Karl Marx (33 page)

Since there is no hard evidence of these transactions, some scholars have assumed that Marx simply invented the story to impress his businesslike uncle. But it may be true. He certainly kept a close eye on share prices, and while badgering Engels for the next payment from Lupus’s estate he mentioned that ‘
had I had the money during the past ten days
, I’d have made a killing on the Stock Exchange here. The time has come again when, with wit and very little money, it’s possible to make money in London.’

Playing the markets, hosting dinner-dances, walking his dogs in the park: Marx was in severe danger of becoming respectable. One day a curious document arrived, announcing that he had been elected, without his knowledge, to the municipal sinecure of ‘Constable of the Vestry of St Pancras’. Engels thought this hilarious: ‘
Salut, ô connétable de Saint Pancrace!
Now you should get yourself a worthy outfit: a red nightshirt, white nightcap, down-at-heel slippers, white pants, a long clay pipe and a pot of porter.’
But Marx boycotted the swearing-in, quoting the advice of an Irish neighbour that ‘
I should tell them that I was a foreigner
and that they should kiss me on the arse’.

Ever since the split in the Communist League he had been a resolute non-joiner, spurning any committee or party that tried to recruit him. ‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves,’ he had told Engels as long ago as February 1851, and it would certainly take more than St Pancras philistines to entice him out of this long hibernation. Nevertheless, after thirteen years of ‘authentic isolation’ (if not exactly peace and quiet) Marx did now feel ready to emerge. The first hint of a new mood can be seen in his enthusiastic reaction to the 1863 uprising in Poland against Tsarist oppression. ‘What do you think of the Polish business?’ he asked Engels on 13 February. ‘This much is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly opened in Europe once more.’ Four days later he decided that Prussia’s intervention on behalf of the Tsar against the Polish insurgents ‘impels us to speak’. At that stage he was thinking merely of a pamphlet or manifesto – and indeed he published a short ‘Proclamation on Poland’ in November. Little did he imagine that within another twelve months he would be the
de facto
leader of the first mass movement of the international working classes.

Marx’s adult life has a tidal rhythm of advance and retreat, in which foaming surges forward are followed by a long withdrawing roar. This alternation of involvement and isolation was largely beyond his control, dictated as it was by accident and circumstance – illness, exile, domestic disaster, political reverses, fractured friendships. But it can also be seen as a wilful experiment in reconciling the demands of theory and practice, private contemplation and social engagement. Like many writers he was a kind of gregarious loner, yearning for a bit of solitude in which he could get down to work without interruption yet also craving the stimulus of action and argument. And he felt the dilemma more
keenly than most, since the estrangement of individuals from society was one of his preoccupying obsessions.

In a schoolboy essay from 1835, brimming with the facile certitude of a seventeen-year-old who has just bought his first razor, the problem was eliminated as briskly as youthful stubble. ‘The chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection,’ he wrote. ‘It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict.’ And why not? Because human nature was so constituted that individuals reached the zenith of perfection when devoting themselves to others. Someone who works only for himself ‘may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man’. History acclaims only those people who have ennobled themselves by enriching their tribe, and ‘religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind … Who would dare to set at naught such judgements?’

Marx himself would, as it happened. After realising that religion was no cure for alienation but merely an opiate to dull the pain, he was forced to look elsewhere for wholeness – first in the grand unifying self-consciousness of Hegelian philosophy, and then in historical materialism. But there was no escape from the old theological argument about faith versus works: it simply assumed a secular form, as theory versus practice or words versus deeds. ‘Philosophers have only
interpreted
the world in various ways; the point is to
change
it,’ he declared in 1845, as if abolishing the division of labour by a stroke of his pen: in future everyone would be both philosopher and soldier, just as we should all tend our sheep in the morning, paint a picture in the afternoon and go fishing in the evening. Aglow with existentialist fervour, Marx had no patience in those days with the ivory-tower mentality. In a little-known article from 1847 he derided the Belgian journalist Adolphe Bartels, who had taken fright at the activities of revolutionary German émigrés in Brussels:

M. Adolphe Bartels claims that public life is finished for him
. Indeed, he has withdrawn into private life and does not mean to leave it; he limits himself, each time some public event occurs, to hurling protests and proclaiming loudly that he believes he is his own master, that the movement has been made without him, M. Bartels, and in spite of him, M. Bartels, and that he has the right to refuse it his supreme sanction. It will be agreed that this is just as much a way of participating in public life as any other, and that by all those declarations, proclamations and protestations the public man hides behind the humble appearance of the private individual. This is the way in which the unappreciated and misunderstood genius reveals himself.

Within a few years, however, Marx came to believe that a misunderstood genius such as himself might well participate in public life by dashing off protests and proclamations from the solitude of his desk. To everything there was a season: a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time of war, and a time of peace. Or, to mix references, why imitate the action of the tiger when the blast of war has fallen silent?

Hence the striking contrast between his sardonic swipe at Bartels and the autobiographical preface to
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
(1859), where he confessed that the closure of the
Rheinische Zeitung
in 1843 had given him a longed-for opportunity ‘to withdraw from the public stage into the study’, which he ‘eagerly seized’. That preface was written during a far longer withdrawal from public business – an abstinence which he showed no great desire to break, even though German newspapers sometimes chided him for inactivity. In 1857 a group of New York revolutionaries wrote begging him to resurrect the old Communist League in London; he took more than a year to answer, and then only to point out that ‘since 1852 I had not been associated with
any
association and was firmly convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than my meddling
with associations which had now had their day on the Continent’. As he told Ferdinand Freiligrath in February 1860, ‘
whereas you are a
poet
, I am a
critic
and for me the experiences of 1849–52 were quite enough. The “League”, like the
société des saisons
in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society.’ This organic metaphor is a most apt description of how the International Working Men’s Association emerged into the daylight, four years later.

