Karl Marx (25 page)

Citizen Hiphiphiphurrah’s only use to Marx and Engels thereafter was as the butt for jokes. However, they stayed on
friendly terms with Ernest Jones, who had not attended the infamous banquet. Having spent his childhood in Germany, Jones was deemed to be ‘unEnglish’ – the highest compliment they could pay any British citizen. (In 1846, still in the first flush of infatuation, Engels had described Harney as ‘
more of a Frenchman than an Englishman
’.) Marx contributed to Jones’s periodical, the
People’s Paper
, and in his articles elsewhere continued to praise the Chartists’ insistence on widening the franchise. ‘
After the experiments which undermined universal suffrage
in France in 1848, the Continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter,’ he wrote in the
Neue Oder-Zeitung
. ‘They overlook the fact that two-thirds of the population of France are peasants and over one-third townspeople, whereas in England more than two-thirds live in towns and less than one-third in the countryside. Hence the results of universal suffrage in England must likewise be in inverse proportion to the results in France, just as town and country are in the two states.’ In France, the suffrage was a political demand, supported to a greater or lesser extent by almost every ‘educated’ person. In Britain, it was a social question, marking the divide between aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one side and ‘the people’ on the other. English agitation for suffrage had gone through ‘historical development’ before it became a slogan of the masses; in France, the slogan came first, without any preceding gestation. Here we see once more the curious ambivalence of Marx’s attitude to his adoptive country. Unlike its peasant-infested neighbours, England had a large and sophisticated metropolitan proletariat: it was therefore more ‘advanced’ and ready for revolution. Yet England also possessed an immensely self-confident bourgeosie, the rock against which revolutionary waves broke in vain. Sometimes he persuaded himself that a political cataclysm in Britain was not only inevitable but imminent; at other times he was reduced to angry despair by the doltish conservatism of the inhabitants. But what could one expect? Marx, more than any other thinker of his generation, was a
connoisseur of paradox and contradictions – since it was these very contradictions which guaranteed capitalism’s demise.

‘
There is one great fact
, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny,’ he said in April 1856, at a London dinner celebrating the fourth anniversary of the
People’s Paper
. ‘On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.’ Machinery, blessed with the power of shortening and fructifying people’s labour, had instead starved and overworked them. The new sources of wealth, by some inverse alchemy, had become sources of want. And Britain – the wealthiest and most modern industrial society in the world – was also the most ripe for destruction. ‘History is the judge – its executioner, the proletarian.’

Even an after-dinner audience of English Jacobins, fortified with ‘the choicest viands and condiments of the season’, might have raised a quizzical eyebrow at this apocalyptic rhetoric. Could England – the financial and industrial centre of the world, the hub of the greatest empire ever seen, the throbbing heart of capitalism – really be so flimsy and frangible? To Marx, the paradox was more apparent than real. It was an ‘old and historically established maxim’ that obsolete social forces summon all their strength before their final death agony, and were therefore weakest when they seemed most intimidating. ‘Such is today the English oligarchy.’

One wonders if any of his listeners recalled the rather more cautious tone of his essay on the civil war in France, written for the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
in 1850. ‘The original process always takes place in England: it is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos,’ he had argued then. But while England luxuriated in bourgeois prosperity ‘there can be no talk of a real revolution … A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis.’

He had been waiting ever since, with some impatience, for the crisis to arrive – reading the runes, seeking out portents. ‘
Provided nothing untoward happens
within the next six weeks, this year’s cotton crop will amount to 3,000,000 bales,’ Engels informed him in July 1851. ‘If the CRASH in the market coincides with such a gigantic crop, things will be cheery indeed. Peter Ermen is already fouling his breeches at the very thought of it, and the little tree frog’s a pretty good barometer.’ A collapse in the fortunes of the textile industry would also have put an end to Marx’s regular subsidies from the petty-cash box at Ermen & Engels, but this was apparently a price worth paying for the general ruination of all the little tree frogs. He licked his lips at ‘
the very pleasing prospect of a trade crisis
’. By September, however, there was no sign of one. Instead, the discovery of gold in the South Australian state of Victoria might actually open up new markets and precipitate an expansion of world trade and credits, like the California gold rush of 1848. ‘One must hope the Australian gold business won’t interfere with the trade crisis,’ Engels fretted. He consoled himself with the thought that even if capitalism was rescued by Antipodean success, at least they would have been right about something: ‘
In six months’ time the circumnavigation of the world
by steam will be fully under way and our predictions concerning the supremacy of the Pacific Ocean will be fulfilled even more quickly than we could have anticipated.’ Australia – that ‘united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets’ – would then startle the world by showing what wonders could be performed by a nation of undisguised rascals. ‘They will beat California hollow.’ Anyway, the demand for Lancashire cotton was still slumping most agreeably, and soon ‘we shall have such overproduction as will warm the cockles of your heart’.

