The dream of returning to the continent in triumph, after revolutions there, continued
to fascinate Marx and Engels. One scholar has counted more than forty anticipations
of impending revolution in their letters and writings over the next thirty years—none
of which materialized. But as early as 1850, Marx and Engels had to begin making some preparations
for a livelihood in England. Marx was then thirty-two, Engels thirty, and
neither of them had ever been self-supporting. They had lived off allowances and gifts from
their families (including Marx’s wife’s family), off small inheritances from relatives,
the sale of belongings, borrowings, credit defaults, emergency collections among friends
and colleagues, and a few scattered and meager earnings from their writings. Now most of
these sources had dried up. Both Marx and Engels were estranged from their
families, who were as disappointed at their prolonged dependency as they were repelled
by their doctrines. Still, as late as 1849, Marx’s much-despised mother advanced him
enough money from his future inheritance to enable him to live comfortably for years—though
in fact it was all gone within one year, much of it spent to buy arms for abortive uprisings
and to finance Marx’s newspaper. Engels’ pious father, described by the younger
Engels as “bigoted and despotic,” nevertheless supported him financially. At age thirty,
Engels accepted his father’s offer to work in the family business in Manchester. This
became the source of Engels’ livelihood—and much of Marx’s.
The young Engels called it “forced labor”—a painfully ironic term in view of what that
phrase was to come to mean in twentieth-century Communist societies. Engels complained, for
example, that “I’ve now got to be at the office no later than 10 in the morning.”
The firm, in which Engels’ father had half-interest, employed about 800 workers.
Though Engels began on a modest level in the management, his position and his pay rose
over the years until he was able to retire at age fifty with substantial funds for himself
and at the same time provide a very generous annuity that relieved Marx of financial worry
for the rest of his life. But before reaching that point, the financial position of Marx
and his growing family was often dire and occasionally desperate.
In 1850 the Marx family moved into the slums of London, where they spent most of the next
twenty years. During this time, it was often difficult for Marx to come up with the money
to pay the rent, buy groceries or pay his bills. The family often dodged creditors,
were evicted for non-payment of rent, on some occasions had to live on bread and potatoes,
frequently pawned their meager belongings, and had three children die amid the squalor—including
one for whom there was no money for a burial until a gift was received for that purpose.
Yet, despite the very real and very painful poverty in which Marx often found himself,
his known sources of income were sufficient for a lower middle class family standard of
living at that time, and was about three times the income of an unskilled worker. A contemporary
German exile with a similar income to Marx’s boasted of eating “luscious beef-steak”
regularly. Marx’s only regular earnings were as a foreign
correspondent for the New York Tribune, but Engels supplemented this even in the early
years before his own finances were solid; and other gifts and inheritances added materially
to Marx’s resources. The problem was Marx’s chronic inability to manage money, and especially
his and his wife’s tendency to splurge when large sums came in.
Moreover, Marx spent at least £100 on a futile lawsuit against an obscure slanderer named
Vogt—enough to support a family for months in those times—and wasted still more money
and time on a longforgotten book of rebuttal called Herr Vogt, for which he was sued in
court to collect the unpaid costs of publication. In 1864, Marx received a number of inheritances
that added up to ten times what he had been living on annually—and yet he was still
debt-ridden in 1868 when Engels came to his rescue by paying off Marx’s debts and then
giving him an annuity. Ironically, Marx’s most important research and writing were done
during these years of travail and heartbreak, and he produced little during the last dozen
or so years of his life when he led a prosperous bourgeois existence.
During the 1850s he buried himself in the reading room of the British Museum during
the day, studying economics. Until late at night and into the wee hours of the morning
he scribbled the voluminous manuscripts that represented several abortive attempts to write
the book that eventually emerged as Capital. Engels wrote little during this period, when
he was working as a capitalist in Manchester and underwriting Marx’s efforts in the communist
cause of overthrowing capitalism. Physical ills dogged Marx increasingly with the passing
years. His irregular sleeping habits, alcohol consumption, and lack of personal cleanliness
or exercise may well have contributed to these, as his improvidence made his family prey to
hunger, disease, and the deaths of three children in infancy and early childhood. But he blamed
these tragedies—like most of his troubles—on other people.