It seems almost oxymoronic that an organisation rejoicing in the name ‘International’ could be started in England, where insularity has long been not so much a geographical fluke as a way of life and generations of schoolchildren have learned to chant the Shakespearean cadences about this scepter’d isle, this other Eden:

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …

When the English talk about ‘Europe’ or ‘the Continent’ they do not include their own country: they are referring to Abroad, a strange and savage place where the natives piss on your shoes and eat garlic in bed. One can visit Abroad, of course – and indeed conquer it to create the largest empire ever known – but the purpose of such expeditions, whether by Victorian gunboat-diplomats or modern football hooligans, is to remind Johnny Foreigner that he will always remain a lesser breed. After all, which other nation can boast that it arose from the azure main at heaven’s command? The nineteenth-century humorist Douglas Jerrold, friend of Dickens and contributor to
Punch
magazine, was kidding on the level when he wrote, ‘The best thing I know between France and England is – the sea.’ These quasi-jokes are
still a staple of English tabloid headlines today. The very thought of England can transform even intelligent people into babbling tosh-merchants. ‘
When you come back to England from any foreign country
, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air,’ George Orwell wrote in a famous and vastly overpraised essay. ‘In the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener …’ Poor old Abroad: it can’t even produce a decent lawn.

Alongside the history of bragging and xenophobia, however, there is another tradition – quieter but no less enduring – of English internationalism, particularly among trade unionists. One thinks of their campaigns against South African apartheid, or their refusal to produce goods for the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s: time and again, at least some British workers have been willing to demonstrate an instinctive kinship with the oppressed. As the Chartist George Julian Harney said at the time of the 1847 Portuguese uprising, ‘
People are beginning to understand
that foreign as well as domestic questions do affect them; that a blow struck at Liberty on the Tagus is an injury to the friends of Freedom on the Thames; that the success of Republicanism in France would be the doom of Tyranny in every other land; and the triumph of England’s democratic Charter would be the salvation of the millions throughout Europe.’ It would be easy to assume, as the ruling élite of the time did, that these friends of Freedom on the Thames existed only in Harney’s imagination. Why else did England remain immune from the revolutionary epidemic that afflicted the rest of Europe in 1848? Harney’s society of Fraternal Democrats – whose committee included refugees from France, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia – might hold meetings to discuss the stirring events on the Continent, but did ordinary British workers care two hoots about the struggle in far-away countries of which they knew nothing?

The answer was provided by the astonishing ‘Haynau incident’ of 1850 – which, by happy coincidence, did indeed take place
right beside the Thames. Field Marshal Baron von Haynau was a brutal Austrian commander known as ‘the Hyena’ who had fully earned the sobriquet by torturing prisoners and flogging women while suppressing revolts in Italy and Hungary. In August 1850, as a respite from these exhausting duties, he took a short holiday in London, where his sightseeing itinerary included a tour of Barclay and Perkins’s Brewery on the south bank of the river. Though George Julian Harney encouraged all friends of Freedom to protest at the visit he had little hope of success – and was as surprised as anyone by what happened next.
As soon as the Hyena entered the brewery
, a posse of draymen threw a bale of hay on his head and pelted him with manure. He then ran out into the street, where lightermen and coal-heavers joined the chase – ripping his clothes, yanking out great tufts of his moustaches and shouting ‘Down with the Austrian butcher!’ Haynau tried to hide in a dustbin at the George Inn on Bankside, but was soon routed out and pelted with more dung. By the time the police reached the pub, rowing him across the Thames to safety, the bedraggled and humiliated butcher was in no fit state to continue his holiday. Within hours, a new song could be heard in the streets of Southwark:

Turn him out, turn him out, from our side of the Thames,

Let him go to great Tories and high-titled dames.

He may walk the West End and parade in his pride,

But he’ll not come back again near the ‘George’ in Bankside.

Harney’s
Red Republican
newspaper saw the debagging of Haynau as proof of ‘the progress of the working classes in political knowledge, their uncorrupted love of justice, and their intense hatred of tyranny and cruelty’. A celebratory rally in the Farringdon Hall, at which Engels spoke, was so oversubscribed that hundreds had to be turned away. Letters of congratulation arrived from workers’ associations as far afield as Paris and New York. Even Palmerston was secretly amused, reckoning that the Field
Marshal could only be improved by a sip of his own medicine. But conservative newspapers such as the
Quarterly Review
found nothing to laugh at: the riotous scenes in Bankside were a most alarming ‘indication of foreign influence even amongst our own people’ foreign influence being the standard mid-century euphemism for the dread virus of socialism.

The
Quarterly Review
needn’t have worried; not yet, anyway. For the next ten years the spirit of Bankside was invisible, as the few socialist groups in Britain – the Communist League, the Chartists, the Fraternal Democrats – either died or fell asleep. It was not until about 1860 that the proletariat began to wake from its long doze. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has remarked, this revival manifested itself in ‘
a curious amalgam of political and industrial action
, of various kinds of radicalism from the democratic to the anarchist, of class struggles, class alliances and government or capitalist concessions. But above all it was
international
, not merely because, like the revival of liberalism, it occurred simultaneously in various countries, but because it was inseparable from the international solidarity of the working classes.’