Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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Koppen unchanged: the drinking session with Koppen did him 'a power of good''01 and Koppen presented him with his two-volume study on the Buddha. Marx also visited old friends in the Rhineland and spent two days with his mother. She interested him with her 'subtle esprit and indestructible stability of character'102 - and she cancelled some of his old debts into the bargain. Marx defined his attitude towards a return to Germany as follows: 'Germany is so fine a country that one is better living outside its boundaries. I for my part, if I were quite free and not burdened with something that you might call "political conscience", would never leave England for Germany, still less for Prussia and least of all for this frightful Berlin with its dust and culture and over-clever people.'103 And Jenny's views were even sharper: 'My wife is particularly against a move to Berlin', Marx informed his uncle, 'since she does not wish our daughters to be introduced to the Hatzfeld circle, and it would be difficult to keep them away from it."04

The whole family was, however, enchanted by the gifts from Lassalle that Marx brought back with him. There was an atlas for Engels and cloaks for the girls and for Jenny, who strutted up and down so proudly in hers that Eleanor called after her: 'Just like a peacock!' Jenny was grateful for other reasons, too, as 'anything like this makes an impression on the philistines of the neighbourhood and earns us respect and credit'.105

On his return to London Marx failed to pursue any co-operation with I .assalle. He was too busy working on his 'Economics' and trying to spin out his meagre earnings from journalism: the New York Daily Tribune had anyway cut Marx's quota of articles by half owing to the Civil War and most of what Marx wrote was for the Viennese paper Die Presse which praised his contributions highly but only printed - and paid for - one out of every four or five. Many of these articles dealt with the American Civil War. Unlike Engels, Marx was confident that the North, being industrially more developed, would win in the end in spite of early setbacks.106 'In this struggle', he wrote in the Tribune, 'the highest form that the self-government of a people has so far attained is giving battle to the lowest and most shameful form of human slavery yet seen in the annals of history.'107 Marx was particularly pleased that the English working class, although their interests were damaged by the blockade of the south, were staunchly opposed to intervention.

In July of the following year Lassalle reciprocated by visiting London at a time when Marx had just returned from several weeks' refuge in Manchester to find a mass of debts. Lassalle stayed in the Marx household for three weeks and spent a lot of time at the International Exhibition. The strain that he imposed on Marx's finances, working time and nerves made him extremely bitter. 'In order to preserve a certain facade', Marx

wrote to Engels, 'my wife had to take to the pawn-brokers everything that was not actually nailed down.'108 It was all the more galling, therefore, that Lassalle had just thrown away almost £100 in speculation and to see him spend more than £i daily just on cabs and cigars. Marx was even more riled when Lassalle offered to obtain the protection of a London Jewish banker for him and take one of his daughters as a 'companion' to the countess. Marx wanted nothing more than to get on with his 'Economics', but Lassalle coolly assumed that since the lack of a market for his articles meant that he had 'no job' and was only doing 'theoretical' work, then Marx had all the time in the world to kill with him.109 As annoying as Lassalle's flamboyant display of wealth was his boastfulness. In Marx's view he had changed much since the previous year in Berlin. Lassalle's success had turned his head and 'he is now not only confirmed as the greatest scholar, profoundest thinker, a genius in research, etc.; he is also Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. And there is also his continual chatter in an unnatural falsetto voice, his ugly demonstrative gestures and didactic tone.'110 And it must indeed have been difficult for Marx to tolerate long the company of a man who could, with complete self-assurance, begin a speech with the words: 'Working men! Before I leave for the Spas of Switzerland . . A f t e r three weeks of this Marx gave vent to his pent-up frustration in a letter to Engels: 'It is now quite clear to me that, as shown by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, that he is descended from the negroes who joined the flight of Moses from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on his father's side were crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a negro foundation was bound to produce something out of the ordinary. The importunity of the fellow is also negroid.'112 Jenny's comment on Lassalle's visit is also worth quoting as her touch is a little lighter than Marx's:

In July 1862 we had a visit from Ferdinand Lassalle. He was almost crushed under the weight of the fame he had achieved as a scholar, thinker, poet and politician. The laurel wreath was fresh on his Olympian brow and ambrosian head or rather on his stiff bristling Negro hair. He had just victoriously ended the Italian campaign - a new political coup was being contrived by the great man of action - and fierce battles were going on in his soul. There were still fields of science that he had not explored! Egyptology lay fallow: 'Should I astonish the world as an Egyptologist or show my versatility as a man of action, as a politician, as a fighter, or as a soldier?' It was a splendid dilemma. He wavered between the thoughts and sentiments of his heart and often expressed that struggle in really stentorian accents. As on the wings of the wind he swept through our rooms, perorating so loudly, gesticulat-

ing and raising his voice to such a pitch that our neighbours were scared by the terrible shouting and asked us what was the matter. It was the inner struggle of the 'great' man bursting forth in shrill discords.1"

()n the day of Lassalle's departure the landlord, tax collector and most of the shopkeepers all threatened Marx with immediate reprisals if he did not pay his debts. Lassalle noticed that something was amiss and lent Marx £15 until the end of the year and anything more that Marx might require, provided that Engels would guarantee the loan. Marx drew a cheque for £60 on Lassalle. However, Lassalle wished first to be assured that Engels was in agreement and this angered Marx so much that he returned a very rough answer for which he half apologised in November: 'I think that the substance of our friendship is strong enough to stand such a shock. I confess to you quite unequivocally that, as a man sitting on a volcano, I allow circumstances to dominate me in a manner unfitting for a rational animal. But in any case it was ungenerous of you to turn this state of mind, in which I would as soon have put a bullet through my head, against me like some prosecutor in a law court. So I hope that "in spite of everything" our old relationship can continue untroubled.'114 Thereafter the correspondence ceased though Lassalle continued to send Marx his numerous publications.

