In the decade that remained of his life after the destruction of the International, Marx published
little. His financial worries were largely behind him, but illnesses plagued him and his wife. The
completion of Capital was delayed not only by illness, but also by Marx’s side excursions
into other subjects—notably the history of Russia, which required him to learn the Russian language.
Even Engels did not know that Marx had let the manuscripts of Volumes II
and III of Capital sit untouched for years while he dallied with other matters. When
Engels discovered this after Marx’s death, he said 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.”
Engels had been vainly urging Marx since 1845 to finish the projected book on economics.
As it was, much of the last two decades of Engels’ life were taken up trying
to decipher and assemble the manuscripts for the remaining two volumes of Capital.
Realizing the monumental task that this involved, and his own advancing age,
Engels initiated the young Karl Kautsky into the mysteries of Marx’s handwriting, enabling
Kautsky to eventually assemble the remaining manuscripts into Theories of Surplus Value,
a separate three-volume work originally intended by Marx as the final volume of Capital.
Thus a work begun in the middle of the nineteenth century was not completely published until the end
of the first decade of the twentieth century. Marx once observed that all his earnings from
Capital would not pay for the cigars he smoked while writing it. It took four years to sell one
thousand copies. And though translations began to appear with the passing years,
Marx remained in his lifetime a little known figure outside the ranks of revolutionaries.
His greatest notoriety came as a defender of the bloody activities of the Paris Commune of 1871.
His book on the subject, The Civil War in France, sold far more copies than The Communist Manifesto.
Marx relished this public notoriety, though it also included death threats.
The Marx family, even after being relieved from dire poverty, had many rocky roads to travel.
Marx’s wife, a beauty in her youth, found herself with a pock-marked face as result of illness—in
her words “looking more like a kind of rhinoceros which has escaped from a zoo
than a member of the Caucasian race.” She remained a nervous wreck and irritable with her children
as a result of decades of strain, for which her pampered upbringing had not prepared her.
While her mother’s servant, Helene DeMuth, had been a godsend to a young wife unable
to take care of children, money, or a household, Lenchen’s handling of these
responsibilities may also have retarded or prevented Jenny Marx from maturing.
Her immaturity was still evident long after she ceased to be young. At age fifty, she realized
a lifetime ambition by giving a ball, complete with uniformed servants and hired musicians.
Even as a middle-aged woman and the wife of a revolutionary,
she had visiting cards printed up identifying herself as “Baroness von Westphalen.” Nor where
these the only vanities in which she and Marx indulged. They continued to give their daughters
piano lessons, music and dancing lessons, even when this sometimes meant not paying the rent.
Keeping up appearances was a major item in the Marxes’ budget throughout their lives.
During his worst years of financial desperation, Marx strove mightily and with pained embarrassment
to prevent visitors from discovering his poverty (though Engels pointed out how
futile and pointless this was)—even when this required his wife to “take everything
that was not actually screwed down to the pawn shop” to pay for entertaining them.
During one of his worst financial crises Marx contemplated “the most extreme reduction of
expenditure,” which might include requiring him to “move into purely proletarian accommodation,”
and “get rid of the maids.” The three Marx daughters all became involved with men unable
to support them—two through marriage and one in a common-law relationship.
All received money at one time or other from Engels—the eldest to pay overdue rent, the middle
daughter repeatedly for a variety of reasons, and the youngest in a large inheritance which she did
not live long to enjoy. Marx’s relationships with his children and grandchildren, however,
show his most happy and human side. He was a gentle and indulgent father, who amused his
children with his own original fairy tales and picnicked and played with them with great relish.
The deaths of those who perished in childhood severely affected him for years afterwards.
Marx wrote in a letter: Bacon says that really important men have so many contacts with nature
and the world, and have so much to interest them, that they easily get over their loss. I am not
one of these important men. My child’s death has shattered my heart and brain,
and I feel the loss as keenly as on the first day.