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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.2: The Adventures of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

We launched this series last week by launching the International Working Men’s Association in 1864. Mostly I did this because the International tried to bring all left wing political groups together under a single tent. And since I’m trying to avoid making the Russian Revolution the narrow story of the Bolsheviks, it seemed like a good way to establish that the Bolsheviks are going to emerge as one faction that represented one variant of Russian Marxism. But there were a lot of other factions and variants out there. Unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, reformers, revolutionaries.

But all that said the Bolsheviks are ultimately the victorious faction from the victorious variant of Marxism so it’s going to be important to understand where they came from. So as the title of this episode suggests, today will be an intertwined biographical sketch of the lives of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that will take us through to the foundation of the International. And then next week we will go through the critical concepts to understand the philosophy and revolutionary program that became known as Marxism. Then we’ll go on to do the same for Bakunin and the anarchists so that we understand what core revolutionary principles were out there that opposed what some people saw as the authoritarian tendencies implicit in that Marxism.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the city of Trier, a middle-sized city in the Rhineland. Little Karl was born just three years after the final fall of Napoleon. Now Trier had been under French administration going back to the 1790s, but at the very recent Congress of Vienna, it was handed to the Prussian monarchy, whose backward-looking feudal conservatism clashed with the more progressive and forward-looking Rhinelanders. Both of Karl’s parents had ethnic Jewish lineage, but to maintain his budding legal practice, Marx’s father converted to Protestantism when the Prussians took over and instituted more carefully draconian restrictions on what Jews could and could not do. Not that this conversion was anything but nominal; Marx’s father was into Kant and Voltaire and the Enlightenment. and though his children were baptized Lutheran, they were hardly a religious bunch.

Karl then got a good enough secondary education where he was sent to the university of Bonne in 1835 to study law. But Karl’s first year at university was mostly filled with drinking beer and reckless brawling, and so his dad shipped him off to the University of Berlin, which was located in the capital of the kingdom. Before Karl departed, he proposed marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a minor noble civil servant, and though the couple were only together in person once over the next five years, and that one time they got together almost wrecked their relationship, their engagement held, and when they finally got married, they remained together through the occasionally thick and very often thin rest of their lives.

Arriving in Berlin in 1836, Karl did something even worse than drinking and brawling: he became enamored with philosophy. In Germany, in the mid 1830s, getting into philosophy meant getting into the just recently deceased Hegel, whose philosophy cast an all encompassing shadow over German intellectual life, especially here in the first half of the 19th century. We’ll talk a little bit more next week about what concepts Marx pulled out of Hegel, but for now, the crowd Marx fell in with was the more radical and iconic classic group called the young Hegelians.

The young Hegelians were working from themes that came from the early days of the French Revolution, and they took Hegel seriously when he said that the purpose and course of history was all about the abolition of anything that restricts freedom and the use of reason. The young Hegelians were obviously critical of the repressive Prussian government, but unable to express their opposition openly, they turned to theology and philosophy. They publish challenges to the reliability, historicity, and believability of Christianity and the Bible. They believe that by doing this, they could undermine one of the core pillars of the Prussian monarchies alleged legitimacy.

Marx fell in with the young Hegelians at the worst possible moment, because while their controversial philosophy was tolerated by King Friedrich Wilheim the Third of Prussia, when he died in 1840 and his son Friedrich Wilheim the Fourth ascended to power, that tolerance evaporated.

Now, you know Friedrich Wilheim the Fourth from our episodes on 1848, because he will be the King of Prussia during the revolutions of 1848; he’s the one who had to crawl on his belly away from Berlin. Conservative, romantic, and evangelical, this Friedrich Wilheim had no tolerance for seditious blasphemy, and so the young Hegelians were marked and blacklisted.

In spite of this, Marx pressed on with a doctoral thesis that used Hegelian methods to analyze ancient metaphysics, even though his conclusions were now outside the boundaries of acceptable thinking. Knowing he couldn’t submit his thesis to the university of Berlin, Marx instead sent it to the more permissive university of Jena which made him a doctor of philosophy in 1841. But as I just said, this was a bad time to be a young Hegelian and Marx’s dream of a university position was squelched. To make matters worse, Marx’s father had died in 1838, beginning endless rounds of bickering with his mummy over money from the inheritance.