In April 1864 Lassalle stated that he had not written to Marx for two years as their relationship was strained 'for financial reasons'. Marx, however, attributed the break to Lassalle's political views - with greater reason. In the early 1860s the prosperity of Germany produced strong liberal forces that considerably diminished the strength of the reaction that had dominated the country throughout the 1850s. This opposition was brought to a head by the refusal of the Landtag to vote the budget necessary for a reform of the army, a refusal which led to elections in May 1862. Lassalle campaigned hard and the radicals had considerable success. During his stay in London Lassalle wished to obtain Marx's backing for his programme of universal suffrage and state aid to workers' co-operatives. Combined with his radicalism Lassalle remained in many respects an Old Hegelian with an Old Hegelian's view of the state; he had never been through the traumatically secularising experience of the Young Hegelians. Thus his proposals could never be acceptable to Marx who summed up his attitude to them in two letters written after Lassalle's death.115 Most importantly, Marx considered that any reliance on state aid would enfeeble the proletariat's struggle for political supremacy. Lassalle's ideas, according to Marx, were not based on any coherent economic theory and involved a compromise with feudalism 'whereas in the nature

of things, the working class must be genuinely "revolutionary" '."6 Lassalle, however, who was in many ways in closer contact with the situation in Germany than was Marx, might with justice have claimed that Marx overestimated the revolutionary potential of the Prussian bourgeoisie and that his own programme represented the only way forward for the working-class movement. Marx was equally opposed to the idea of universal suffrage in Germany: Lassalle had learnt none of the lessons of the manipulation of this political device in France by Louis Napoleon. He also claimed that Lassalle did not base himself enough on previous working-class movements in Germany (though in fact many of his collaborators were former members of the Communist League);117 and that Lassalle had no international dimension to his political agitation. This last observation was certainly justified: Lassalle had never lived outside Germany and both his theory and his practice were strictly limited to German conditions.

Even after his visit to London, Lassalle still hankered after the idea of editing a newspaper in co-operation with Marx. But Marx's criticisms became even more pronounced during Lassalle's last year of feverish political activity. In May 1863 Lassalle's agitation culminated in a request from the Leipzig workers to attend a conference where the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein (General Union of German Workers), the first effective German socialist party, was formed. Eleven days before the conference Lassalle had had an interview with Bismarck with whom he had already been in secret negotiation. Although Lassalle claimed that he was 'eating cherries with Bismarck, but Bismarck was getting only the stones', Lassalle did not live long enough for it to be clear whether he was right.118 Marx himself very quickly came to the conclusion that Lassalle had sold out to Bismarck and complained even more strongly of his plagiarising the Communist Manifesto and Wage Labour and Capital. But Lassalle's sudden death intervened: on 28 August 1864 he was mortally wounded in a duel by a Wallachian Count, the fiance of Helen von Donniges, a seventeen-year-old girl to whom Lassalle had got himself engaged barely four weeks before. Engels received the news fairly coolly; Marx showed more humanity. He wrote:

Lassalle's misfortune has been going damnably round in my head these last days. He was after all one of the old stock and the enemy of our enemies. Also the thing came so surprisingly that it is difficult to believe that so noisy, stirring, pushing a man is now as dead as a mouse and must shut his mouth altogether. About the cause of his death you are quite right. It is one of the many tacdessnesses which he performed in his life. For all that, I'm sorry that our relationship was troubled during the last years, of course through his fault. . . .

The devil knows, the crowd is getting ever smaller and no new blood is being added.'1'

And to the countess, he wrote:

You will understand how the quite unforeseen news of Lassalle's death has astonished, shocked and shattered me. He was one of those for whom I had a great affection.... Be convinced that no one can feel deeper grief than I at his being torn away. And above all I feel for you. I know what the departed was to you, what his loss means to you. Rejoice over one thing. He died young, in triumph, like Achilles.120

Although Marx was obviously over-generous here to his own past sentiments, yet his relationship to Lassalle was ambivalent, resentment and hate always being tempered by a grudging admiration.

IV. L I F E I N G R A F T O N T E R R A C E

The years 1860-63 had marked a fresh - but final - low in Marx's domestic affairs. He touched the depth of 'bourgeois misery' and could manage no more in three years than research on the historical portions of his 'Economics'. In 1864, however, the situation changed: two legacies gave the Marx household enough security for Marx to be able to devote himself to the spread of the First International (which had been founded just four weeks after Lassalle's death) and also to start drafting the vital chapters of his 'Economics' on capital.

As Marx had foreseen, the poverty that the family experienced in Grafton Terrace was in many ways worse than that of Dean Street. The building had, according to Jenny, 'the four characteristics the English like in a house: airy, sunny, dry, and built in gravelly soil';121 and on a fine day there was a clear view right down to St Paul's. But the Marxes lived a very isolated life as their house was, initially, very difficult of access: building was going on all round, there was no made-up road leading to it, and in rainy weather the sticky red soil turned into a quagmire. This particularly affected Jenny who wrote that

it was a long time before I could get used to the complete solitude. I often missed the long walks I had been in the habit of making in the crowded West-End streets, the meetings, the clubs and our favourite public-house and homely conversations which had so often helped me to forget the worries of life for a time. Luckily I still had the article for the Tribune to copy out twice a week and that kept me in touch with world events.122

Even worse, there were more appearances to be kept up and expenditure