A month later there was another cockle-warming bulletin from Marx’s Trojan horse in the capitalist citadel. ‘
The iron trade is totally paralysed
, and two of the main banks which supply it with money – those in Newport – have gone broke … There is the prospect, if not actually the certainty, of next
spring’s convulsions on the Continent coinciding with quite a nice little crisis. Even Australia seems incapable of doing very much; since California, the discovery of gold has become an old story and the world has grown blasé about it …’ Two days after Christmas 1851, Marx sent a cheerful end-of-year message to the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath: ‘
From what Engels tells me
, the city merchants now also share our view that the crisis, held in check by all kinds of factors (including, e.g., political misgivings, the high price of cotton last year) etc., must blow up at the latest next autumn. And since the latest events I am more than ever convinced that there will be no serious revolution without a trade crisis.’ The downfall of Russell’s Whig administration in February 1852, and the installation of a Tory cabinet headed by Lord Derby, seemed likely to speed the happy day. ‘
In England our movement can progress only under the Tories
,’ Marx explained. ‘The Whigs conciliate all over the place and lull everyone to sleep. On top of that there is the commercial crisis which is looming ever closer and whose early symptoms are erupting on every hand.
Les choses marchent
.’ Free trade and a falling cotton price might keep the English economy afloat until the autumn, but then the fun would begin.

Engels was not so sure. Although the crisis certainly ought to come by the end of 1852 ‘according to all the rules’, the strength of Indian markets and the cheapness of raw materials suggested otherwise. ‘
One is almost tempted to forecast
that the present period of prosperity will be of exceptionally long duration. At any rate it may well be that the thing will last until the spring.’ It did; and perhaps Marx wasn’t entirely disappointed. ‘The revolution may come sooner than we would like,’ he wrote in August, noting a spate of bankruptcies and below-average harvests. ‘Nothing could be worse than the revolutionaries having to provide bread.’ Here he was hoist by his own explosive logic: if the revolution depended on economic catastrophe, as he insisted, it would of course inherit a breadless world. Nevertheless, for the next couple of years he still felt cheerfully certain that there were
bad times just around the corner. ‘
The state of the winter crops
being what it is, I feel convinced that the crisis will become due.’ (January 1853.) ‘Present conditions … in my view must soon lead to an earthquake.’ (March 1853). ‘
Les choses marchent merveilleusement
. All hell will be let loose in France when the financial bubble bursts.’ (September 1853.)

In the absence of a terminal economic crisis, Marx began to wonder if some other spark could light the conflagration. The Crimean War, perhaps? ‘We must not forget that there is a sixth power in Europe,’ he wrote in the
New York Daily Tribune
on 2 February 1854, ‘which at given moments asserts its supremacy over the whole of the five so-called “Great” Powers and makes them tremble, every one of them. That power is the Revolution … A signal only is wanted, and this sixth and greatest European power will come forward, in shining armour, and sword in hand, like Minerva from the head of the Olympian. This signal the impending European war will give …’

No such luck. Apparently forgetting his insistence that revolution was possible only as the consequence of an economic débâcle, he scanned the horizon for some other dark cloud. On 24 June 1855 the Chartists held a rally in Hyde Park to protest against the new Sunday Trading Bill, which would ban the opening of pubs and the printing of newspapers on the sabbath. Ladies and gentlemen riding along Rotten Row had to run the gauntlet of demonstrators; some were forced to dismount and flee. ‘
We were spectators from beginning to end,
’ Marx wrote in the
Neue Oder-Zeitung
, ‘and do not think we are exaggerating in saying that
the English revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park
.’

