Karl Marx
Karl Marx(1818–1883)
Karl Marx, presented his ideology Marxism as a scientific analysis of societal structures and historical progression. However, a comprehensive understanding of Marx the ideologue necessitates an examination of Marx the man, as the two are inextricably linked. His personal life, riddled with contradictions and marked by specific psychological traits, deeply informed the theoretical framework he advanced.
Early Life and Influences
Born on 5 May 1818, in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx emerged from a highly religious background. His maternal grandfather had been the Rabbi of Nijmegen, described as a merchant, money-changer and collector of lottery funds.
Paternal ancestors, including his grandfather, also served as rabbis in Trier and Saarlouis. Though ethnically Jewish, Marx’s father, Hirschel Marx, converted to Lutheran Christianity, becoming Heinrich Marx, prior to Karl’s birth. This conversion was primarily motivated by the Prussian state's ban on Jews holding government positions, including legal careers. Karl Marx himself was baptised into the Lutheran Church. Despite some knowledge of Jewish faith, he did not practise Judaism and held anti-Jewish sentiments.
The momentous events of the French Revolution significantly shaped the young Karl’s worldview and his relationship with his parents. His father, a lawyer, benefited directly from the Revolution's educational initiatives and Napoleon's policies, accommodating himself to restrictive Prussian laws post-1815.
This period contributed to Karl Marx's generally negative attitude towards his family’s Jewish past, leading to a profound self-shame and self-hatred that permeated his life and philosophy. This internal rebellion against his origins and parents manifested as a broader rebellion against society itself.
Historically, Jews were prohibited from owning land in Christian Europe. Consequently, they were compelled to reside in towns and cities (boroughs), giving rise to the term "Bourgeoisie" (French for "Townsfolk").
Jews often resorted to "usury"—the lending of money at interest—a practice forbidden by the Christian ethics. This historical context fostered in Marx the belief that JEWS were synonymous with the bourgeoisie and that capitalism originated from them.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, many Jews, including Marx's father, abandoned their faith or became ashamed of their Jewish and "Capitalist" heritage. Karl Marx exemplified this trend, which explains his ideology’s dual nature as anti-Semitic and anti-Capitalist.
Heinrich Marx's interest in philosophy, particularly Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, significantly influenced his son. Kant's philosophy, which attempted to reconcile faith with science and underscored the altruistic principle that "the human being must always first and foremost work for others," deeply affected Marx.
Education, Habits, and Relationships
Marx received private education before attending high school, where liberal teachers exposed him to philosophies of Atheism and Materialism. At 17, in 1835, he entered the University of Bonn to study law, as his father wished. However, he soon immersed himself in heavy drinking and constant smoking, despite a pre-existing weak chest.
His parents repeatedly urged him to adopt healthier habits, but to no avail. Marx’s behaviour led to detention for disturbing the peace, carrying prohibited weapons, and even a 24-hour imprisonment after a binge. He also engaged in a pistol duel that resulted in a superficial wound above his left eye.
His father expressed considerable concern over his son's "disconnected and inconclusive" accounts and inability to manage money, noting that Karl spent nearly 700 talers in one year, far exceeding even the wealthiest individuals. This financial ineptitude, which would plague Marx throughout his life, suggests that the man who extensively critiqued money understood little about it and seldom possessed any.
Believing Bonn’s student culture was to blame, Heinrich Marx compelled his son to transfer to the University of Berlin. During this period, Berlin was experiencing significant population growth, drawing immigrants with the promise of higher wages.
Despite Socialists' claims of widespread squalor, economic conditions prior to the Industrial Revolution were highly unsatisfactory, with traditional systems unable to accommodate a rapidly increasing population.
Factories emerged as a solution, providing sustenance for masses of paupers, emptying workhouses and prisons, and converting starving beggars into self-supporting individuals. Factory owners offered wages that, though low, exceeded any other available opportunities for these destitute people. The industrialisation Marx critiqued was, in fact, alleviating pre-existing economic evils rather than creating them.
