Francis Wheen - Karl Marx

Marx was often accused of being an intellectual bully, especially by those who felt the full force of his invective. (One of his tirades against Karl Heinzen, published in 1847, runs to nearly thirty pages.) He undoubtedly delighted in his talent for inflicting verbal violence. His style, as a friend noted admiringly, is what the stylus originally was in the hands of the Romans – a sharp-pointed steel pencil for writing and for stabbing. ‘ The style is the dagger used for a well-aimed thrustat the heart.’ Heinzen thought it not so much a dagger as a full battery of artillery – logic, dialectics, learning – used to annihilate anyone who would not see eye to eye with him. Marx, he said, wanted ‘to break windowpanes with cannon’. Nevertheless, the charge of bullying cannot be upheld. Marx was no coward, tormenting only those who wouldn’t retaliate: his choice of victims reveals a courageous recklessness which explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation.

For proof, one need look no further than his first article for the Rheinische Zeitung , published in May 1842, in which he delivered a withering exegesis of the Rhine Provincial Assembly’s debates on freedom of the press. Naturally he criticised the oppressive intolerance of Prussian absolutism and its lickspittles; this was brave enough, if unsurprising. But, with an exasperated cry of ‘God save me from my friends!’, he was even more scathing about the feeble-mindedness of the liberal opposition. Whereas the enemies of press freedom were driven by a pathological emotion which lent feeling and conviction to their absurd arguments, ‘the defenders of the press in this Assembly have on the whole no real relation to what they are defending. They have never come to know freedom of the press as a vital need . For them, it is a matter of the head, in which the heart plays no part.’ Quoting Goethe – who had said that a painter can succeed only with a type of feminine beauty which he has loved in at least one living being – Marx suggested that freedom of the press also has its beauty, which one must have loved in order to defend it. But the so-called liberals in the Assembly seemed to lead complete and contented lives even while the press was in fetters.

Having made enemies of both the government and the opposition, he was soon turning against his own confrères as well. Georg Jung, a successful Cologne lawyer involved in the Rheinische Zeitung , thought him ‘a devil of a revolutionary’, and the radical young Turks on the staff had high hopes when Marx was appointed to the editor’s chair in October 1842. They were to be disappointed. He set out his editorial policy in the form of a reply to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung , which had accused its rival of flirting with communism:

The Rheinische Zeitung , which does not even admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality , and therefore can still less desire their practical realisation , or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism … Such writings as those of Leroux, Considérant, and above all the sharp-witted work by Proudhon, cannot be criticised on the basis of superficial flashes of thought, but only after long and profound study.

No doubt he had half an eye on the censor – and on the paper’s shareholders, bourgeois capitalists to a man. But he meant it all the same. Marx disliked the posturing of colleagues such as the tipsy Rutenberg (who was still working in the office, though his job consisted mainly of inserting punctuation marks) and Moses Hess. He was even more irritated by the antics of the Young Hegelian pranksters in Berlin, now calling themselves ‘The Free’, who lived up to the name by freely criticising everything – the state, the Church, the family – and advocating ostentatious libertinism as a political duty. He regarded them as tiresome, frivolous self-publicists. ‘Rowdiness and blackguardism must be loudly and resolutely repudiated in a period which demands serious, manly and sober-minded persons for the achievement of its lofty aims,’ he told his readers.

There was, of course, an element of hypocrisy here: as his Cologne drinking companions testify, he was not always either serious or sober, and the solemn disapproval of attention-grabbing stunts came a little oddly from a man who, only a few months earlier, had been clattering through the streets of Bonn astride a donkey. But the assumption of editorial responsibility had concentrated his mind wonderfully: juvenile japes were no longer acceptable. The most persistent nuisance was Eduard Meyen, leader of the licentious Berlin clique, who submitted ‘heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas’. During the weak, undiscriminating stewardship of Rutenberg, Meyen and his gang had come to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their private playground. But the new editor made it clear that he would no longer permit them to drench the newspaper in a watery torrent of verbiage. ‘ I regard it as inappropriate, indeed even immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatrical criticisms etc.,’ he wrote. ‘I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all.’

Marx’s own ability to discuss communism was hampered by the fact that he knew nothing about it. His years of academic study had taught him all the philosophy, theology and law that he was ever likely to need, but in politics and economics he was still a novice. ‘ As editor of the Rheinische Zeitung ,’ he admitted many years later, ‘I experienced for the first time the embarrassment of having to take part in discussions on so-called material interests.’

His first venture into this unexplored territory was a long critique of the new law dealing with thefts of wood from private forests. By ancient custom, peasants had been allowed to gather fallen branches for fuel, but now anyone who picked up the merest twig could expect a prison sentence. More outrageously still, the offender would have to pay the forest-owner the value of the wood, such value to be assessed by the forester himself. This legalised larceny forced Marx to think, for the first time, about the questions of class, private property and the state. It also allowed him to exercise his talent for demolishing a thoughtless argument with its own logic. Reporting a comment by one of the knightly halfwits in the provincial assembly – ‘It is precisely because the pilfering of wood is not regarded as theft that it occurs so often – he let rip with a characteristic reductio ad absurdum : ‘ By analogy with this, the legislator would have to draw the conclusion: It is because a box on the ear is not regarded as a murder that it has become so frequent. It should be decreed therefore that a box on the ear is murder.’

This may not have been communism but it was quite naughty enough to worry Prussian officialdom – especially since the paper’s circulation and reputation were growing rapidly. ‘ Do not imagine that we on the Rhine live in a political Eldorado,’ Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge, whose Deutsche Jahrbücher had taken a fearsome battering from the authorities in Dresden. ‘The most unswerving persistence is required to push through a newspaper like the Rheinische Zeitung .’ For most of 1842, the resident censor at the paper was Laurenz Dolleschall, a doltish police officer who had once banned an advertisement for Dante’s Divine Comedy on the grounds that ‘the divine is not a fit subject for comedy’. After receiving the proofs each evening he blue-pencilled any articles he didn’t understand (most of them), whereupon the editor would spend hours persuading him that it was all quite harmless – while the printers waited, long into the night. Marx liked to quote Dolleschall’s anguished wail whenever his superiors chided him for letting through some piece of devilry: ‘Now my living’s at stake!’ One can almost sympathise with the hapless jobsworth, since any censor unlucky enough to have to haggle with Karl Marx every working day might well conclude that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. A story told by the left-wing journalist Wilhelm Blos shows what Dolleschall had to endure: