24. May 24th '2021
“…the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory...announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch
Who was ‘Karl Marx’? This is a question with many valences and even more answers. A natural way to go about addressing this question is to ask which Marx are we interested in? Are we talking about the young Marx, who was under the thrall of the German philosopher Hegel or the French economist Proudhon? Or, are we talking about the Marx who was a devoted but errant husband, a kindly but often absentee father or a doting and loving grandfather—a family man who struggled throughout his life to offer a comfortable living to his loved ones? Are we talking about a Marx who was in a deep intellectual communion with his friend, collaborator, and co-author, Frederich Engels with whom he co-wrote, most famously, ‘The Communist Manifesto’? Or, are we talking about the Marx—author, pamphleteer, columnist—who has left behind a 50-volume Karl Marx / Frederick Engels: Collected Works which has been translated into English and whose unpublished manuscripts still lay in the International Institute of Social History (IISH) of Amsterdam or the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) of Moscow. Or perhaps, we are talking about Marx the economist who investigated questions of value and surplus and other ideas of classical economics—benefitting off and disagreeing with ideas of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo—and yet is now considered as one among them despite diverging radically from their ideas? Else, we could talk about Marx the columnist who railed against capitalism and yet wrote articles and essays for the great capitalist newspaper barons in America and England in order to put food on the family table? Or, more romantically, we could talk about Marx the founding spirit of great many labor and worker struggles across Europe, and eventually in rest of the world? More complicatedly, one could very well ask are we talking about the Marx who is deemed as the animating spirit behind many violent regimes—from Lenin’s anti-kulak liquidations, the murderous gulags of Stalin, the genocides of Mao, and every Left-authoritarian figure? From an historical perspective, we are still debating the question if Marx is a 19th-century figure (as Jonathan Sperber argued in his biography) or a 20th century figure (as many politicians have claimed) or, as some suggest, a prophet in the great Jewish tradition for all times to come? More personally, who was Marx the man? By all accounts he could be acidic in his remarks, abrasive in his assessment of others (“donkey”, “dogs”, “hypocrites” were among his various annotations in his books), prickly and aggressive, an angry enemy, and yet unexpectedly generous to his friends. (The 19th century German socialist, Wilhelm Liebknecht wrote “There was something militarily abrupt in his manner, which called out opposition and contradiction, while Marx in the company of others had something extraordinarily winning.”) And what about Marx and his children? We know he preferred to have boys (he writes to Engels, “My wife alas, delivered a girl and not a boy.”) and yet he insisted that his three girl children wore ‘bloomers’ (trousers), educated them well, raised them as ‘outspoken atheists’, and yet was surprisingly conservative when it came to their love life. He wrote to a prospective son-in-law, like any middle class father-in-law, “Before the final arrangements of your relationship to Laura, I must have serious information about your economic circumstances. . . . You know that I have sacrificed my entire fortune in revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. Quite the opposite. Were I to start my career over again, I would do the same. Only I would not marry.” Perhaps most complicated of all was the personal relationships involving Marx, his wife Jenny, and their house servant, Lenchen Demuth, with whom he had an unacknowledged son—a domestic arrangement that was fraught with sexual politics which could have only undermined Marx’s patriarchal authority in ways we don’t fully understand. In comparison to Engel’s far seeing vision on the role of women in society, Marx’s understanding was liberal for his times and yet one which we would describe today as chauvinistic or, even, sexist. (He writes, “The progress of society can be exactly measured by the societal position of the fair sex (including the ugly ones)”—the kind of words that would get him ‘cancelled’ in todays environs).
