Karl Marx

What is dialectic? As any schoolchild with a set of magnets – or, for that matter, any dating agency – will confirm, opposites can attract. If it were not so, the human race would be extinct. Female mates with male, and from their sweaty embrace a new creature emerges who will, eventually, repeat the process. Not always, of course, but often enough to ensure the survival and progress of the species.

The dialectic performs much the same function for the human mind. An idea, stripped naked, has a passionate grapple with its antithesis, from which a synthesis is created; this in turn becomes the new thesis, to be duly seduced by a new demon lover. Two wrongs may make a right – but, soon after its birth, that right becomes another wrong which must be subjected to the same intimate scrutiny as its forebears, and thus we go forward. Marx’s own engagement with Hegel was itself something of a dialectical process, from which emerged the nameless infant that was to become historical materialism.

I simplify, of course; but one is obliged to simplify Hegel since much of his work would otherwise remain impenetrably obscure. As an eighteen-year-old, soon after arriving at Berlin University, Marx himself had mocked this opaqueness and ambiguity in a series of epigrams titled ‘On Hegel’:

Words I teach all mixed up (#litres_trial_promo) into a devilish muddle,

Thus, anyone may think just what he chooses to think;

Never, at least, is he hemmed in by strict limitations.

Bubbling out of the flood, plummeting down from the cliff,

So are his Beloved’s words and thoughts that the Poet devises;

He understands what he thinks, freely invents what he feels.

Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom’s nourishing nectar;

Now you know all, since I’ve said plenty of nothing to you!

Marx included the poem in a notebook of verse ‘dedicated to my dear father on the occasion of his birthday as a feeble token of everlasting love’. The old man must have been delighted to learn that his son hadn’t succumbed to the epidemic of Hegel-worship which was infecting almost every institution in the land. In one of his letters to Berlin, Heinrich warned Karl against the contagious influence of Hegelians – ‘the new immoralists who twist their words (#litres_trial_promo) until they themselves do not hear them; who christen a flood of words a product of genius because it is devoid of ideas’.

Someone as limitlessly curious and disputatious as Karl Marx was unlikely to resist for long. Hegel had held the chair of philosophy at Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831, and by the time Marx enrolled at the university, five years later, his intellectual heirs were still fighting over the legacy. In his youth Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but like so many radicals – then as now – he became comfortable and complaisant in middle age, believing that a truly mature man should recognise ‘the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it’. The world in question – the Prussian state – was a complete and final manifestation of what he called the Divine Spirit or Idea (the Geist). This being so, there was nothing left for philosophers to discuss. Any further questioning of the status quo was the merest vanity.

Naturally, this line of argument made him very popular indeed with the Prussian authorities, who brandished it as proof that their system of government was not only inevitable but unimprovable. ‘All that is real is rational,’ Hegel had written; and since the state was undoubtedly real, in the sense that it existed, it must therefore be rational and above reproach. Those who championed the subversiveness of his earlier work – the so-called Young Hegelians – preferred to cite the second half of that famous dictum: ‘All that is rational is real.’ An absolute monarchy, buttressed by censors and secret police, was palpably irrational and therefore unreal, a mirage or spectre that would disappear as soon as anyone dared to touch it.

As a student in the Berlin law faculty, Marx had a front-row seat at the arena. His lecturer in jurisprudence was Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a thin, severe reactionary who, though not a Hegelian, nevertheless agreed that the development of a country’s law and government was an organic process reflecting the character and tradition of its people. To challenge Prussian absolutism was to defy nature: one might as well demand a reform in the structure of oak trees, or the abolition of rain. The alternative view was represented by the chubby and cheerful professor of criminal law, Eduard Gans, a radical Hegelian who believed that institutions should be subjected to rational criticism rather than mystical veneration.

For his first year at Berlin, Marx struggled to ignore the temptations of philosophy: he was, after all, meant to be studying law. Besides, hadn’t he already rejected the devilish Hegel and all his works? He distracted himself by writing lyrical verse, but produced only ‘diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling (#litres_trial_promo), nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts …’ (Out of the quarrel with others, as W. B. Yeats said, we make rhetoric; from the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry.) He then set about composing a philosophy of law – ‘a work of about 300 pages’ – only to discover the same old gulf between what is and what ought to be: ‘What I was pleased to call the metaphysics of law, i.e. basic principles, reflections, definitions of concepts, [was] divorced from all actual law and every actual form of law.’ Worse still, having failed to bridge the gap between theory and practice he found himself unable to reconcile the form of law with its content. His mistake – for which he blamed von Savigny – ‘lay in my belief that matter and form can and must develop separately from each other, and so I obtained not a real form but something like a desk with drawers into which I then poured sand’.

