记忆中的马克思不仅仅是革命家、哲学家、科学家，更是一个道德上的完人。他的爱情故事曾经作为经典被世人广为传颂。然而最近看到的一则前东德的解密资料显示，实际情况却远非如此。1843年身为贵族的千金小姐燕妮，毅然嫁给了25岁的马克思，还带来了陪嫁的女仆琳衡。在我们今天来看，这不仅仅是因为马克思的才华的确出众，更是因为燕妮对爱情的坚贞。但是，一向对“剥削”假装深恶痛绝的马克思，不但心安理得的花着当资本家的恩格斯“剥削”来的钱，无偿占有着女仆琳衡的劳动，并强占琳衡的身体在1850年产下一个私生子。当时，燕妮因为此事和马克思吵得不可开交，于是马克思把眼光投向了老朋友兼单身汉恩格斯。为了自己的声誉，要恩格斯替罪，私生子用恩格斯的名字命名，由恩格斯寄养在工人之家。吃了哑巴亏的恩格斯临死之前得了喉癌，不能说话，在一个纸盘上写下了：“亨利．弗来迪是马克思的儿子，图西把她的父亲理想化了。”弗来迪就是马克思的私生子，而图西是马克思的女儿。这段往事，现在已经在东德的博物馆里展出了。

Karl Marx:

　　'Howling Gigantic Curses'

　　f^T^Y^KYCL MARX has had more impact on actual events, as well

　　f) s as on the minds of men and women, than any other intellec-

　　ts^ L/ tual in modern times. The reason for this is not primarily

　　the attraction of his concepts and methodology, though both have a

　　strong appeal to unrigorous minds, but the fact that his philosophy has

　　been institutionalized in two of the world's largest countries, Russia

　　 their many satellites. In this sense he resembles St Augus-

　　and China, and

　　 whose writings were most widely read among church leaders from

　　tine,

　　the fifth to the thirteenth century and therefore played a predominant

　　 Marx

　　role in the shaping of medieval Christendom. But the influence of

　　has been even more direct, since the kind of personal dictatorship he

　　 carried into effect,

　　envisaged for himself (as we shall see) was actually

　　with incalculable consequences for mankind, by his three most important

　　 Tse-tung, all of whom, in this respect,

　　followers, Lenin, Stalin and Mao

　　 Marxists.

　　were faithful

　　Marx was a child of his time, the mid-nineteenth century, and Marxism

　　was a characteristic nineteenth-century philosophy in that it claimed

　　 'Scientific' was Marx's strongest expression of approval,

　　to be scientific.

　　 used to distinguish himself from his many enemies.

　　which he habitually

　　 'scientific' ; they were not. He felt he had found

　　He and his work were

　　a scientific explanation of human behaviour in history akin to Darwin's

　　 notion that Marxism is a science, in a way

　　theory of evolution. The

　　 been or could be, is implanted in

　　that no other philosophy ever has

　　 founded, so that it colours

　　the public doctrine of the states his followers

　　the teaching of all subjects in their schools and universities. This has

　　52

　　

　　Karl Marx: 'Howling Gigantic Curses'

　　spilled over into the non-Marxist world, for intellectuals, especially aca-

　　demics, are fascinated by power, and the identification of

　　 Marxism with

　　massive physical authority has

　　 tempted many teachers to admit Marxist

　　'science' to their own disciplines, especially such inexact or quasi-exact

　　subjects as economics, sociology, history and geography. No

　　 doubt if

　　Hitler, rather than Stalin, had won the struggle for Central and Eastern

　　Europe in 1941-45, and so imposed his will on a great part of the world,

　　Nazi doctrines which also claimed to be scientific, such as its race-theory,

　　would have been given an academic gloss and penetrated universities

　　throughout the world. But

　　 military victory ensured that Marxist, rather

　　than

　　 Nazi, science would prevail.