It was in Berlin that Karl Marx met Jenny von Westphalen, his future wife. Jenny hailed from the aristocracy, her father being a baron. She abandoned her respectable fiancé, a second lieutenant, to become engaged to Marx in 1836, hiding the engagement from her parents for a year. While some attribute her attraction to his intellect, her own descriptions point to a fascination with his "dark eyes," "domineering personality," and his nature as a "terrible tyrant" and "volatile nonconformist". She was attracted to his "bad boy" persona—a common attraction to rebels and "thugs".
Marx immersed himself in the works of Hegel, whose philosophy profoundly influenced him, leading him to join the Young Hegelians. Marx styled himself as a "Man of Destiny," one of Hegel’s "heroes". Heinrich Marx, however, dismissed Hegel’s philosophy as "devoid of ideas," urging Karl to focus on his law degree and secure employment.
Heinrich died from tuberculosis on 10 May 1838; Karl did not attend the funeral, claiming the journey was too long and he had "more important things to do". His father’s death cut off his regular allowance, forcing him to beg from his widowed mother. Instead of seeking employment, Marx dedicated himself to reading, writing, and smoking.
In this mechanical, Materialist worldview, humans were also seen as machines, propelled by a spirit—God. Marx’s dissertation was steeped in this mysticism, asserting that atoms contained spirits, which manifested as human consciousness.
Thus, Marx’s materialism was inherently a form of mysticism. The logical conclusion of this materialism is that a god must have created these spirits, leading to the idea that the "machine-world" is a fake reality, a "figment of god’s imagination" (Idealism). **Materialism and idealism, therefore, represent two sides of the same coin, both concluding that reality was created by a divine mind.
Epicurus, the other philosopher Marx studied, believed everything was mechanical and predetermined, leaving humans with no Free Will. His philosophy advocated withdrawing from the world to avoid pain, seeking happiness in the absence of strong emotions and cessation of action. This pursuit of pleasure through avoidance of effort, encapsulated by "Nothing ventured, nothing lost," led Epicurus to retire to a sheltered garden. Marx’s own avoidance of work and inimical attitude towards life mirrored Epicurus, a behaviour stemming from his philosophical convictions and parental issues.
Marx’s philosophy, particularly his "Dialectical Materialism," was a reinterpretation of Hegel's "Dialectical Idealism". Hegel's dialectic involved the "transcendence" of opposites (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis) to reach a higher synthesis, ultimately leading to God.
Marx replaced Hegel's idealism with materialism, yet, given that materialism and idealism are two sides of the same coin, his philosophy similarly aimed at "transcendence of a fake material reality" to reach god.
This explains Marx's apparent contradiction: despite calling himself a materialist, he despised money, physical possessions, and the free market, viewing them as "materialistic" and advocating a "spiritual" existence.
A critical aspect of Marx’s method was his use of dialectical language, employing words with multiple meanings to reconcile incompatible ideas and manipulate understanding.
For example, "revolution" could mean gradual transformation or violent uprising. The term "bourgeoisie" was used by Marxists to refer to Jews, while audiences understood it as the middle class. "Class" often signified "race," and "socialism" paradoxically encompassed both "state control" and "non-state control," "total control of the means of production" (totalitarianism) and "democracy".
Such linguistic obfuscation was a tactic to conceal their true intentions and draw people into their ideology. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s collaborator, privately expressed contempt for the proletariat, calling them "stupid workers" and "donkeys," further demonstrating the deceptive nature of their rhetoric.
Journalism, Poverty, and Major Works
After obtaining his degree, Marx remained unemployed, leading to further estrangement from his mother, who refused him his inheritance. He spent a summer with Bruno Bauer engaged in idleness, smoking, drinking, and even ridiculing religious practices. His first "job" was at the Rheinische Zeitung newspaper, funded by bourgeois capitalists, where he became editor and exercised tyrannical control. His articles were lengthy and primarily concerned with the principle of press freedom, rather than investigative reporting. The newspaper was eventually censored by the Prussian government in 1843, leaving Marx unemployed again at 24.
Despite his engagement to Jenny, Marx became involved with Bettina von Arnim, a poet old enough to be his mother. Jenny, however, remained with him. Jenny’s family strongly opposed the marriage due to Marx's jobless, penniless status and national notoriety. They married on 19 June 1843, after Jenny fled her family. A large cash gift from Jenny’s mother, intended to support them, was squandered within a week.