His labours weren’t entirely wasted. ‘In the course of this work,’ he revealed, ‘I adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read’ – a habit he never lost. His reading list from this period shows the breadth of these intellectual explorations: who else, while composing a philosophy of law, would think it worthwhile to make a detailed study of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of Art? He translated Tacitus’s Germania and Ovid’s Tristia, and ‘began to learn English and Italian by myself, i.e. out of grammars’. In the next semester, while devouring dozens of textbooks on civil procedure and canon law, he translated Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and ‘spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight’.

All good exercise for the brain, no doubt; but even the artistic animals couldn’t rescue his magnum opus. Abandoning the 300-page manuscript in despair, young Karl turned again to ‘the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs’. He dashed off a short ‘humoristic novel’, Scorpion and Felix, a nonsensical torrent of whimsy and persiflage that was all too obviously written under the spell of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It does, however, have one passage that deserves quotation:

Every giant … presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine, and every storm at sea – mud, and as soon as the first disappear, the latter begin, sit down at the table, sprawling out their long legs arrogantly.

The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain, as one may see from the facts, for champagne leaves a lingering repulsive aftertaste, Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe …

No previous writer on Marx appears to have noticed the resemblance between this jokey conceit and the famous opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written fifteen years later:

Hegel remarks somewhere (#litres_trial_promo) that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a great tragedy, the second as a miserable farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848–1851 for the Montagne of 1793–1795, and the London constable [Louis Bonaparte] with the first dozen indebted lieutenants that came along for the little corporal [Napoleon] with his band of marshals! The eighteenth Brumaire of the idiot for the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius!

Apart from that suggestive echo, there is little in Scorpion and Felix that need detain us; and even less in Oulanem, an overwrought verse drama that groans under the weight of Goethe’s influence. After these experiments, Marx finally accepted the death of his literary ambitions. ‘Suddenly, as if by a magic touch – oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow – I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing.’ The discovery had cost him many a sleepless night and much anguish. ‘A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.’ Suffering some kind of physical breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest. He took a house in the tiny village of Stralau, on the banks of the River Spree just outside Berlin.

At this point, he seems to have become slightly unhinged. Still striving to ignore the siren voice of Hegel (‘the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me’), he wrote a twenty-four-page dialogue on religion, nature and history – only to find that ‘my last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system’. He had been delivered into the hands of his enemy. ‘For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which “washes souls and dilutes the tea”. [A quotation from Heinrich Heine.] I even joined my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer.’ Interestingly, Hegel himself had undergone a similar crack-up at the time when he was jettisoning his ideals and embracing ‘maturity’. It is no coincidence that both Hegel and Marx wrote at length about the problem of alienation – the estrangement of humans from themselves and their society. For in the nineteenth century ‘alienation’ had a secondary meaning as a synonym for derangement or insanity: hence, mental pathologists (or ‘mad-doctors’) were known as alienists.

While he was convalescing – restoring his strength with long walks, regular meals and early nights – Marx read Hegel from beginning to end. Through a friend at the university he was introduced to the Doctors’ Club, a group of Young Hegelians who met regularly at the Hippel café in Berlin for evenings of noisy, boozy controversy. Members included the theology lecturer Bruno Bauer and the radical philosopher Arnold Ruge, both of whom were to become intellectual collaborators with Marx – and, a few years later, his sworn enemies.

On the night of 10 November 1837, Marx wrote a very long letter to his father describing his conversion, and the intellectual peregrinations that had led him to it. ‘There are moments in one’s life,’ he began, ‘which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. Indeed, world history itself likes to look back in this way and take stock …’

No false modesty there: at the age of nineteen he was already trying on the clothes of a Man of Destiny and finding that they fitted him handsomely. Now that he had begun the next stage of life, he wanted to erect a memorial to what he had lived through – ‘and where could a more sacred dwelling place be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our endeavours!’

