Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

their father’s death, did his utmost to prevent the union, warning that Marx was a ne’er-do-well who would bring disgrace on the entire tribe of von Westphalens. To escape the incessant gossip and browbeating, Jenny and her mother – who supported her loyally if anxiously throughout – fled from Trier to the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach, fifty miles away. It was there, at 10 a.m. on 19 June 1843, that the twenty-five-year-old Herr Marx, Doctor of Philosophy, married Fräulein Johanna Bertha Julia Jenny von Westphalen, aged twenty-nine, ‘of no particular occupation’. The only guests were Jenny’s goofy brother Edgar, her mother and a few local friends. None of Karl’s relations attended. The bride wore a green silk dress and a garland of pink roses. The wedding present from Jenny’s mother was a collection of jewellery and silver plate embellished with the Argyll family crest, a legacy from the von Westphalens’ Scottish ancestors. The Baroness also gave them a large box of cash to help them through the first few months of married life but unfortunately the newlyweds took this treasure chest with them on a honeymoon trip up the Rhine, encouraging any indigent friends they happened to meet on the way to help themselves. The money was all gone within a week.

      A few days before the wedding ceremony, at Jenny’s insistence, Karl had signed an unusual contract promising that the couple would have ‘legal common ownership of property’ – save that ‘each spouse shall for his or her own part pay the debts he or she has made or contracted, inherited or otherwise incurred before marriage’. One must assume that this was an attempt to placate Jenny’s mother, who was well aware of Marx’s hopelessness with money. But the contract was never enforced, even though he was seldom out of debt thereafter. During the next few years, the Argyll family silver spent more time in the hands of pawnbrokers than in the kitchen cupboard.

      In that post-nuptial summer of 1843, the new Mr and Mrs Karl Marx were able to live on next to nothing as guests at the Baroness’s house in Kreuznach while waiting to learn from Ruge when – and where – his new journal would be born. It was an idyllic little interlude. In the evenings, Karl and Jenny would stroll down to the river, listening to the nightingales singing from the woods on the far bank. By day, the editor-elect of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher retreated to a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity.

      Marx always liked to work out his ideas on paper, scribbling down thoughts as they occurred to him, and a surviving page from his Kreuznach notebooks shows the process in action:

      Note. Under Louis XVIII, the constitution by grace of the king (Charter imposed by the king); under Louis Philippe, the king by grace of the constitution (imposed kingship). In general we can note that the conversion of the subject into the predicate, and of the predicate into the subject, the exchange of that which determines for that which is determined, is always the most immediate revolution. Not only on the revolutionary side. The king makes the law (old monarchy), the law makes the king (new monarchy).

      Once Marx had started on one of these riffs, playing with his beloved contradictions, there was no stopping him. Mightn’t the simple grammatical inversion that turned old monarchs into new also explain where German philosophy had gone wrong? Hegel, for instance, had assumed that ‘the Idea of the State’ was the subject, with society as its predicate, whereas history showed the reverse to be the case. There was nothing wrong with Hegel that couldn’t be cured by standing him on his head: religion does not make man, man makes religion; the constitution does not create the people, but the people create the constitution. Top down and bottom up, it all made perfect sense.

      The credit for this discovery belongs to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose Introductory Theses to the Reform of Philosophy had been published in March 1843. ‘Being is subject, thought predicate,’ he argued. ‘Thought arises from being, not being from thought.’ Marx stretched the logic much further by extending it from abstract philosophy to the real world – above all, the world of politics, the state and society. Feuerbach, a former pupil of Hegel, had already travelled quite a distance from his mentor’s idealism towards materialism (his most memorable aphorism, still to be found in dictionaries of quotations, was ‘Man is what he eats’); but it was a studiously cerebral materialism, unrelated to the social and economic conditions of his time or place. Marx’s foray into journalism had convinced him that radical philosophers shouldn’t spend their lives atop a lofty pillar like some ancient Greek anchorite; they must come down and engage with the here and now.

      Feuerbach was one of the first writers from whom Marx solicited a contribution to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher as soon as he knew that its publication was assured. On 3 October 1843, just before setting off to join Ruge in Paris, he wrote to suggest a demolition job on the Prussian court philosopher F. W. von Schelling, his old antagonist from Berlin University. ‘The entire German police is at his disposal, as I myself experienced when I was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. That is, a censorship order can prevent anything against the holy Schelling from getting through … But just imagine Schelling exposed in Paris, before the French literary world! … I confidently expect a contribution from you in the form you may find most convenient.’ As further enticement, he added a cheeky postscript: ‘Although she does not know you, my wife sends greetings. You would not believe how many followers you have among the fair sex.’

      Feuerbach was not seduced. He replied that, in his opinion, it would be rash to move from theory to practice until the theory itself had been honed to perfection. Marx, by contrast, believed the two were – or ought to be – inseparable. Praxis makes perfect, and the most necessary practice for philosophers at this time was ‘merciless criticism of all that exists’. The critique of Hegel had been inspired by Feuerbach; now Feuerbach himself, having served his purpose, must expect to be criticised in turn – most notably in the Theses on Feuerbach, written in the spring of 1845, which conclude with the most succinct summary of the difference between anchorites and activists: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’

      Unlike most of the thinkers whom Marx chewed up and spat out, Feuerbach earned his lasting gratitude. ‘I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and – if I may use the word – love which I feel for you,’ he wrote to Feuerbach in 1844. ‘You have provided – I don’t know whether intentionally – a philosophical basis for socialism … The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!’

      In his last weeks at Kreuznach, Marx wrote two important essays which were to appear in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. The first, ‘On the Jewish Question’, is usually mentioned only en passant, if at all, in Marxist hagiographies. But it has provided powerful ammunition for his enemies.

      Was Marx a self-hating Jew? Although he never denied his Jewish origins, he never drew attention to them either – unlike his daughter Eleanor, who proudly informed a group of workers from the East End of London that she was ‘a Jewess’. In his later correspondence with Engels, he sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee: the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a frequent victim, was described variously as the Yid, Wily Ephraim, Izzy and the Jewish Nigger. ‘It is now quite plain to me – as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify – that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt, unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger,’ Marx wrote in 1862, discussing the ever-fascinating subject of Lassalle’s ancestry. ‘Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also niggerlike.’

      Some passages from ‘On the Jewish Question’ have an equally rancid flavour if taken out of context – which they usually are.

      What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.

      What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling.

      What