The death of his infant son he blamed on “bourgeois misery,” which he apparently considered
also the cause of the boils that covered his body, for he promised to make the bourgeoisie
pay for them via his revolutionary writings. Marx repeatedly denounced creditors who insisted
on collecting what he owed them. He even lost his temper at his wife for her
bouts of tears in the midst of mounting tragedies. Even during the long years of poverty, the
Marx household had a maid, Helene DeMuth, better known by her nickname of Lenchen. She
had been a servant of the elder Baroness von Westphalen, who in 1845 sent her as a present
to her daughter, who was unprepared to take care of children or a household.
Though the Marxes were seldom in a position to pay her, “dear, faithful Lenchen” remained
in their service to their dying days—and then went to work for Engels. In her youth
she passed up suitors and other opportunities for jobs to stay and serve the Marxes. In
1851, during the most desperate period of the Marx family, when Marx’s wife was pregnant,
Lenchen soon became pregnant too. Only a few friends knew of the child’s birth,
he was sent away to be raised by a working class family, and there was no father’s
name on the birth certificate. Marx’s wife was told that Engels—a bachelor—was the
father, but long after the deaths of Marx and his wife, it came out that in fact the
father was Karl Marx. Engels confirmed it on his death bed to Marx’s tearful daughter.
In his life he had taken the blame for Marx, in order to save his friend’s marriage,
but in death Engels was apparently not prepared to take the blame forever. The child himself,
Freddy DeMuth, grew up with no relationship with Marx, and never visited his mother as
long as the Marxes were alive. Only after their deaths, when Helene DeMuth
became Engels’ housekeeper, did the boy begin visiting his mother—entering and leaving
by the back door. He was sacrificed first to Marx’s convenience, then to Marx’s
image. His mother apparently loved him; when she died, she left everything to him. Marx’s
human relationships in general were self-centered, if not exploitative.
When his wife gave birth to a child who died immediately, Marx briefly mentioned his own
reactions in a letter to Engels, so totally ignoring the effect on his wife that Engels’
reply reminded him that “you don’t say how she is.” In 1851, at the age of thirty-three,
Marx “wrote to my mother, threatening to draw bills on her and, in the event of non-payment,
going to Prussia and letting myself be locked up.”
When his mother refused to be blackmailed this way, Marx complained of her “insolent”
reply. After his mother later died in 1863, Marx’s letter to Engels was a model of brevity
wasting no sentiment on “the old woman” and focusing entirely on getting his inheritance
immediately. Nor was this the only occasion when death in the family was seen in purely
economic terms. Earlier, in 1852, he referred to some “good
news”—the illness of “my wife’s indestructible uncle”—and added: “If that dog dies
now I’ll be out of trouble” financially. Because Marx wanted German socialist Ferdinand
Lassalle to “find me some literary business in Germany” to supplement “my diminished
income and increased expenditure,” he cultivated him with flattery to his face and contempt
behind his back. Marx referred to Lassalle’s book on Hegel
as an “exhibition of enormous erudition” when writing to Lassalle and as a “silly
concoction” when writing to Engels. Marx added that Lassalle was a “Jewish n*gger,”
based on Marx’s analysis of his appearance: It is now perfectly clear to me that, as testified
also by his cranial formation and hair growth, he is descended from the negroes who joined
Moses’s exodus from Egypt (unless his paternal mother or grandmother was crossed with a n*gger).
Well, this combination of Jewish and Germanic stock with the negroid basic substance is
bound to yield a strange product. The fellow’s importunity is also n*gger-like. Engels likewise
seized upon Lassalle’s ancestry, called him “a true Jew” and “From firtht to
latht the thtupid Yid.” Crude and repulsive as Marx’s and Engels’
racial remarks to each other often were, there is no need to make them still worse by putting
them in the same category as twentieth-century racism that has justified genocide. Marx’s
much criticized essay, “On the Jewish Question,” for example, contains clear statements of
his distaste for what he considered to be Jewish cultural or social traits, but in the
end it was a defense of Jews’ right to full political equality, written as a reply to
a contemporary who had claimed that Jews should be required to give up their religion before
receiving equal civil status. Marx hoped that the characteristics he disliked
in Jews would fade away with the disappearance of capitalism, thus leading to “abolishing
the essence of Jewry”—but hardly in the sense of Hitler and the Nazis. Similarly,
despite his anti-Negro stereotypes, during the American Civil War he conducted propaganda
for the North and for the emancipation of slaves.
Perhaps more indicative, he agreed to the marriage of his eldest daughter to a man known
to have some Negro ancestry, after discouraging other suitors. Likewise, Engels in 1851 expressed
to a friend his hope that “the present persecution of Jews in Germany will spread no further.”
Marx and Engels were, in short, inconsistent and privately crude, but hardly racial fanatics.