But amid all these furies of an historic, life, we rarely wonder about the last years of Marx the person. How did he die? In what conditions? At least, I had never thought about these years of Marx till I read Marcello Musto’s elegiac biography, (gracefully translated by Patrick Camiller) about his years from 1881 to 1883—in which he appears as a sum total of all of the above shards of his being albeit in various attenuated and yet all too recognizable forms. We shouldn’t be, but are nevertheless, surprised to find a man who remained committed to his life-long project of learning in order to understand an increasingly globalized world—see here on early globalization—and what it had wrought upon the working class to his last days. It is also a portrait that reveals a man at precipice of world fame—one who had set the world of labor unions and worker rights aflame with his incendiary prose but was yet to become the pater familias of revolution as a global idea—as a result of which, we can only wonder if he even intuited what was to become of his name. A cousin of mine in Kerala named his son ‘Engels’, and when I asked him why chose to restrain himself by not calling his child ‘Marx’, he smiled and said, that was too much to dream, even as a father. That episode has always remained with me—this extraordinary sense of affiliation to a man who was, by all means, a 19th century European who benefited from all the material gains that came off colonization, even if he may have had complex views on it—a colonization that would have most likely enslaved my cousin in a previous life. The metamorphosis of Marx’s name—from a provincial German-Jewish middle class household name to a world-historic repository of local aspirations—has an history that is yet to be written in a truly global fashion. Irrespective, what struck me, vividly, when reading Musto, was how extraordinarily indebted he was to Engels—financially, socially, and perhaps most unexpectedly in these last years, emotionally. (“Your altruistic concern for me is unbelievable, and I am often secretly ashamed.”) Behind that stentorian presence was a man who knew he could only think freely because his friend had unshackled his everyday life from all-too-common privations of the 19th century. Theirs was a friendship between two men that is rare, precisely because as J. M. Coetzee writes to Paul Auster, unlike love, true (male?) friendships are straightforward in their motivations of companionship even if taciturn in its expression.
Ironically, despite all revolutionary talk that he spawns, the Marx we meet in his last years is a picture of bourgeois respectability. He lives in an expensive accommodation in North London, his “nuclear family” in the house consisted of him, his wife, his youngest daughter, and his governess. He has three dogs—which, no doubt, prophesies his eventual popularity in Kerala—Toddy, Whisky, and an unnamed third. In the evenings, he would go to the park and take his eldest, and most beloved, grandson Johnny Longuet (1876-1938) for a stroll. On occasion, he would meet up with friends, read Shakespeare’s plays together, have dinner, and almost always greet foreigners and fellow socialists who came to pay respects. Amid all this, Marx continued to educate himself on what was happening with British rule in India, the Spanish in Latin America, and the French in Algeria. Among these, Marx was understandably most interested in India since his views on British colonialism had evolved. He went from offering a ‘qualified’ support of colonialism in 1853 (for those interested, see the debates between Aijaz Ahmed and Edward Said on this phase of Marx’s life) to a deeply committed anti-imperialist, and by the end of his life, who scribbled invectives against the British on the margins of his notebook. In his last years of 1879 to 1880, Marx compiled diligently from various sources a thousand year materialist history of India, which is now collected as ‘Notes on Indian History (664 — 1858)’.
Strangely, it was in his last years that Marx travelled widely—for the first time in his life, he left Northern Europe—when he went from the Isle of Wight (south of England), then spent three months in Algeria, thereafter he travelled to Monaco and southern France, visited his daughter Jenny and grandchildren near Paris, made a quick trip to Switzerland before return to London. In Algeria, he shaves off his famous beard and writes to Engels in 1882, “Apropos; because of the sun, I have done away with my prophet’s beard & my crowning glory but (in deference to my daughters) had myself photographed [see here] before offering up my hair on the altar of an Algerian barber.” In a tragic turn of events, on January 11th’ 1883, he learnt that his beloved daughter had died of cancer (this came nearly a year after his wife had passed away)—after which Marx’s health declined rapidly. I can’t help but suspect that Marx was laid low by that most anti-materialist of tragedies: heartbreak. Engels visited him almost daily and noted, “Marx is still incapable of work, keeps to his room and reads French novels.” One is filled with a sense of melancholy admiration as we read this withering in the Autumn of the (Red) Patriarch. On March 14th 1883, at 2.45 pm Marx died after developing an abscess in his lung and possibly after a stroke. []