To make a living, Marx like many of his ideological comrade turned from academia to journalism. So this newly minted doctor of philosophy moved to Cologne, where he submitted articles to a progressive paper called The Rhineland News, showing off a rhetorical style that was acerbic, witty, intelligent, sarcastic, and occasionally savage. This was also the period that, by his own account, he started being handed socialist and communist ideas, moving him away from abstract philosophy towards the realities of social and economic life. When the editorial brain trust of The Rhineland News fell apart, Marx became its defacto editor in chief in the middle of 1842. The paper was successful and that looked like that; Karl Marx was going to be a newspaper editor in Cologne. But the paranoid hand of conservative censorship dug up Marx’s new roots before they even had a chance to settle. The Rhineland News was suppressed and banned in 1843. Whatever plans Marx may have had for a normal life with a steady income were turned upside down by his politics.

During his stint with The Rheinland News, Marx came into contact with a young semi-anonymous contributor named Friedrich Engels. Engels was two and a half years younger than Marx, born in 1820 in Barmen, a city about 35 miles east of Cologne. The Engels family were first devout evangelical Protestants, and second, industrial pioneers in the Rhineland. They owned textile factories in the region, and had further expanded up to Manchester, England, which was rapidly transforming into a hive of industrial factories. The scion of this rich capitalist and very religious family rebelled on nearly every front. In 1842, Engels did a requisite year in the Prussian army, and stationed in Berlin, he attended lectures and came into social and intellectual contact with both the young Hegelians and various proto-socialists. Engels took to thinking and writing, and he submitted pieces to the Rheinland News — anonymously, as I said, since he was the son of filthy rich capitalists. Scandalized by their son’s new friends and his new ideas, his parents sent him to Manchester, to apprentice in a family owned factory there. And in the annals of parents trying to halt the radicalization of their children only to see it backfire, sending Friedrich Engels to Manchester may be the single greatest backfire in world history.

Now, despite having lost his job, Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen married and moved to Paris in October of 1843. Under the semi liberal auspices of the July monarchy, Paris was a haven for émigré radicals from across Europe. Russians and Poles, Italians, Germans, Spaniards, creating a swirling milieu of nationalists and democrats, socialists, anarchists, tepid reformers, and single-minded revolutionaries. The Marxes settled down, and their first daughter, little Jenny was born in early 1844. Marx worked as a contributor and editor for a couple of different German language publications meant for audiences in the immigrant community, but also for audiences back in Germany.

None of this work though was steady, or particularly profitable. Engels, meanwhile, went off to Manchester where he embarked on a program of self-radicalization. He was absolutely appalled by what he found there: shortly after arriving, Engels met an Irish worker named Mary Burns. They fell in love and began a twenty year non-marriage marriage, where they never tied the knot because they both rejected the oppressive bourgeois institution that was marriage. Mary Burns was Engels’s early guide to Manchester, and he was deeply affected by what he saw. And basically he saw every single stereotypical thing you might cram into a period piece drama about England during the industrial revolution: crowded slums, ill fed, filthy workers, men, and women walking around with missing limbs, child labor, environmental degradation, grinding metal, choking black smoke, the works. Engels started writing articles and submitting them to various outlets, among them those Marx was working on in Paris. Pretty soon, Engels decided to collect and revise his notes and articles and ideas and turn them into a book that he called The Conditions of the Working Classes in England, which became his first contribution to mid 19th century socialism.

Now in semi-regular correspondence with Marx, Engels swung through Paris on his way back to Germany so they could meet. And on August the 28th, 1844, they got together at a café near the Palais Royale. It was not technically the first time they had met, but it was the first time that they realized what kindred spirits they were. The two young men, both still in their mid twenties, got along famously, and Engels wound up staying at Marx’s home for the next 10 days, the beginning of a lifelong collaboration and friendship. Marx by this point had begun thinking deeper and more seriously about the link between economics, society, and politics, and not just in the abstract. Marx was a man who dreamed of revolution, and he had hit upon this idea that the new industrial quote unquote working class might just be miserable enough to be the engine of the next revolution. And when Engels came along with these horribly evocative descriptions of working class, misery, they agreed with each other, that they were really onto something, that they had discovered the revolutionary proletariat.