　　The first thing we must ask about Marx, therefore, is : in what sense,

　　if any, was he a scientist? That is, to what extent was he engaged in

　　the pursuit of objective knowledge by the careful search for and evalu-

　　ation of evidence? On the face of it, Marx's biography reveals him as

　　primarily a scholar. He was descended on both sides from lines of scho-

　　lars. His father Heinrich Marx, a lawyer, whose name originally was

　　Hirschel ha-Levi Marx, was the son of a rabbi and Talmudic scholar,

　　descended from the famous Rabbi Elieser ha-Levi of Mainz, whose son

　　Jehuda Minz was head of the Talmudic School of Padua. Marx's mother

　　Henrietta Pressborck was the daughter of a rabbi likewise

　　 descended

　　from famous scholars and sages. Marx was born in Trier (then Prussian

　　territory) on 5 May 1818, one of nine children but the only son to survive

　　into middle age; his sisters married respectively an engineer, a

　　 book-

　　seller, a lawyer. The family was quintessentially middle-class and rising

　　in the world. The father

　　 was a liberal and described as 'a real eighteenth-

　　1

　　century Frenchman, who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau inside out'.

　　Following a Prussian decree of 1816 which banned Jews from the higher

　　ranks of law and medicine, he became a Protestant and on 26 August

　　1824 he had his six children baptised. Marx was confirmed at fifteen

　　and for a time seems to have been a passionate Christian. He attended

　　a former Jesuit high school, then secularized, and Bonn University. From

　　there he went on to Berlin University, then the finest in the world. He

　　never received any Jewish education or attempted to acquire any, or

　　2

　　showed any interest in Jewish causes. But it must be said that he deve-

　　loped traits characteristic of a certain type of scholar, especially Talmudic

　　ones: a tendency to accumulate immense masses of half-assimilated

　　materials and to plan encyclopedic works which were never completed;

　　a withering contempt for all non-scholars; and extreme assertiveness

　　and irascibility in dealing with other scholars. Virtually all his work,

　　indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: it is essentially a commen-

　　tary on, a critique of the work of others in his field.

　　53

　　

　　Intellectuals

　　Marx became a good classical scholar and later specialized in philoso-

　　phy, in the prevailing Hegelian mode. He took a doctorate, but from

　　Jena University, which had lower standards than Berlin; he never seems

　　to have

　　 been quite good enough to get an academic post. In 1842 he

　　became a journalist with the

　　 Rheinische Zeitung and edited it for five

　　months until it was banned in

　　 1843; thereafter he wrote for the Deutsch-

　　Franzosische Jahrbücher and other journals in Paris until his expulsion in

　　1845, and then in Brussels. There he became involved in organizing

　　the Communist League and wrote its manifesto in

　　 1848. After the failure

　　of the revolution he was forced to move (1849) and settled in London,

　　this time for

　　 good. For a few years, in the 1860s and 1870s, he was

　　again involved in revolutionary politics, running the International Work-

　　ing Men's Association. But most of his time in London, until his death

　　on

　　 14 March 1883 - that is, thirty-four years - was spent in the British

　　Museum, finding material for a gigantic study of capital, and trying

　　to get it into publishable shape. He saw one volume through the press

　　(1867) but the second and third were compiled from his notes by his

　　colleague

　　 Friedrich Engels and published after his death.

　　Marx, then, led a scholar's life. He once complained : T am a machine

　　3

　　condemned to devour books.'

　　 But in a deeper sense he was not really

　　a scholar and not a scientist at all. He was not interested in finding

　　the truth but in proclaiming it. There were three strands in

　　 Marx: the

　　poet, the journalist and the moralist. Each was important. Together,

　　and in combination with his enormous will, they made him

　　 a formidable

　　writer and seer. But there was nothing scientific about him; indeed,

　　in all that

　　 matters he was anti-scientific.

　　The poet in Marx was much more important than is generally sup-

　　posed, even though his poetic imagery

　　 soon became absorbed in his

　　political vision. He began writing poetry as a boy, around two main

　　themes: his love for the

　　 girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, of

　　Prussian-Scotch descent, whom he married in 1841 ; and world destruc-

　　tion. He wrote

　　 a great deal of poetry, three manuscript volumes of which

　　were sent to

　　 Jenny, were inherited by their daughter Laura and vanished

　　after her death in 1911. But copies of forty poems have survived, includ-

　　ing a verse tragedy,

　　 Oulanen, which Marx hoped would be the Faust

　　of his time. Two poems were published in the Berlin Athenaeum, 23 Janu-

　　ary 1841. They were entitled 'Savage Songs', and savagery is a character-

　　istic note of his verse, together with intense pessimism about the human

　　condition, hatred, a fascination with corruption and violence, suicide

　　pacts and pacts with the devil. 'We are chained, shattered, empty, frigh-

　　tened/Eternally chained to this

　　 marble block of being,' wrote the young

　　Marx, '... We are the apes of a cold God.' He has himself, in the person

　　54

　　

　　Karl Marx: 'Howling Gigantic Curses'

　　of God, say: T shall howl gigantic curses at mankind,' and below the

　　surface of much of his poetry is the notion of a general world-crisis

　　4

　　building up.

　　 He was fond of quoting Mephistopheles' line from Goethe's

　　Faust, 'Everything that exists deserves to perish' ; he used it, for instance,

　　in his

　　 tract against Napoleon in, 'The Eighteenth Brumaire', and this

　　apocalyptic vision of

　　 an immense, impending catastrophe on the existing

　　system remained with him throughout his life

　　 : it is there in the poetry,

　　it is the background to the

　　 Communist Manifesto of 1848, and it is the

　　climax of

　　 Capital itself.

　　Marx, in short, is an eschatological writer from start to finish. It is

　　notable, for instance, that in the original draft of

　　 The German Ideology

　　(1845-46) he included a passage strongly reminiscent of his poems, deal-

　　ing with

　　 'the Day of Judgment', 'when the reflections of burning cities

　　are seen in the heavens ... and when the "celestial harmonies" consist

　　of the

　　 melodies of the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole, to the accompani-

　　ment of thundering cannon, while the guillotine beats time and the

　　inflamed masses scream

　　 Ca ira, ca ira, and self-consciousness is hanged

　　5

　　on the lamppost'.

　　 Then again, there are echoes of Oulanen in the Commu-

　　6

　　nist Manifesto, with the proletariat taking on the hero's mantle. The

　　apocalyptic

　　 note of the poems again erupts in his horror-speech of 14

　　April 1856: 'History is the judge, its executioner the proletariat' - the

　　terror, the houses marked with the red cross, catastrophic metaphors,

　　7

　　earthquakes, lava boiling up as the earth's crust cracks. The point is

　　that Marx's concept of a

　　 Doomsday, whether in its lurid poetic version

　　or its eventually economic one, is an artistic not a scientific vision. It

　　was always in Marx's mind, and as a political economist he worked

　　backwards from it, seeking the evidence that made it inevitable, rather

　　than forward to it, from objectively examined data. And of course it

　　is the

　　 poetic element which gives Marx's historical projection its drama

　　and its fascination to

　　 radical readers, who want to believe that the death

　　and judgment of capitalism is coming. The

　　 poetic gift manifests itself

　　intermittently in Marx's pages, producing

　　 some memorable passages.

　　In the sense that he intuited rather than reasoned or calculated, Marx

　　remained

　　 a poet to the end.

　　 some ways a good one. Marx found

　　But he was also a journalist, in

　　planning, let alone

　　 writing, a major book not only difficult but impossible :

　　even Capital is a series of essays glued together without any real form.

　　But he was well suited to write short,

　　 sharp, opinionated reactions to

　　events as they occurred. He believed, as his

　　 poetic imagination told

　　him, that society was on the verge of collapse. So almost every big news

　　story could be related to this general principle, giving his journalism a

　　remarkable consistency. In August 1851, a follower of the early socialist

　　55

　　

　　Intellectuals

　　Robert Owen, Charles Anderson Dana, who had become a senior execu-

　　tive on the New

　　 York Daily Tribune, asked Marx to become the European

　　political correspondent of the paper, writing two articles a week at ￡1

　　each. Over the

　　 next ten years Marx contributed nearly five hundred

　　articles, of which about one hundred and twenty-five were ghosted for

　　him by Engels. They were heavily subbed and rewritten in New York,

　　but the sinewy arguments are pure Marx and therein lies their power.

　　In fact his greatest gift was as a polemical journalist. He made brilliant

　　use of epigrams and aphorisms. Many of

　　 these were not his invention.

