Karl Marx (24 page)

The only people likely to receive satisfaction from this communist cannibalism were the Prussian authorities: Marx’s vendettas against men such as Willich were far more effective than the bungled attempts at sabotage and entrapment by their own Keystone Cops. Though aware that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, Marx argued that the conspirators he attacked were the truly dangerous enemies because their siren song of instant revolution might lure socialists into some sort of premature and disastrous stunt. Fake messiahs, if left unexposed, were far more attractive to the masses than genuine monarchs. The
ad hominem
pamphlets, and the threats of pistols at dawn, were therefore essential political interventions rather than mere manifestations of pique and wounded pride – or so he convinced himself. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘
engaged in a fight to the death with the sham liberals.
’ The most deadly weapon against these poltroons would be a finished copy of his
magnum opus
, demonstrating once and for all why revolutionaries could never succeed without first doing their economic homework. ‘
The democratic simpletons
to whom inspiration comes “from above” need not, of course, exert themselves thus,’ he sneered. ‘Why should these people, born under a lucky star, bother their heads with economic and historical material? It’s really all
so simple
, as the doughty Willich used to tell me. All so simple to these addled brains!’

Marx’s enemies, then and since, have attributed his dislike of Willich and the other ‘great men of the exile’ to pure jealousy. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions many of the heroes of that glorious defeat had come to London garlanded with campaign medals and romantic glamour – men such as Mazzini from Italy, Louis Blanc from France, Kossuth from Hungary, Kinkel from Germany. Society hostesses vied for their attention; lavish banquets were held in their honour; portraits were commissioned. Gottfried Kinkel, who had fled to England after a daring escape from Spandau jail, was eulogised by Dickens in
Household Words
. He then gave a series of lectures on drama and literature for which tickets were sold at an amazing one guinea a head. As
Marx commented, ‘
No running around, no advertisement
, no charlatanism, no importunity was beneath him; in return, however, he did not go unrewarded. Gottfried sunned himself complacently in the mirror of his own fame and in the gigantic mirror of the Crystal Palace of the world.’ Though trapped in poverty, obscurity and near starvation, Marx never envied these swaggering world-liberators their
réclame
. He often quoted Dante’s maxim,
Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti
– go your own way and let tongues wag. What he admired in the British co-operative pioneer Robert Owen was that whenever any of his ideas became popular he would immediately say something outrageous to make himself unpopular all over again.

‘He loathed fine speakers and woe betide anyone who engaged in phrasemongering,’ Liebknecht observed. ‘He kept impressing upon us “young fellows” the necessity for logical thought and clarity in expression and forced us to study … While the other emigrants were daily planning a world revolution and day after day, night after night, intoxicating themselves with the opium-like motto “Tomorrow it will begin!”, we, the “brimstone band”, the “bandits”, the “dregs of mankind”, spent our time in the British Museum and tried to educate ourselves and prepare arms and ammunition for the future fight.’ His favourite story about the perils of posturing concerned Louis Blanc, a very small but exceedingly vain man, who turned up at Dean Street early one morning and was asked by Lenchen to wait in the front parlour while Marx dressed. Peeping through the connecting door, which had been left slightly ajar, Karl and Jenny had to bite their lips to stop laughing: the great historian and politician, former member of the French provisional government, was strutting in front of a shabby mirror in the corner, contemplating himself with delight and frisking like a March hare. After a minute or two of this entertainment Marx coughed to announce his presence. The foppish tribune wrenched himself away from the narcissistic pleasures of the looking-glass and ‘hastily adopted as natural an attitude as he was capable of’.

The applause of the multitude was worthless until the workers were ‘spiritually soaked’ in socialist ideas – through education not elocution, political organisation rather than preening. And where better to begin the task? England was not only the cradle of capitalism but also the birthplace of Chartism. While his fellow exiles contented themselves with secret societies and salons, the natives had already recruited a huge army of proletarian resistance. ‘The English working men are the first-born sons of modern industry,’ Marx declared. ‘They will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry.’

Chartism took its name and inspiration from the People’s Charter of May 1838, which had six fundamental demands: universal male suffrage; secret ballots; annual parliaments; salaries for MPs; abolition of the property qualification for MPs; an end to rotten boroughs. Though beset by constant arguments between the advocates of violent insurrection and those who put their trust in ‘moral force’, the Chartists remained a potent threat to the established order for much of the next decade. One of their newspapers, the
Northern Star
, sold more than 30,000 copies a week, and since most of these were bought in pubs or factories the actual readership was far higher. Pitched battles were fought with the police, most notably in Birmingham and Monmouthshire, after which several of the leaders were jailed or transported. A Chartist petition presented to Parliament in 1842 – unsurprisingly rejected – had 3,317,702 signatures and was more than six miles long. That summer a two-week general strike in support of the Charter paralysed the Midlands, the North of England and parts of Wales.

In April 1848, as Europe’s
anciens régimes
tottered and fell, the Chartists announced that they would assemble on Kennington Common, just south of the Thames, and march on Parliament. The news provoked such panic among the governing classes that the Duke of Wellington himself, victor of Waterloo, was brought
out of retirement to prevent the demonstrators from crossing the river. It was Chartism’s last hurrah. Three years later, big crowds did gather in the centre of town – but for the International Exhibition in Hyde Park. With its industrial wealth, middle-class resilience and ubiquitous police, England had apparently weathered the revolutionary storms rather better than its Continental neighbours. Even so, a kind of submerged radicalism lingered on. Henry Mayhew’s book
London Labour and the London Poor
, published in 1851, recorded that ‘the artisans are almost to a man red-hot proletarians, entertaining violent opinions’.