Both Marx and Engels then got involved, at least peripherally, with a radical group of émigré German artisans who had formed themselves into something they called the League of the Just to promote socialist and anarchist philosophy and prepare for the very revolution Marx and Engels now believed was coming. The Marxes probably would have stayed in Paris indefinitely, or at least until the revolution came, but Prussian diplomats complained to the French government about radical German propaganda being produced in Paris, and in 1845, demanded that some of the more offensive elements be expelled from France, specifically citing this guy Karl Marx. To his horror and dismay, Marx discovered he had one week to leave the country, and the order was signed personally by François Guizot, earning lifelong enmity from Marx, who then had to pack up his wife, Jenny, who was pregnant again, and little Jenny and scoot over to Brussels to start over again. To keep himself free of the long arm of Prussian conservatism, about six months after arriving in Brussels, Marx renounced his citizenship.

Their arrival in Brussels happened to coincide with the beginning of the hungry forties. The potato blight and harvest failures were going to send recessive shock waves reverberating through every sector of the European economy. So the going was hard for the Marx family, and his son, Edgar was born in February, 1847 at a very difficult time, both for his family and for families across Europe. In Brussels, Marx and Engels also reconnected on a more permanent basis, and they actively collaborated on various book ideas. Some of which, like The Holy Family, were published at the time while others like The German Ideology sat around in piles of paper until Soviet researchers put them out in the 1920s and 1930s.

Most of these ideas, though, revolved around their various beefs with other German radicals and philosophers. Old friends and mentors became derided rivals as Marx and Engels moved decisively towards the idea that material economics was the basis of everything else. And if you disagreed, prepare to be skewered with a sarcastic and acidic pen. They broke with the young Hegelians, they attacked other socialist theorists as philistines and heretics and reactionary pawns who all either had things upside down, or if they had things right side up, they advocated different means to the same ends. Now, Marx and Engels were not unique in this regard, and in return, they were attacked, derided, and mocked just as hard and with just as much venom. But outside of these beefs, they continued to keep an eye out for the revolution. And in one of Marx’s works from this period that only saw the light of day well after he was dead, he wrote that quote, philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.

But when it came to changing the world, Marx was never a fan of Blanqui-style revolutionary vanguardism, and he wanted the working class movements to be out in the open, not secret, that their great power was in their great numbers. Let the ruling classes tremble. Exerting more intellectual force inside the League of the Just, Marx succeeded in getting them to make a strategic shift: in June of 1847, the League of the Just rebranded itself as the Communist League, and then came out into the open. To attract members and announce their program, they commissioned Marx and Engels to draft a manifesto. Marx got to work, using as his foundation a pamphlet Engels had written called Principles of Communism, which Marx then redrafted and reworked into what has gone down in history as the Communist Manifesto.

Now, as I said in episode 8.1, the Communist Manifesto was more prophetic than it was a work rooted in the actual economic and material conditions of Europe at that moment, prophetic in part because Engels just so happened to have been sent to Manchester, which was then on the leading edge of full blown industrial capitalism, which would not really sweep the globe until the later 19th century and early 20th century. But it did show that most of the basics of later fully developed Marxism were already in place by 1848: historical materialism, class conflict, the exploitation of labor by the bourgeoisie and the historical role of the proletariat as the next revolutionary class, whose aim would be the abolition of bourgeois property relations. The Communist Manifesto also advocated such civilization-shattering policies as a progressive income tax, a national bank, free universal secular education, and the suburbs. This revolutionary statement of principles was published in London in February, 1848. By complete coincidence, the February Revolution hit Paris at almost that same moment. For all their anticipation and planning and organizing, this revolution took Marx and Engels and frankly everybody else by surprise, as revolutions nearly always do.

The authorities in Brussels were terrified by the revolution in France and on March the Third, 1848, they expelled everyone who might potentially destabilize Belgium. Marx and Engels and other Communist League guys were on the list, but that was okay, because their lives as emigres and exiles was over. It was time to go home and embark on the revolution.

Now, at this point, everything is moving in a straight line: Marx and Engels had been young stubbornly nonconformists students who had been radicalized, politically dreamed about and worked towards a revolution against the conservative powers of Europe, and now that revolution was at hand. With the revolution afoot, Marx and his family went back to Cologne. Other members of the Communist League went to other German cities to start a pan German revolutionary network to make sure this went right.

