Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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until June 1873, mainly because of a long printers' strike in Leipzig. He made substantial changes in the first chapter with which, as his daughter

begun by a young Populist called Lopatin who moved to London in the summer of 1870 to work under Marx's direction in the British Museum while taking English lessons from Eleanor. Lopatin did not complete the translation (he returned to Russia on an unsuccessful mission to liberate Chernyshevsky from prison). T h e work was taken over by Danielson, a shy Populist scholar, who translated the book in the evenings on his return from the bank where he worked for fifty years. There was some fear that the Tsarist censors might ban the book but they found it so 'difficult and hardly comprehensible' that they concluded that 'few would read it and still fewer understand it'.27 Here they were wrong: the Russian edition sold better than any other, and copies of it passed avidly from hand to hand - sometimes inside the covers of the New Testament. Marx did not even have time to rewrite the first chapter as he would have liked; he wrote to Danielson complaining about the demands made on him by the International: 'Certainly I shall one fine morning put a stop to all this, but there are circumstances in which you are in duty bound to

Marx spent most of the following year tying up the loose ends in London. T h en in the autumn of 1873 he suffered a serious breakdown of health.

translate Capital into French and Elie Reclus (brother of the famous anarchist geographer) had made a start, assisted by Marx's old mentor, Moses Hess. He soon gave up, however, and it was not until 1 8 7 1 (after no fewer than five other translators had attempted the task) that Marx opened negotiations with Roy, who had acquired a considerable reputation as a translator of Feuerbach. Roy was a school teacher in Bordeaux; mailing the various chapters and sections to and from London naturally made for new delays, which were further increased by Roy's difficulty in reading Marx's handwriting (he translated from the manuscript of the second German edition). Marx was lucky to have been introduced (by Lafargue) to an extremely energetic Parisian publisher, Maurice Lachatre, who had recently been exiled to Switzerland. Marx welcomed Lachatre's

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proposal to publish in separate instalments as 'in this form the work will lie more easily accessible to the working class, and this consideration is more important to me than any other'.29

In February 1872 the contract with Lachatre was signed. But the book was to be published at the author's expense. Applying to his cousin August

I'm not doing it for your political and revolutionary aims'.30 Roy's work, however, did not come up to Marx's high expectations and he found

1 march on the Russian publishers who had had their photo banned by die Government, on the grounds that it would imply too much respect loi Marx's personality). It had cost him, said Marx, 'more trouble than a whole fresh composition of the book in French';31 and he wrote in the

Fven before the French edition was finished Marx received urgent letters from his German and Russian publishers asking for Volume Two.

1'nplained the situation in a long letter to Danielson. He had just received

delay. Firstly, England was going through an economic crisis that differed

alio liom the United States, etc., make it pleasant for me to have a pieiext" for continuing my studies instead of winding them up finally loi the public'.36

I >aniclson himself had been supplying Marx with numerous books on Hiiv.i.in agricultural economics since the freeing of the serfs - books that both I'.ngels and Jenny sometimes felt like burning. This was a subject ili.it occupied Marx's mind particularly in the years 1876 and 1877. As I duels wrote, Marx after 1870 'studied agronomics, agricultural con-

4 IO KARL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

ditions in America and especially Russia, the money market and banking institutions, and finally natural sciences, such as geology and physiology. Independent mathematical studies also form a large part of the numerous manuscripts of this period.'37

A study of the evolution of agriculture in Russia was intended to illuminate Marx's ideas on ground-rent in Volume Three of Capital in the same way as English industrial development provided the practical examples to the ideas expounded in Volume One. Marx had learnt Russian specifically to be able to study the original sources. As in the 1850s and 1860s, Marx amassed a huge amount of material but he now lacked the power of synthesis and the driving force to make something of it. After his death Engels was amazed to find among Marx's papers more than two cubic metres of documents containing nothing but Russian statistics. During these years Marx filled in his microscopic handwriting almost three thousand pages - these manuscripts comprising almost exclusively notes on his reading. In his later years this reading became obsessional: he no longer had the power to create, but at least he could absorb. Thus the manuscripts for Volume Three of Capital remained virtually in the state in which they had been since 1864-65. Marx had rewritten almost half of Volume Two in 1870, but thereafter made only minor additions and revisions - realising, as he said to Eleanor shortly before his death, that it would be up to Engels 'to make something of it'.38 Marx kept the state of his manuscripts a secret from everyone, including Engels, who wrote later to Bebel that 'if I had been aware of this, I would not have let him rest day or night until everything had been finished and printed. Marx himself knew this better than anyone. .. .'i<> In fact, the state of the manuscripts was so chaotic that Engels could publish Volume Three of Capital only eleven years after Marx's death.