Karl Marx had little time for the Chartists’ leader, Feargus O’Connor, a brilliant but increasingly demented Irish demagogue. He was more impressed by O’Connor’s two lieutenants, George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, whom he had met briefly during his first visit to England in the summer of 1845. Engels wrote a series of articles about Germany for Harney’s
Northern Star
that year and invited him to join the communists’ correspondence network soon afterwards. Harney and Jones both attended the second congress of the Communist League in November 1847, at which Marx and Engels were asked to compose their manifesto.

Alarmed by the galloping optimism of these German revolutionists, Harney tugged desperately on the reins. ‘
Your prediction that we will get the Charter
in the course of the present year, and the abolition of private property within three years, will certainly not be realised,’ he warned Engels in 1846. ‘The
body
of the English people, without becoming a slavish people, are becoming an eminently pacific people … Organised conflicts such as we may look for in France, Germany, Italy and Spain cannot take place in this country. To organise, to conspire a revolution in this country would be a vain and foolish project.’ Engels ignored the cautionary signals. Immediately after the Kennington Common rally of April 1848 he told his communist brother-in-law, Emil Blank, that the English bourgeoisie would be ‘
in for a surprise when once the Chartists make a start
. The business of the procession was a mere bagatelle. In a couple of months, my
friend G. Julian Harney … will be in Palmerston’s shoes. I’ll bet you twopence and in fact any sum.’ After a couple of months – and indeed a couple of years – Palmerston was still Foreign Secretary.

What went wrong? On 1 January 1849, Marx reviewed the failed revolutions of 1848 and looked ahead to the coming year in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
. ‘
England
, the country that turns whole nations into proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace, that has already defrayed the cost of a European Restoration, the country in which class contradictions have reached their most acute and shameless form –
England
seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb.’ The world market was dominated by England, and England was dominated by the bourgeoisie. ‘Only when the Chartists head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality.’

In short, the future of world revolution depended on Harney and his colleagues – a heavy responsibility for Marx to lay upon them, though also a handsome tribute to their prowess. Alas for his prediction, they were already disintegrating into factions and splinter groups. Encouraged by Marx and Engels, George Julian Harney broke with O’Connor in 1849 and founded a succession of evanescent if lively journals – the
Democratic Review
, the
Red Republican
(whose greatest achievement, during its brief six months of existence, was to publish the first English translation of the
Communist Manifesto
) and the
Friend of the People
.

To the disgust of Marx and Engels, Harney practised what he preached about the ‘brotherhood of man’ – a phrase Marx detested, since there were many men whose brother he would never wish to be under any circumstances. The emollient Harney spread his political favours widely, applauding Marx’s ‘rascally foes’ among the Continental democrats – Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Ruge, Schapper – and somehow contriving to keep in with all sides when the Communist League fell apart. Marx
thought him not so much wicked as merely impressionable – ‘
impressionable, that is, to famous names
, in whose shadow he feels touched and honoured’. In his private correspondence with Engels, Marx nicknamed the indiscriminate cheerleader ‘Citizen Hiphiphiphurrah’ – or sometimes ‘Our Dear’, a mocking reference to his cloyingly fond and attentive wife, Mary Harney. ‘
I am
fatigué
of this public incense
so tirelessly used by Harney to fill the nostrils of
les petits grands hommes
,’ he complained in February 1851.

Still, Harney’s ideological promiscuity had one merit: it left Marx once again without any loyal allies. ‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with these jackasses, all this is now over … I hardly see anyone here [in London] save Pieper and live in complete retirement.’

Engels agreed wholeheartedly:

I find this inanity and want of tact
on Harney’s part more irritating than anything else. But
au fond
it is of little moment. At long last we have again the opportunity – the first time in ages – to show that we need neither popularity, nor the support of any party in any country, and that our position is completely independent of such ludicrous trifles. From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. Until then we shall at least have some peace and quiet … How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held
to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years.

Like another Marx, they disdained any club that would want them as members: ‘merciless criticism of everyone’ was now their policy. ‘What price all the tittle-tattle the entire émigré crowd can muster against you,’ Engels asked, ‘when you answer it with your political economy?’

This lofty contempt for tittle-tattle was gloriously disingenuous: Marx and Engels had an undiminished thirst for émigré gossip, and for the rest of their lives they never missed a chance to amuse or infuriate each other by trading scuttlebutt. The spluttering indignation reached new heights in February 1851 when Harney helped to organise a London banquet at which the guest of honour was Louis Blanc. Two of Marx’s few remaining allies among the London expatriates, Conrad Schramm and Wilhelm Pieper, were sent along to observe the proceedings – only to find themselves dragged out of the hall, denounced as spies and then kicked and punched by a 200-strong crowd, including many members of Harney’s ill-named ‘Fraternal Democrats’. Schramm appealed for help to one of the stewards, Landolphe, but to no avail. Then, as Marx informed Engels, ‘
who should arrive but Our Dear
; instead of intervening energetically, however, he stammered something about knowing these people and would have launched into long explanations. A fine remedy, of course, at such a moment.’ Engels suggested that Pieper and Schramm avenge themselves by giving Landolphe a box on the ears. Marx, predictably enough, felt that nothing less than a duel would provide the necessary satisfaction – and ‘if anybody is to be done an injury, it must be the little Hiphiphiphurrah Scotsman, George Julian Harney, and no other, and then it is Harney who will have to practise shooting.’