And by went right. Marx specifically meant carrying out his theory of a double revolution in Prussia. First, they must recreate the course of the French Revolution, have all classes combined behind the liberal bourgeoisie to topple the Prussian monarchy. Once that was accomplished, the working class proletariat could break off and immediately stage a second revolution against the oh so recently triumphant liberal bourgeoisie. Thus, they would advance rapidly towards the dream of communism.

Marx’s part in all this was to wield the pen, and he started a new paper dubbed The New Rhineland News to publish his ideas. The paper was successful locally, but events move very quickly and Marx’s activities in 1848 would ultimately be limited just to the city of Cologne. The Communist League struggled to make inroads with the actual workers they were supposed to be representing. They also had trouble forming alliances with other socialist leaders, who Marx and Engels had just spent the last few years so thoroughly mocking and deriding. To say nothing of the articles in The New Rhineland News that denounced rival working class organizations as reactionary, not because they were insufficiently radical, but because they were too radical. These leaders wanted to skip the bourgeois revolution that Marx thought was so essential. So they didn’t want to make alliances with the Democrats, they wanted to move straight onto the revolution of the worker. And these leaders in turn thought Marx was a cowardly stooge of the bourgeoisie for advancing the necessity of this bourgeoisie revolution in the first place.

Not that it mattered; by the fall and winter of 1848, everything was falling apart. The King of Prussia disbanded the Prussian Diet, and the Frankfurt Parliament did not seem long for this world. Only with the walls closing in, in April, 1849 did Marx belatedly conclude that the Democrats were too cautious and uncommitted, and that a strong unified push had to come from the workers, and the workers alone.

But in May of 1849, the hammer of reaction fell hard in Cologne. Flexing his muscle after being forced to so ignominiously crawl on his belly, King Friedrich Wilheim the Fourth put the Prussian army on the move. The Frankfurt Parliament broke and fled, disappearing into the footnotes of history. Marx, who had never regained his renounced citizenship, was expelled from Cologne as an alien on May the 19th, which coincided with the last issue of the now banned and suppressed New Rhineland News. In these chaotic final days, Engels joined a volunteer rifle company led by future union army major general August Willich to fight the last stand of the revolution.

Marx was no soldier, and he made for Paris, and he would occasionally be dogged for the rest of his life by accusations of cowardice by those who did stay in Germany and fight. But the cause was well and truly hopeless by this point, and the company Engels had joined was quickly pushed across the border into Switzerland.

In Paris, Marx hoped to find radical democrats and socialists combining into a coalition that would seize control of the second Republic and turn France into the revolution’s war machine, just as the first republic had once done. But by now Prince President Bonaparte and the Party of Order had come to power. After probably witnessing the suppression of those Paris radicals in June of 1849, Marx was told he could stay in France, if he removed himself to the coast of Brittany and made no trouble. Instead he quit Paris and went to London, calling for Jenny and their three kids to join him. He arrived in England in August of 1849. Karl Marx was 32-years-old, the revolution was hopefully only set back, but not yet dead. Marx prepared for a life of temporary exile in London. He would live there for the rest of his life.

That life in London was tough on the Marxes as the city filled with other exiles fleeing the reactionary hammer. Working class artisans and more professional types like doctors and lawyers could find work. But Karl Marx was a radical journalist who didn’t speak English and who carried few other credentials or letters of recommendation. The Marxes spent the next few years hovering around destitution they were broke and constantly harassed by creditors.

During these miserable years, the German émigré community in London was itself a miserable mix of pessimistic disillusionment, or recklessly grandiose declarations that they must restart the revolution now. It was full of rivalries, in fighting, denunciations, blame tossing police spies, and agents provocateur. Marx’s mood completely soured, and he systematically got into fights with everyone, contributing to his isolation from practically everyone. Jenny gave birth to another son in September of 1849, but the baby died just a month later. Just about the only friend Marx had left in the world was Engels, who arrived in England in November, 1849. Himself destitute and without prospects Engels, decided to tactically renounce his revolutionary past so that his parents would let him work in the family business again, so that he could make a living — not just for himself, but he also sent cash when he could to Marx.