A similar gathering one week later drew an even bigger crowd – and another vivid dispatch from Marx to the
Neue Oder-Zeitung
. ‘
At once the constabulary rushed from ambush
, whipped their truncheons out of their pockets, began to beat up people’s heads until the blood ran profusely, yanked individuals here and there out of the vast multitude (a total of 104 were thus arrested) and dragged them to the improvised blockhouses.’ But the character
of the scene was quite different from the improvised class war of the previous weekend:

Last Sunday the masses were confronted by the ruling class as individuals. This time it appeared as the state power, the law, the truncheon. This time resistance meant insurrection, and the Englishman must be provoked for a long time before he breaks out in insurrection. Hence the counter-demonstration was confined, in the main, to hissing, jeering and whistling at the police-wagons, to isolated and feeble attempts at liberating the arrested, but above all to passive resistance in phlegmatically standing their ground.

Thus did ‘the English revolution’ fizzle out, only seven days after Marx’s bold fanfare; and all because of the natives’ deferential timidity when confronted by the majesty of institutionalised power. It is all too like a scene from Gilbert and Sullivan in which the bloodthirsty pirates of Penzance, having captured a posse of police officers, are standing over their victims with drawn swords. ‘We charge you yield,’ a police sergeant commands from a prostrate position, ‘in Queen Victoria’s name!’ The pirate king cannot but obey: ‘We yield at once, with humbled mien,/Because, with all our faults, we love our Queen.’

For the rest of his life, Marx’s view of the English proletariat oscillated between reverence and scorn. In January 1862 he cited British workers’ support for the North in the American Civil War as ‘
a new, splendid proof of the indestructible thoroughness
of the English popular masses, that thoroughness which is the secret of England’s greatness’. But when anti-government demonstrators tore down the Hyde Park railings in July 1866, he despaired of their moderation. ‘
The Englishman first needs a revolutionary education
, of course,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘If the railings – and it was touch and go – had been used offensively and defensively against the police and about twenty of the latter had been knocked out, the military would have had to “intervene” instead of only
parading. And then there would have been some fun. One thing is certain, these thick-headed John Bulls, whose brainpans seem to have been specially manufactured for the constables’ bludgeons, will never get anywhere without a really bloody encounter with the ruling powers.’ As he conceded, however, there was no great likelihood of serious combat: the workers were ‘slavish’, ‘sheepish’ and incurably enfeebled by a ‘bourgeois infection’.

This disease had many small but telling symptoms. The historian Keith Thomas has suggested that ‘
the preoccupation with gardening
, like that with pets, fishing and other hobbies … helps to explain the relative lack of radical and political impulses among the British proletariat’. Hence the popularity of allotments in the nineteenth century, and the surprising dearth of large-scale tenement blocks – which ‘would have deprived working men of the gardens which they regarded as a necessity’. For every worker who ripped up railings in Hyde Park, there were dozens more who wanted only to walk their dogs or inspect the flower-beds.

Even Ernest Jones, the Chartist leader whom Marx most admired, soon revealed himself as a middle-class dilettante by advocating a coalition between the Chartists and the thoroughly bourgeois radicals. ‘The business with Jones is very disgusting,’ Engels wrote after hearing him address a meeting in Manchester. ‘One is really almost driven to believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish completely before it can develop in a new, viable form.’ But what form would this be? As Engels noted, with rueful prescience, ‘
the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois
, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat
as well as
a bourgeoisie’. So it has come to pass: in the England of today, toffs and workers alike buy their food from Tesco superstores and watch the National Lottery draw on Saturday nights. If the ghosts of Marx and Engels returned they would also notice the most bizarre oxymoron of all, a bourgeois monarchy, whose young princes wear baseball caps, eat
Big Macs and take their holidays at Eurodisney. In Hyde Park, where once the Chartists taunted aristocrats and Karl Marx thought the English revolution had begun, the largest mass assembly in living memory occurred on 6 September 1997 – for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.