Karl Marx by Francis Wheen Read Free Book Online Page A

dialectical zeal produced empty rhetoric, but moreoften it led to startling and original insights. He took nothing for granted, turned everything upside down – including society itself. How could the mighty be put down from their seat, and the humble exalted? In the critique of Hegel he set out his answer for the first time: what was required was ‘a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes … This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat .’ That last word resounds like a clap of thunder over a parched landscape. Never mind that neither Germany nor France yet had a proletariat worth the name: a storm was coming.
    Marx’s theory of class struggle was to be refined and embellished over the next few years – most memorably in the Communist Manifesto – but its outline was already clear enough: ‘Every class, as soon as it takes up the struggle against the class above it, is involved in a struggle with the class beneath it. Thus princes struggle against kings, bureaucrats against aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie against all of these, while the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie.’ The role of emancipator therefore passes from one class to the next until universal liberation is finally achieved. In France, the bourgeoisie had already toppled the nobility and the clergy, and another upheaval seemed imminent. Even in stolid old Prussia, medieval government could not prolong its reign indefinitely. With a parting jibe at Teutonic efficiency – ‘Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one’ – he set off for Paris. It was, he sensed, the only place to be at this moment in history. ‘When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.’

POSTSCRIPT 1 :

Consequences
    Karl Marx died stateless and intestate. His estate was assessed at £250, largely based on the value of furniture and books in 41 Maitland Park Road. These, together with his vast collection of letters and notebooks, passed into Engels’s keeping – as did Helene Demuth, who was employed as the housekeeper at 122 Regent’s Park Road until her death from bowel cancer on 4 November 1890.
    Engels devoted himself to collating the notes and manuscripts for Capital . Volume II was published (in Germany) in July 1885, Volume III in November 1894. The first official English translation (1887) sold badly, but a pirated English-language edition which appeared in New York three years later exhausted its print run of 5,000 copies almost at once – possibly because the publisher sent a circular to Wall Street bankers claiming that the book revealed ‘how to accumulate capital’. Engels died of cancer of the oesophagus on 5 August, 1895. About eighty people attended the funeral at Woking crematorium; Eleanor Marx and three friends then travelled to Eastbourne, took a rowing boat six miles out from Beachy Head and consigned his ashes to the sea.
    After Engels’s death, the task of sorting and storing Marx’s papers fell to Eleanor Marx and her lover, Edward Aveling. Although astonishingly ugly and notoriously unreliable, Aveling was also a silver-tongued charmer who ‘needed but half an hour’s start of the handsomest man in London’ to seduce a woman. He and Eleanor lived together openly, but since most of their friendswere actors, freethinkers and other bohemian types no one was unduly scandalised. What did shock many guests was how appallingly he treated her: the novelist Olive Schreiner described Aveling as a ‘ruffian’; William Morris thought him a ‘disreputable dog’. Eleanor discovered how right they were in March 1898, when she learned that he had secretly married a twenty-two-year-old actress the previous summer. Aveling’s solution to the crisis was to propose a