And he wasn’t very happy about having to take this job, but it was all for a good cause. Marx and Engels’s last hope for getting the revolution going again in Germany ended in 1851, when their last remaining allies in Cologne, people who they were actually allied, with were arrested in a police sweep. Then at the end of the year came the last cruel blow a last spark of hope that Paris might yet save the revolution in Europe was smothered by the coup of Prince-President Bonaparte in December, 1851. The revolution was over.

Friendless broke, angry and terminally depressed, Marx responded by writing The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It’s easily Marx’s greatest literary work, and I really do highly recommend it, especially since if you’ve listened to the episodes on 1848 and the Paris Commune, and then these episodes right now, you’ll have some idea of who and what he is talking about. Making use of a line from Engels that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, Marx deconstructed the course of the failed revolution in France. But when you read the 18th Brumaire, keep in mind that when Marx is criticizing all the dummies who thought that they were going to play act a revival of the French revolution, he’s kind of talking about himself. And his scathing criticism of those who thought cross class alliances were possible or would end in anything but the betrayal of the working class, he’s also talking about himself, repudiating and walking away from those positions. It all makes for great reading, it’s a great review of 1848 and its aftermath, it’s really, well-written, it’s fun, and rightly one of the great masterpieces of 19th century political commentary. It’s also an epistle from a failed revolutionary, wallowing in veiled self-criticism as he descends into broke and friendless obscurity, having alienated himself from everyone.

Renouncing revolutionary activism, we now get to the familiar version of an older and more worn down Karl Marx, going daily to the British Museum Library to pour over mountains of government records and reports, newspapers, history, books, and philosophy as he made mountains of notes for any eternally forthcoming magnum opus on political economy. To make a living, he got hooked into a job as European correspondent for Horace Greeley’s progressive and abolitionists paper The New York Daily Tribune. Writing for The New York Daily Tribune gave Marx the steady income he needed, and Engels pitched in again to ghost write some of these articles — for example, accounts of the Crimean War, which gave Engels an outlet for his pen, and got his friend a few more paychecks.

But though Marx’s life was stabilizing, it was still depressing and rocked by tragedy. Their eight year old son Edgar unexpectedly succumb to a fatal ailment in 1855, and then another baby died in 1857 without even being named. Marx’s health was in a state of constant decline. He drank too much and smoked too many cheap cigars, and the possibility that none of this really mattered, none of this was ever going to matter seemed very real indeed. But he kept scribbling his notes in the British library. Dedicated full-time to research and writing, Marx finally produced A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, which developed in further detail, his theories about capitalism, money, politics, and history. It was meant to advance and correct the traditions of classical economics that have begun with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was exciting and bold stuff, and sold quite well among interested German readers, and it gave Marx both the moral and financial boost he needed to finally fulfill his life’s work, which would eventually become known simply as Das Kapital or in English, Capital.

In the early 1860s, things were looking up. Engels’s father finally died, and so his communist son inherited the family’s capitalist fortune. Engels put Marx on an annual allowance that put his friend, who Engels was convinced was one of history’s great geniuses, into a state of permanent financial security. In 1864, Marx was 46 years old, 15 years removed from any kind of political activity, and was nearing the completion of his first volume of Capital when a French anarchist acquaintance came round, looking for Germans to attend a meeting, in a week’s time, at St. Martins Hall to join the disparate and separate forces who stood opposed to the political and more importantly, economic status quo.

Marx suggested a friend of his who was actually a worker, but he went along to the meeting himself. His intellectual reputation had been boosted by a contribution to the critique of political economy, but among émigré radicals, he was still mostly known as an old, late 1848er who had pissed everyone off and then retreated to the library to be an intellectual grump who never hung out with anyone, never really learned English, and wasn’t on speaking terms with most of the other Germans.

So that is how Karl Marx came to join the International Working Men’s Association. marking his return to active left-wing politics, and giving him a vehicle for his more mature and developed theories. And next week, we will talk about those more mature and developed theories, because they are going to be so important to nearly all revolutions going forward. Historical materialism, class conflict, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie modes of production, and most especially how this would fit with the never-ending question of how to turn the world upside down.

Or in the estimation of Marx, right side up.