　　Marat produced the phrases The workers have no country' and 'The

　　proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.' The famous joke

　　about the bourgeoisie wearing feudal coats-of-arms on their backsides

　　came from

　　 Heine, as did 'Religion is the opium of the people.' Louis

　　Blanc provided 'From each according to his abilities, to each according

　　to his

　　 needs.' From Karl Schapper came 'Workers of all countries, unite !'

　　and from Blanqui 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'. But Marx was cap-

　　able of producing his

　　 own : 'In politics the Germans have thought what

　　other nations have

　　 done.' 'Religion is only the illusory sun around which

　　man revolves, until he begins to revolve around

　　 himself.' 'Bourgeois

　　marriage is the community of wives.' 'The revolutionary daring which

　　hurls at its adversaries the defiant words : "J am nothing and I must be

　　everything".' 'The ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its

　　ruling class.' Moreover he had a rare gift for pointing up the sayings

　　of others and using them at exactly the right stage in the argument,

　　and in deadly combination. No political writer has ever

　　 excelled the

　　last three sentences of the

　　 Manifesto : 'The workers have nothing to lose

　　but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite !'

　　It was Marx's journalistic eye for the short, pithy sentence which, more

　　than anything else, saved his entire philosophy from

　　 'oblivion in the

　　last

　　 quarter of the nineteenth century.

　　But if poetry supplied the vision, and journalistic aphorism the high-

　　lights of Marx's work, its ballast was academic jargon. Marx was an

　　 or rather, and worse, he was a failed academic. An embittered,

　　academic;

　　would-be don, he wanted to astonish the world by founding a new

　　philosophical school, which was also a plan of action

　　 designed to give

　　him power.

　　 Hence his ambivalent attitude to Hegel. Marx says in his

　　preface to the

　　 second German edition of Capital : T frankly proclaimed

　　7

　　myself

　　 a disciple of that great thinker and 'toyed with the use of Hegelian

　　terminology when discussing the theory of value' in Capital. But, he

　　says, his own 'dialectical method' is in 'direct opposition' to Hegel's.

　　For Hegel, the thought-process is the creator of the real, whereas 'in

　　my view, on the other hand, the ideal is nothing more than the material

　　56

　　

　　Karl Marx: 'Howling Gigantic Curses'

　　when it has been transposed and translated inside the human head/

　　Hence, he argues, 'in Hegel's writings, dialectic stands on its head. You

　　must turn it the right way up again if you want to discover the rational

　　8

　　kernel that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.'

　　Marx, then, sought academic fame by what he saw as his sensational

　　discovery of the fatal flaw in

　　 Hegel's method, which enabled him to

　　replace the entire Hegelian system with a new philosophy; indeed, a

　　super-philosophy which would make all existing philosophies out-

　　moded. But he continued to accept that Hegel's dialectic was 'the key

　　to human understanding', and he not only

　　 used it but remained its

　　prisoner till the end of his life. For the dialectic and its 'contradictions'

　　explained the culminating universal crisis which was his original poetic

　　vision as a teenager. As he wrote towards the end of his life (14 January

　　1873), business cycles express 'the contradictions inherent in capitalist

　　society' and will produce 'the culminating point of

　　 these cycles, a univer-

　　sal crisis'. This will 'drum dialectics' into the heads even of 'the upstarts

　　of the new German empire'.

　　What did any of this have to do with the politics and economics of

　　the

　　 real world ? Nothing whatever. Just as the origin of Marx's philosophy

　　lay in a poetic vision, so its elaboration was an exercise in academic

　　jargonizing. What it needed, however, to set Marx's intellectual machi-

　　nery in motion was a moral impulse. He found it in his hatred of usury

　　and moneylenders, a passionate feeling directly related (as we shall see)

　　to his own money difficulties. This found expression in

　　 Marx's first ser-

　　ious writings, two essays 'On the Jewish

　　 Questions' published in 1844

　　in the

　　 Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbücher. Hegel's followers were all in vary-

　　ing degrees anti-Semitic, and in 1843 Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader

　　of the

　　 Hegelian left, published an essay demanding that the Jews aban-

　　don Judaism completely. Marx's essays were a reply to this. He did

　　not object to Bauer's anti-Semitism;

　　 indeed he shared it, endorsed it

　　and quoted it with approval. But he disagreed with Bauer's solution.

　　Marx rejected Bauer's belief that the anti-social nature of the Jew was

　　religious in origin and could be remedied by tearing the Jew away from

　　his faith.

　　 In Marx's opinion, the evil was social and economic. He wrote :

　　'Let us consider the real Jew. Not the Sabbath Jew ... but the everyday

　　Jew.' What, he asked, was 'the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need,

　　self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is

　　his worldly god?

　　 Money.' The Jews had gradually spread this 'practical'

　　religion to all society :

　　Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may

　　 all the gods of mankind and changes them into

　　exist. Money abases