Ornate flattery got him nowhere. Heinrich was neither sympathetic nor merciful as he read, with rising horror, the full story of his son’s intellectual adventures. To have a Hegelian in the family was shaming enough; worse still was the realisation that the boy had been squandering his time and talents on philosophy when he should have been concentrating solely on obtaining a good law degree and a lucrative job. Had he no consideration for his long-suffering parents? No duty to God, who had blessed him with such magnificent natural gifts? And what of his responsibility for his wife-to-be – ‘a girl who has made a great sacrifice in view of her oustanding merits and her social position in abandoning her brilliant situation and prospects for an uncertain and duller future and chaining herself to the fate of a younger man’? Even if Karl cared nothing for his fretful mother and ailing father, he must surely feel obliged to secure a happy and prosperous future for the gorgeous Jenny; and this could hardly be achieved by sitting in a smoke-filled room poring over books about arty animals:

God’s grief!!! (#litres_trial_promo) Disorderliness, musty excursions into all departments of knowledge, musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp, running wild in a scholar’s dressing-gown and with unkempt hair instead of running wild over a glass of beer; unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum … And is it here, in this workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition, that the fruits are to ripen which will refresh you and your beloved, and the harvest to be garnered which will serve to fulfil your sacred obligations!?

This stinging reprimand – which is also a brilliant description of Marx’s lifelong working methods – was delivered in December 1837, when Heinrich was already dangerously ill with tuberculosis. It sounds like the last desperate howl of a dying man who has placed all his hopes in the next generation – only to see those hopes crumpled like so much waste paper. Fortifying himself with a fistful of pills prescribed by his doctor, he hurled grievances galore at the wastrel son. Karl scarcely ever replied to his parents’ letters; he never enquired after their health; he had spent almost 700 thalers of their money in one year, ‘whereas the richest spend less than 500’; he had weakened his mind and body chasing abstractions and ‘giving birth to monsters’; he never returned home during university holidays, and ignored the existence of his brothers and sisters. Even Jenny von Westphalen, who had previously been praised to the skies, was now revealed as yet another irritant: ‘Hardly were your wild goings-on in Bonn over, hardly were your old sins wiped out – and they were truly manifold – when, to our dismay, the pangs of love set in … While still so young, you became estranged from your family …’ True enough; but this litany of complaint was scarcely calculated to reunite them. Karl’s parents begged him to visit Trier for a few days during the Easter vacation of 1838; he refused.

The truth was that Marx had left his family behind. The distance between them can be gauged by a letter from Heinrich in March 1837 suggesting that Karl make his name by writing a heroic ode: ‘It should redound to the honour of Prussia (#litres_trial_promo) and afford the opportunity of allotting a role to the genius of the monarchy … If executed in a patriotic and German spirit with depth of feeling, such an ode would itself be sufficient to lay the foundation for a reputation.’ Did the old man really think that his son would wish to glorify either Germany or its monarchy? Perhaps not. ‘I can only propose, advise,’ he conceded ruefully. ‘You have outgrown me; in this matter you are in general superior to me, so I must leave it to you to decide as you will.’

Heinrich Marx died, aged fifty-seven, on 10 May 1838. Karl did not attend the funeral. The journey from Berlin would be too long, he explained, and he had more important things to do.

2 The Little Wild Boar (#ulink_24aa5c3d-23f5-5888-8f45-c27447821c36)

During his three years at Berlin University, Marx was seldom in the lecture hall and often in debt. The death of his father meant an end to the regular stipends but also relieved the paternal pressure to apply himself to legal studies. ‘It would be stupid,’ Bruno Bauer advised, ‘if you were to devote yourself to a practical career. Theory is now the strongest practice, and we are absolutely incapable of predicting to how large an extent it will become practical.’ The task of the Young Hegelians was to infiltrate the academy and establish their theories as the new received wisdom. Marx began work on a doctoral thesis which would qualify him for a lectureship, taking as his subject ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy’.

He could not have chosen a less propitious moment, since it coincided with a new and thoroughgoing purge of Hegel’s left-wing disciples. Eduard Gans, the last Hegelian in the faculty of law, died unexpectedly in 1839 and was replaced by the severely reactionary Julius Stahl. Bauer himself was evicted from the theology department soon afterwards and forced to seek refuge at the University of Bonn. As recently as 1836 Bauer had argued, with some vehemence, that religion should remain above and beyond philosophical criticism; now he was proclaiming his atheism from the rooftops. He urged Marx to get on with the dissertation and join him in Bonn as soon as possible. Another young radical predicted that ‘if Marx, Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach come together (#litres_trial_promo) to found a theological – philosophical review, God would do well to surround Himself with all His angels and indulge in self-pity, for these three will certainly drive Him out of His heaven’. Luckily for God, He had Prussian friends in high places. After the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the throne in 1840 the persecution of dissidents was redoubled, strict censorship imposed on all publications and academic freedom extinguished.