Moving to Paris, Marx and Jenny embarked on a spending spree, despite his unemployment. His wife's birthday gift of a 100-franc riding switch, despite Marx's inability to ride or own a horse, exemplified his extravagance and desire for material possessions. The birth of their first daughter, Jenny, in 1844, further strained their finances. Helene Demuth, a maidservant sent by Jenny’s mother, served the family without pay, effectively as an indentured servant, highlighting Marx's hypocrisy given his later critiques of exploitation.
In 1844, Marx published his "Manuscripts of 1844," where he introduced the concept of workers becoming "estranged from their work". He claimed that wages were determined by a struggle in which workers always lost, condemning them to overwork, early death, and enslavement to capital. However, he authored these claims in Paris, a city whose economic reality, characterised by skilled trades in small workshops rather than factory work, directly contradicted his narrative.
His essay "On the Jewish Question" asserting that the "chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general". He concluded that "the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism".
Following his expulsion from France in 1845 due to Prussian complaints about his political writings, Marx moved to Belgium. There, with Engels, he developed "historical materialism" in works like "German Ideology". These writings also hinted at a Communist society free from the division of labour, where individuals would not be tied to specific jobs but could "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner".
In 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned by the Communist League to write the Communist Manifesto. Originally conceived as the "Communist Confession of Faith," and with an initial slogan of "All men are brothers," the text underscores its religious and philosophical, rather than purely economic, nature. Marx procrastinated, only completing it under ultimatum. The Manifesto also revealed Marx's explicit pro-slavery stance, asserting that "direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc."
Despite advocating for the abolition of inheritance in the Manifesto, Marx accepted a £6,000 inheritance from his mother in 1848, using it to finance revolutionary activities, including arming workers. This breach of promise led to his expulsion from Belgium and arrest.
He subsequently moved to Paris, then Cologne, where he founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx exercised "a simple dictatorship" over this newspaper, yet his antagonism to work meant he struggled even as a journalistic "lord," taking an entire day to write an article others would finish in hours. The paper, aimed at an educated bourgeoisie, indicated that socialism was truly for the elite, not the workers. The newspaper closed amidst crackdowns and lawsuits, forcing Marx to sell his personal printing presses and furniture to cover debts before fleeing to England in 1849.
Life in London and the Das Kapital Era
Arriving in London heavily pregnant and ill, Jenny Marx and their three children faced extreme destitution. They lived in squalid conditions, sharing a two-room apartment with tattered furniture, dust, and disarray. A spy described Marx’s room as filled with smoke, fumes, and dirt, where sitting down risked soiling trousers. His poor hygiene, which reportedly included rarely washing or changing linen, contributed to persistent health issues.
Despite constant poverty, Marx consistently refused to seek stable employment. He launched another newspaper, which quickly failed due to his attacks on its target audience—German refugees. Jenny Marx often endured illness, described as a "nervous wreck" and prone to "nervous excitement," likely exacerbated by the chronic stress of their financial situation and reliance on alcohol.
The family frequently faced eviction by landlords and demands from creditors—bakers, governesses, grocers, butchers—placing Jenny in a state of terror. Marx was arrested once for attempting to pawn Jenny’s family silver, suspected of theft due to his dishevelled appearance. Although he received substantial financial support, often exceeding a comfortable income for a lower-middle-class family, the money mysteriously vanished.
During this period, Marx’s maid, Helene Demuth, became pregnant at the same time as Jenny. Rumours circulated that the child, Freddy, was Marx’s, though Engels later claimed paternity to shield Marx. However, evidence—including Freddy’s resemblance to Marx, Marx’s reluctance to inform Engels, and his daughter’s later attempts to remove damning evidence—suggests Marx was the father.
Marx’s children suffered greatly from their poverty. Two children, Heinrich and Franziska, died in infancy, and his only surviving son, Edgar, died at age eight from tuberculosis, all likely exacerbated by their squalid living conditions. Despite these tragedies, Marx continued to avoid work, even becoming ill when faced with journalistic deadlines.
Engels served as Marx’s steadfast financial benefactor, providing a regular salary and bailing him out of debt, sometimes even stealing from his own family's company to do so. Engels also often ghostwrote many of Marx’s articles for the New York Daily Tribune and other publications.
