Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

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      Arnold Ruge, taking fright, left Marx in the lurch by suspending publication and refusing to pay him the promised salary. Some historians have claimed that the quarrel needn’t have become terminal ‘had not other personal differences, especially on fundamental matters of principle, been developing between them for some time’. But in fact the most ‘fundamental matter of principle’ was a ridiculous squabble over the sex life of their colleague Georg Herwegh, who had already betrayed his new bride by starting an affair with the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, a former mistress of the composer Liszt and mother of the girl who became Cosima Wagner. ‘I was incensed by Herwegh’s way of living and his laziness,’ Ruge wrote to his mother. ‘Several times I referred to him warmly as a scoundrel, and declared that when a man gets married he ought to know what he is doing. Marx said nothing and took his departure in a perfectly friendly manner. Next morning he wrote to me that Herwegh was a genius with a great future. My calling him a scoundrel filled him with indignation, and my ideas on marriage were philistine and inhuman. Since then we have not seen each other again.’

      Although Marx often railed against promiscuity and libertinism with the puritanical ferocity of a Savonarola – if only to disprove the charge that communism was synonymous with communal sex – he observed the amorous escapades of his friends with amusement and, perhaps, a touch of envy. Jenny certainly feared as much. ‘Although the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak,’ she wrote from Trier in August 1844, two months after leaving her husband alone in Paris. ‘The real menace of unfaithfulness, the seductions and attractions of a capital city – all those are powers and forces whose effect on me is more powerful than anything else.’ She needn’t have worried. Among the seductions and attractions of Paris, the rustle of a countess’s skirt could not begin to compete with the clamour of politics. In the summer of 1844 Marx took up an offer to write for Vorwärts!, a biweekly communist journal sponsored by the composer Meyerbeer and now edited by Karl Ludwig Bernays, who had collaborated on the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher.

      As the only uncensored radical paper in the German language appearing anywhere in Europe, Vorwärts!, provided a refuge for all the old gang of émigré poets and polemicists, including Heine, Herwegh, Bakunin and Arnold Ruge. Once a week they would gather at the first-floor office on the corner of the Rue des Moulins and the Rue Neuve des Petits for an editorial conference presided over by Bernays and his publisher, Heinrich Börnstein, who recalled:

      Some would sit on the bed or on the trunks, others would stand and walk about. They would all smoke terrifically and argue with great passion and excitement. It was impossible to open the windows, because a crowd would immediately have gathered in the street to find out the cause of the violent uproar, and very soon the room was concealed in such a thick cloud of tobacco smoke that it was impossible for a newcomer to recognise anyone present. In the end, we ourselves could not even recognise each other.

      Which was probably just as well, if both Marx and Ruge were in attendance: otherwise the ‘violent uproar’ might have degenerated into fisticuffs.

      The two enemies continued their feud in the public prints instead. In July 1844, signing himself merely ‘A Prussian’, Ruge wrote a long article for Vorwärts! about the Prussian King’s brutal suppression of the Silesian weavers, who had smashed the machines which were threatening their livelihoods. He regarded the weavers’ revolt as an inconsequential nothing, since Germany lacked the ‘political consciousness’ necessary to transform an isolated act of disobedience into a full-dress revolution.

      Marx’s reply, published ten days later, argued that the fertiliser of revolutions was not ‘political consciousness’ but class consciousness, which the Silesians had in abundance. Ruge (or ‘the alleged Prussian’, as Marx called him) thought that a social revolution without a political soul was impossible; Marx dismissed this ‘nonsensical concoction’, maintaining that all revolutions are both social and political in so far as they dissolve the old society and overthrow the old power. Even if the revolution occurred in just one factory district, as with the Silesian weavers, it still threatened the whole state because ‘it represents man’s protest against a dehumanised life’. This was too optimistic by half. The only lasting influence of the revolt was that it inspired one of Heine’s most celebrated verses, ‘The Song of the Silesian Weavers’, which was published in the same issue of Vorwärts!.

      ‘The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its economist, and the French proletariat its politician,’ Marx wrote in his riposte to Ruge, prefiguring a later assessment by Engels that Marxism itself was a hybrid of these three bloodlines. The twenty-six-year-old Marx was already well versed in German philosophy and French socialism; now he set about educating himself in the dismal science. During the summer of 1844 he read his way systematically through the main corpus of British political economy – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill – and scribbled a running commentary as he went along. These notes, which run to about 50,000 words, were not discovered until the 1930s, when the Soviet scholar David Ryazanov published them under the title Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. They are now more commonly known as the Paris manuscripts.

      Marx’s work has often been dismissed as ‘crude dogma’, usually by people who give no evidence of having read him. It would be a useful exercise to force these extempore critics – who include the present British prime minister, Tony Blair – to study the Paris manuscripts, which reveal the workings of a ceaselessly inquisitive, subtle and undogmatic mind.

      The first manuscript begins with a simple declaration: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him.’ From this premiss all else follows. The worker has become just another commodity in search of a buyer; and it isn’t a seller’s market. Whatever happens, the worker loses out. If the wealth of society is decreasing, the worker suffers most. But what of a society which is prospering? ‘This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition takes place among the capitalists. The demand for workers outstrips supply. But …’

      But indeed. Capital is nothing more than the accumulated fruits of labour, and so a country’s capitals and revenues grow only ‘when more and more of the worker’s products are being taken from him, when his own labour increasingly confronts him as alien property and the means of his existence and of his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist’ – rather as an intelligent chicken (if such an unlikely creature existed) would be most conscious of its impotence when at its most fertile, laying dozens of eggs only to see them snatched away while still warm.

      Furthermore, in a prosperous society there will be a growing concentration of capital and more intense competition. ‘The big capitalists ruin the small ones and a section of the former capitalists sinks into the class of the workers which, because of this increase in numbers, suffers a further depression of wages and becomes ever more dependent on the handful of big capitalists. Because the number of capitalists has fallen, competition for workers hardly exists any longer, and because the number of workers has increased, the competition among them has become all the more considerable, unnatural and violent.’

      So, Marx concludes, even in the most propitious economic conditions, the only consequence for the worker is ‘overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital’. The division of labour makes him more dependent still, introducing competition from machines as well as men. ‘Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor.’ Finally, the accumulation of capital enables industry to turn out an ever greater quantity of products. This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of workers out of a job or by reducing their wages to a pittance. ‘Such,’ Marx concluded with bleak irony, ‘are the consequences of a condition of society which is most favourable to the worker, i.e. a condition of growing wealth. But in the