Stranded in inhospitable Berlin, Marx no longer bothered to attend the university. By day he sat in his lodgings, reading and writing and smoking; in the evenings he colloquised and caroused with the kindred souls at the Doctors’ Club, who were keeping their spirits up by meeting almost daily. Though his explorations of Epicurus and Democritus might seem harmless enough, he knew that there was no question of submitting his thesis to the Berlin professors – especially since it would be scrutinised by F. W. von Schelling, a veteran anti-Hegelian philosopher who was brought into the university in 1841 at the personal command of the new king to root out unhealthy influences. Despite its apparently dry subject, Marx’s comparative study of Democritus and Epicurus was actually a daring and original piece of work in which he set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy, and that scepticism will triumph over dogma. His argument was laid down like a gauntlet on the first page:

As long as a single drop of blood pulses (#litres_trial_promo) in her world-conquering and totally free heart, philosophy will continually shout at her opponents the cry of Epicurus: ‘Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd.’ Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus – ‘In one word, I hate all gods’ – is her own profession, her own slogan against all gods in heaven and earth who do not recognise man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.

In the spirit of belligerent mischief that was to be such a feature of his later polemics, Marx added a brief appendix mocking his own tutor’s loss of liberal faith. Quoting from an essay Schelling had written more than forty years earlier – ‘The time has come to proclaim to the better part of humanity the freedom of minds, and not to tolerate any longer that they deplore the loss of their fetters’ – he asked, ‘When the time had already come in 1795, how about the year 1841?’

Schelling did not have a chance to reply. Marx submitted his thesis instead to the University of Jena, which had a reputation for awarding degrees without delay or debate. He was obliged to attach his leaving certificate from Bonn (which mentioned the escapades with drink and firearms) and a reference from the Deputy Royal Government Plenipotentiaries at Berlin University, who found ‘nothing specially disadvantageous to note from the point of view of discipline’ except that ‘on several occasions he has been the object of proceedings for debt’. The Dean of Philosophy at Jena, Dr Carl Friedrich Bachmann, decided that these trifling misdemeanours could be disregarded, since the essay on Democritus and Epicurus ‘testifies to intelligence and perspicacity as much as to erudition, for which reason I regard the candidate as pre-eminently worthy’. On 15 April 1841, just nine days after sending his dissertation to Jena, Karl Marx collected a Ph.D.

Herr Doktor Marx was now ready to launch himself in the world. But for the next year he shuttled aimlessly between Bonn, Trier and Cologne, apparently uncertain of what to do next. His thesis had been dedicated ‘to his dear fatherly friend, Ludwig von Westphalen … as a token of filial love’, and during several visits to Trier he pointedly ignored his own surviving parent, devoting himself to the ailing Baron (who was to die in March 1842) and the patient Jenny, whose adoration of her ‘little wild boar’ was as intense as ever in spite of his lengthy absences. ‘My little heart is so full (#litres_trial_promo), so overflowing with love and yearning and ardent longing for you, my infinitely loved one,’ she wrote. ‘It is certain, isn’t it, that I can marry you?’ Of course, of course, he agreed, but not just yet. The marriage would have to be postponed until he had found gainful employment, since his wretched mother had stopped his allowance and withheld his share of Heinrich Marx’s estate.

In July 1841 Marx went to stay with Bruno Bauer in Bonn, where the two reprobates spent an uproarious summer shocking the local bourgeoisie – getting drunk, laughing in church, galloping through the city streets on donkeys and (rather more subversively) penning an anonymous spoof, The Last Trump of Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and the Anti-Christ. At first glance this was a pious broadside, supposedly written by a devout and conservative Christian who wished to prove that Hegel was a revolutionary atheist; but its true intent soon became apparent, as did the identity of the authors. One Hegelian newspaper commented knowingly that every ‘bauer’ (the German word for ‘peasant’) would understand the real meaning. Bruno Bauer was expelled from the university, and with him went Marx’s last chance of academic preferment.

‘In a few days I have to go to Cologne (#litres_trial_promo),’ Marx told the radical Hegelian philosopher Arnold Ruge in March 1842, ‘for I find the proximity of the Bonn professors intolerable. Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!’ A month later, he was having second thoughts: ‘I have abandoned my plan to settle in Cologne (#litres_trial_promo), since life there is too noisy for me, and an abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy … Thus Bonn remains my residence for the time being; after all, it would be a pity if no one remained here for the holy men to get angry with.’

