Marx with his children was a very different man from the Marx described by his adult contemporaries.
When his father questioned whether his heart was as good as his head, he raised a question
that many others would continue to raise about Marx throughout his life.
A fellow revolutionary said of Marx: “If his heart had matched his intellect, and if
he possessed as much love as hate, I would have gone though fire for him,” but “a
most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him” (emphasis in the
original).
Still another radical contemporary, Proudhon, wrote to Marx, “for God’s sake, after
we have abolished all the dogmatisms a priori, let us not of all things attempt in our turn
to instill another kind of dogma into the people.”
He said: Let us have decent and sincere polemics.
Let us give the world an example of learned and farsighted tolerance.
But simply because we are at the head of the movement, let us not make ourselves the leader
of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostle of a new religion—even though this
religion be the religion of logic, the religion of reason.
Carl Schurz, while still a youthful revolutionary in Germany (before his later fame as a liberal
in the United States), met Marx and formed an opinion of him that accords with the impressions
of many others: I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable.
To no opinion, which differed from his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending
consideration.
Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did
not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted
it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it.
Marx liked to glare at anyone who challenged his conclusions and say “I will annihilate
you!”
The radicals and revolutionaries whom Marx successively alienated over a period of forty
years reads like a Who’s Who of the nineteenth-century political left.
Even the patient and long-suffering Engels came close to a break with Marx, whose curt
and clumsy remarks on the death of Engels’ common-law wife in 1863 wounded his friend.
Engels wrote: All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have shown me more sympathy
and friendship on this occasion, which inevitably affected me quite closely, than I had a right
to expect.
You found the moment suitable for a demonstration of the superiority of your cool manner of
thinking.
So be it!
Marx’s apology brought forgiveness and the historic partnership continued.
The younger Marx of the 1840s presented a more humane vision in his writings, and has
become something of a refuge for modern radicals disillusioned with the more blatantly severe
later Marx, who seemed to presage Lenin and Stalin.
Lighthearted humor also brightened some of these earlier writings in a way seldom seen
again in the later works of Marx and Engels.
Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the authoritarian and terroristic elements that were as present
in these earlier writings as in the later ones—and in Engels as well as Marx.
Engels’ first draft for The Communist Manifesto included compulsory labor, a deliberate undermining
of the family by ending the dependence “of the wife upon the husband and of the children
upon the parents,” and the erection of “common dwellings for communities of citizens” to
replace family homes.
Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung declared on its last day of publication: “When our
turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism.”
A current vogue, aptly characterized as “Engels-baiting” makes it especially important to assess Engels’
role in Marxism.
Engels was much more than Marx’s friend and benefactor.
He was one of the very few people with whom Marx had intellectual interchange, and by
far the most important.
For most of his life, Marx, as an obscure autodidact, was utterly cut off from participation
in the world of universities, learned journals, scholarly conferences, and other institutionalized
intellectual exchange.
Nor did he have any intellectual interaction, by correspondence or in person, with the leading
minds of his time—Mill, Darwin, Tolstoy, Menger, or Dostoevski, for example.
Marx’s relationship with contemporary radical intellectuals was one of tutelage or hostility.
His correspondence consisted overwhelmingly of gossip, intrigue, and passing remarks on
current events and contemporary personalities.
Only with Engels were serious intellectual matters discussed with even occasional regularity.
Engels’ early economic writing provided the basic conception that Marx systematized
and elaborated in the massive volumes of Capital.
Finally, Engels’ piecing together and editing of the many manuscripts for the posthumous
volumes of Marx’s magnum opus was a monumental work of dedication and self-sacrifice, stretching
over more than a decade.
Engels was not only a far clearer writer than Marx, but often more subtly and accurately
conveyed Marx’s theories—especially of history—for he did not so readily indulge
in Marx’s penchant for epigrams at the expense of accuracy.
Engels’ letters on the Marxian theory of history are a major contribution to understanding
what Marx actually did in his historical writings, as distinguished from how Marx tried to encapsulate
his practice in clichés that continue to obscure more than they reveal.
There is no way to know what Engels would have accomplished in the decades he devoted,
first to earning a living for both himself and Marx, and then to completing Marx’s
unfinished work.
But what he actually accomplished was both impressive and indicative.
His Socialism: Utopian and Scientific remains the best summary of the system of thought
that bears the name of Marx.
How much of Marxism originated in fact with Engels is a question that may never be answered.
Engels was clearly a precursor of Marxian crisis theory in economics, as Marx himself
indicated.
Engels’ letters to Marx also presage the content and title of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.
But the collaborative writings of Marx and Engels and their unrecorded conversations
over a period of forty years preclude any definitive disentangling of their respective
contributions to Marxism.
In 1883, at the graveside of Marx, Engels painted an idealized picture that provided
the stuff of which legends are made.
He began: “On the 14th day of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest
living thinker ceased to think.”
According to Engels, “Marx discovered the law of development of human history,” and
also “the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production.”
Innumerable slanders Marx “brushed aside as though it were cobweb,” and “though
he may have had many opponents he had hardly one personal enemy.”
This was at best a highly sanitized picture of a man who personalized every quarrel and
whose letters to Engels were full of spiteful gossip and petty intrigues.
Finally, Engels’ funeral oration ended with these words: “His name will endure through
the ages, and so also will his work!”
Marx’s name has indeed become infinitely better known than when he died in relative
obscurity in London a hundred years ago.
How much of what has happened in the twentieth century is “his work”—and in what sense—is
a much larger and more complex question.
For Marx the man, he perhaps wrote his own best epitaph when he said: “Nothing that
is human is foreign to me.”
Others made him an abstraction and an icon.