The creation of Das Kapital became a central focus of Marx’s life, though it was plagued by procrastination and delays. Marx repeatedly promised its completion, yet it took him 15 years to publish the first volume. He often attributed delays to illness, but this was a lie; his work was interrupted by laziness and feuds. The book itself was long, inaccessible, and confusing, founded on the now obsolete Labour Theory of Value. Its title, "Das Kapital," was Marx's shorthand for "The Jew," underscoring its underlying anti-Jewish premise.
In 1861, Marx visited Ferdinand Lassalle in Berlin, attending the opera in a private box next to King Wilhelm I of Prussia. This association with the establishment highlighted the irony of Marx, a virulent critic of high society, having descended from it and being on the cusp of rejoining it had he chosen to work. During this trip, Marx received £160 and debt cancellation from his uncle Lion Philips and his mother, yet he returned to London broke and dependent on Engels.
In a rare moment of introspection, in 1862, Marx conceded the value of practical knowledge, for the first time applying for a clerical job on the railways at age 45. He was rejected due to his illegible handwriting, and this single attempt was his last; he never sought employment again. Instead, he engaged in pub crawls, arguments with workers, and vandalism.
Decline and Death
Marx’s health deteriorated, marked by boils and liver issues, yet he continued to smoke, drink heavily, and take opium. His mother died in 1863, and a small inheritance allowed Marx to move into a mansion in 1864, an astronomical expense he could ill afford. However, a significant inheritance of £820 from his devotee Wilhelm Wolff, to whom he dedicated Das Kapital, sustained him. Despite this, Marx quickly exhausted the funds, admitting "it was unbelievable how the money disappeared".
In 1867, at age 48, Marx finished Das Kapital Volume 1. He wrote the final pages standing due to painful boils. The book’s first royalty cheque arrived 16 years later, after both Karl and Jenny had died. The widespread difficulty in reading Das Kapital meant that many purchasers kept it merely as symbolic proof of Socialism’s scientific inevitability, rather than truly engaging with its content.
Marx remained largely obscure until the Franco Prussian War and the Paris Commune, when newspapers seized upon his writings, propelling him to infamy. Engels, by then, had sold his partnership in his family firm, moved to London, and provided Marx a pension of £350 a year.
Marx's family life was fraught with dysfunction. His daughters, subjected to a tyrannical upbringing, were denied proper education and careers, and their relationships were stifled. Four of his six children died before him, and the two surviving daughters later committed suicide. Only his son, Freddy, who did not live with him, lived a full life. Marx continually appealed for handouts from friends and relatives throughout his life, including his adult children.
Marx's health declined significantly from 1877 onwards. His wife, Jenny, died of liver cancer in December 1881, followed by his daughter Jenny in January 1883. Racked by laryngitis, bronchitis, insomnia, and night sweats, Karl Marx died in his armchair on 14 March 1883, from a ruptured lung ulcer, attributed to his lifelong chest problems and constant smoking. His estate amounted to a mere £250. Engels, who had loyally supported Marx until his death, discovered how little progress Marx had made on subsequent volumes of Das Kapital and undertook the task of completing and publishing them himself.
Legacy and Assessment
The reality of Karl Marx's personal life often remains obscured or ignored by adherents to his ideology, who have, post-mortem, inflated his reputation to mythical status, presenting him as a scientific genius. This intentional obfuscation hides the areas where his writings and activities failed to meet these fabricated ideals.
However, the individual cannot be separated from his work. Karl Marx was, by all accounts, slothful, greedy, and bourgeoise, who married an aristocrat and financially ruined his family through his indolence and financial irresponsibility. His children suffered the consequences of his behaviour, and his friends bore the burden of his colossal debts.
Marx's philosophy, likened to that of a modern Epicurus, justified his laziness and parasitic existence. It represents a disease that distorts reality, discourages productivity, damages economies, and shames those who value hard work and thrift, thereby enabling the perpetuation of support for useless beggars like himself.
His ideology was designed to enrich the elite, of which he considered himself a part, despite his outward claims to support the poor. This constitutes an insidious lie, a dialectic intended to trick followers. Marx's hatred of money and usury stemmed from his own inability to earn an income and his perpetual debt. Ultimately, his anti-Capitalist stance was a means to conceal his profound personal failure.