Marx's inherent reluctance to complete any of his economic work was abetted by other distracting tasks imposed on him during the 1870s. He collaborated on two shortened versions of Capital, Volume One, in German by Johannes Most and in Dutch by Domela Nieuwenhuis. N ot only did he help Eleanor translate Lissagaray's book into English but he also supervised in great detail the German translation. His aversion to Lissagaray as a possible son-in-law was more than balanced by his admiration for his History of the Commune. During the mid-1870s Marx gave some of his time to assisting Engels write Anti-Diihring which, by virtue of its systematisation and clarity, was to become the best-known textbook in Marxist circles with a circulation much wider than Capital.*0 In the Preface to the second edition, written after Marx's death, Engels says that he read all the manuscript to Marx and that Marx actually wrote a chapter consisting of a review of Diihring's Critical History of Political Economy.

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T H E L A S T D E C A D E

Towards the end of his life Marx moved nearer to the positivism then so fashionable in intellectual circles. This tendency, begun in Anti-Diihring and continued by Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach and Dialectics of Nature, reached its apogee in Soviet textbooks on dialectical materialism. It was this trend which presented Marxism as a philosophical world-view or Weltanschauung consisting of objective laws and particularly laws of the dialectical movement of matter taken in a metaphysical sense as the basic constituent of reality. This was obviously very different from the 'unity of theory and practice' as exemplified in, for instance, the Theses on Feuerbach. This preference for the model of the natural sciences had always been with Engels, though not with Marx, who had, for example, a much more reserved attitude to Darwinism.

Marx had always had a great admiration for Darwin's work. He had read On the Origin of Species in i860, a year after its publication, and had at once written to Engels that it contained 'the natural-history basis lor our view'.41 He considered that the book had finally disposed of religious teleology, but he regretted 'the crude English manner of the presentation'.42 Two years later, however, his view was slightly different:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his Knglish society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions', and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes's 'bellum omnium contra omnes', and one is reminded of I legel's Phenomenology, where civil society is described as a 'spiritual animal kingdom', while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society.43

I )arwin's book might have 'an unconscious socialist tendency', anyone who wanted to subsume the whole of history under the Darwinian expression struggle for survival' merely demonstrated his 'feebleness of thought'.45 Marx certainly used biological metaphors to express his ideas and considered his method in the study of economic formations more akin to biology than to physics or chemistry. The only place where Marx drew a direct parallel between himself and Darwin was in an ironical review of his own work for the Stuttgart newspaper Der Beobachter,46 Marx certainly wished to dedicate the Second Volume of Capital to Darwin. (Darwin lefused the honour, apparently because he had the impression that it was in overtly atheistic book and did not wish to hurt the feelings of his lamily.) But this suggests no more than that Marx appreciated Darwin's work - and not that he approached history in the same way as Darwin

had approached nature. Thus Engels' equating the views of Marx and Darwin in his famous speech at Marx's graveside is highly misleading.47

It is nevertheless true that Marx paid more attention to the natural sciences (physiology, geology and, above all, mathematics) during the last decade of his life than he ever did before. He was also much interested in the beginnings of anthropology and enthused about the work of Lewis Morgan, a once much-respected writer whose scholarly reputation has not survived subsequent research. In the winter of 1880 - 81 Marx drew up with great care a hundred pages of excerpts from Morgan's Ancient Society, excerpts later used by Engels in his Origin of the Family. What particularly interested Marx in Morgan's book was the democratic political organisation of primitive tribes together with their communal property. Marx was uninfluenced by the Victorian value judgements that permeate Morgan's work nor does he seem to have shared Engels' great admiration for his achievements. In particular, he did not see any close parallel between primitive communism and a future communist society.48

I I I . H E A L T H

What prevented Marx from finishing his life's work was his illness. By the early 1870s his earlier life-style and privations had irredeemably impaired his health. Throughout the last ten years of his life the pathetic search for soundness of body, which drove him from one health resort to another, played an increasingly central role. In April 1 8 71 Engels reported to Kugelmann that Marx had begun to live 'fairly rationally' since giving up his theoretical work with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War: he went for two-hour walks up to Hampstead most days and laid off beer for weeks on end if he felt unwell.49 But scarcely had he returned to his theoretical work (continuing with the French translation of Volume One) than he had a serious relapse: there was pressure on the brain with an attendant insomnia that even strong doses of chloral could not relieve. A stroke was feared. Engels persuaded him to go to Manchester at the end of M a y 1873 to consult Gumpert, Engels' own doctor and the only one in whom Marx had complete confidence. Gumpert gave him a strict regimen to follow and absolutely forbade him to work more than four hours a day. This considerably improved his health but there was a renewal of the headaches in the autumn and Marx again went north to see Gumpert. At the same time he took a three-week water cure in Harrogate in the company of Eleanor, who was near to a nervous breakdown. Marx occupied his time reading Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand which he found full of 'newfangled forms of expression, false profundity, Byzan-