But the lure of Cologne was hard to resist, since the ‘noise’ of which he complained sounded remarkably like an echo of the Doctors’ Club meetings in the Hippel café – the main difference being the quality of the alcohol. ‘How glad I am that you are happy (#litres_trial_promo),’ Jenny wrote to Karl in August 1841, ‘and that you drank champagne in Cologne, and that there are Hegel clubs there, and that you have been dreaming …’ Champagne seemed a more appropriate lubricant than the ale favoured in Berlin: Cologne was the wealthiest and largest city in the Rhineland, which was itself the most politically and industrially advanced province in the whole of Prussia, and the local bankers and businessmen had lately begun to agitate for a form of government more suited to a modern economy than the wheezing, ancient apparatus of absolute monarchy and bureaucratic oppression under which they laboured. As Marx himself pointed out often enough in later years, the nature of society is dictated by its forms of production; now that industrial capitalism had established itself, the talk in the bars of Cologne was that democracy, a free press and a unified Germany would have to follow. It was no surprise, then, that the city acted as a magnet for heretical thinkers and Bohemian malcontents who offered their wealth of knowledge in exchange for the tycoons’ knowledge of wealth. The child of this union was the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper founded in the autumn of 1841 by a group of wealthy manufacturers and financiers (including the President of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce) to challenge the dreary, conservative Kölnische Zeitung.

With hindsight, it was sublimely inevitable that Marx would write for the paper and quickly install himself as its presiding genius. But although Marxism has often been caricatured as a doctrine of ‘historical inevitability’, he knew very well that individual destinies are not preordained – though he did tend to underestimate the importance of accident and coincidence in shaping a life. What if Bruno Bauer had not been driven out of academe? What if Dr Marx had found a university sinecure instead of being forced – faute de mieux – to express his restless intelligence through journalism?

Chance may have helped to decide his fate; but it was a chance he had himself been seeking. This was another of those frontier posts marking the unexplored territory beyond. Hegel had served his purpose, and since leaving Berlin Marx’s thoughts had been moving from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual. ‘Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence (#litres_trial_promo) of its time,’ he wrote in 1842, ‘the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.’ He had come to despise the nebulous and blurry arguments of those German liberals ‘who think freedom is honoured by being placed in the starry firmament (#litres_trial_promo) of the imagination instead of on the solid ground of reality’. It was thanks to these ethereal dreamers that freedom in Germany had remained no more than a sentimental fantasy. His new direction would, of course, require another exhaustive and exhausting course of self-education, but that was no discouragement to such an insatiable auto-didact.

He composed his first journalistic essay in February 1842, while visiting the dying Baron von Westphalen in Trier, and sent it to Arnold Ruge in Dresden for inclusion in his new Young Hegelian journal, the Deutsche Jahrbücher. The article was a brilliant polemic against the latest censorship instructions issued by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV – and, with glorious if unintended irony, the censor promptly banned it. The Deutsche Jahrbücher itself was closed down a few months later, by order of the federal parliament.

Grumbling about the ‘sudden revival of Saxon censorship’, Marx hoped for better luck in Cologne, where several of his friends were already installed at the Rheinische Zeitung. The editor, Adolf Rutenberg, was a bibulous comrade from the Doctors’ Club (and brother-in-law to Bruno Bauer), but since he was usually sozzled the burden of producing the paper fell mostly on Moses Hess, a rich young socialist. Moses Hess later became a fierce enemy, as did almost all of Marx’s friends, but at this time his attitude to the combative youngster was reverential. He wrote to his friend Berthold Auerbach:

He is a phenomenon (#litres_trial_promo) who made a tremendous impression on me in spite of the strong similarity of our fields. In short you can prepare yourself to meet the greatest – perhaps the only genuine – philosopher of the current generation. When he makes a public appearance, whether in writing or in the lecture hall, he will attract the attention of all Germany … Dr Marx (that is my idol’s name) is still a very young man – about twenty-four at the most. He will give medieval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person – I say fused not juxtaposed – and you have Dr Marx.

Marx had the same effect on almost everyone he encountered at this time. Though the men in the Berlin Doctors’ Club and the Cologne Circle were eight or ten years older than him, most treated him as their senior. When Friedrich Engels arrived in Berlin to do his military service, a few months after Marx’s departure, he found that the young Rhinelander was already a legend. A poem written by Engels in 1842 includes a vivid description of his future collaborator – whom he hadn’t yet met – based entirely on the breathless reminiscences of fellow intellectuals:

Who runs up next with wild impetuosity? (#litres_trial_promo)