CHAPTER XI.

I

KARL MARX AND SOCIALISM.

F one were asked to mention the book in the whole world which has been at once the most talked about and the least read, one could hardly go wrong in naming Karl Marx's Das Kapital. Some enquiries have been made, before venturing that statement, at libraries and bookshops, to ascertain whether the work is frequently borrowed, bought and enquired for, and the result has been to remove any hesitation in awarding to it the certificate for Greatest Unread Repute. The first volume, the only one of the three to be published during the lifetime of the author, disappointed him by reason of its small sale. It was translated into English by Moore and Aveling, and revised by Friedrich Engels. The volume has been twice reprinted. The entire work has been translated by E. Untermann and published at Chicago. It has not reached a second edition, and no publisher in Great Britain has Ideemed it worth while to issue a translation of the complete treatise, though we may be sure that the opportunity of doing so would have been seized had there been a probable demand.

If we make a comparison with another famous book, published eight years before Das Kapital, we shall realise what these facts mean. Darwin's Origin of Species has circulated in six editions of the two-volume issue, and ir as many reprints of a popular edition issued by Murray, the original publisher, apart from some thousands of copie in editions by other publishers, English and American, and translations into every literary language.

It is not to be doubted that Capital has been patiently studied by many intellectual men, both Socialists and adverse critics, and that through their writings and speeches it has exerted an influence far greater than

would appear from the comparatively small amount of direct attention which has been devoted to it. But though those who call themselves Marxian Socialists have been numbered by tens of thousands, and Capital has been styled "the Bible of Socialism," by far the greater number have limited their knowledge of Marx's writings to the violent and rhetorical Communist Manifesto of 1848, and "the Bible" has remained for them a portentous mystery in three thick volumes, containing too much hard reading and too few easily caught phrases for their liking. If every Marxian subjected himself to the discipline of reading Marx-and the author himself, by the way, said, "I am no Marxist" there would be fortune for publishers in Capital and much greater sobriety of language in the popular discussion of Socialism. Perhaps those are two reasons why so few of them do study the book. We shall have to return to this point in another connection a little later.

The man himself was on the whole the largest, solidest figure in the revolutionary movement in Europe during the nineteenth century. There is a certain mountainous ruggedness about him. When we think of Marx living in exile and poverty in London, piling up day by day the mighty heap of manuscript which formed his magnum opus, working out the mathematical formulæ with which it was embellished, or confused, fighting against sickness, raging against opposition, copiously vituperative, patiently constructive, prophesying vehemently and never deterred from fresh predictions by the failure of old ones, plodding on with his tremendous analysis of capitalistic society in defiance of all discouragements-there seems something passionately heroic in the shaggy old man who believed that he was thus reconstructing the earth. His life was a continuous battle from his youth till the Highgate Cemetery gave him a resting place.

The essential facts about him are not many. Born at Trier in 1818, he was the son of a Jewish lawyer who had embraced Christianity. He was, according to one of his biographers, grateful to his father for "freeing him from the yoke of Judaism, which he felt was a great hindrance to the many revolutionists of his race, including his friends Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand Lassalle." He studied first at the University of Bonn, afterwards at Berlin, where he took his doctor's degree. Attracted towards journalism by

an absorbing interest in public questions, he edited the Rheinische Gazette until its fierce attacks stung the government of Frederick William IV. of Prussia to suppress it (1843). Then he went to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels, and formed the friendship which was to endure to the end of his life.

Engels, during a residence in England, had become imbued with the political and economic doctrines of the Chartists. Marx soon got himself into trouble with the French government, and fled from Paris (1847). At that time a revolutionary movement was being generated-the movement which was to destroy the monarchy of Louis Philippe early in 1848. At Brussels, where Marx found a temporary refuge, he was joined by Engels, and the two collaborated in the preparation of the Communist Manifesto. The revolutionary troubles which convulsed Germany in 1848 attracted these two stormy petrels back to the Fatherland; but the revolution, like a spent storm, blew itself out, and in 1849 the Prussian Government again drove Marx beyond the frontiers. He then settled in London, which was thenceforth his home until his death in 1883.

The journalism and miscellaneous writing with which Marx occupied himself during his London residence never returned him much more than a pittance. But it was here that he began the great work of his life, which was to be a critical analysis of political economy from the Socialist point of view. In 1850 he produced his first considerable book, Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Critique of Political Economy), which was intended to form the first volume of his principal work. But closer criticism revealed to him crudities which made him dissatisfied with the book. So he wrote it entirely again, and after seventeen years produced (1867) volume I. of Das Kapital, the treatise by which he will always be remembered, however thick the dust upon it may grow. He had nearly finished the second volume, but did not see it in book form before he died. Volume III. was also largely written, though much existed only in notes, and parts of it are fragmentary. Engels put it together from the mass of material left by his friend, and saw the two concluding volumes through the press.

The life of Marx during the writing of his book was by no means that of a recluse student. His work would

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have been better if it had been. He was continually embroiled in revolutionary politics, denouncing and being denounced in the wild-elephant trumpetings which are the normal speech of that stentorian world. Mr. Spargo, to whose biography, Karl Marx: His Life and Work, students are much indebted, classifies his public career into three periods. The first culminated in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The second culminated in the organisation of the International Working Men's Association in 1864. The International was meant to be a union of Socialists and Revolutionists of all nations. Racial and national barriers were to be disregarded; the working classes everywhere were to subordinate all political aims to the one great end of solving the social question on social democratic lines. Mazzini attended the inaugural meetings in London, but Marx was determined to be the dominating personality and could endure no rivalry; for his most faithful admirers cannot acquit him of arrogance. His attitude towards Mazzini was thoroughly unfriendly; we are told that "what he lacked in anger he more than made up in contempt." Mazzini, on the other hand, distrusted Marx as a man who "believes strongly neither in philosophical nor religious truth," and with whom "hatred outweighs love in his heart."

The third period of Marx's life culminated in the break up of the International in 1873. An anarchist section, under the leadership of the Russian terrorist, Michael Bakunin, had during the preceding five years endeavoured to capture the association. The debates were tempestuous. Marx nourished a fierce hatred of Bakunin, and induced the majority to expel him and his associates at a Congress at the Hague in 1872. But the split entailed the collapse of the International, which did not hold another Congress after that of Berne in 1873.

It must be said that Marx was a redoubtable hater. He had little that was good to say of any of his contemporaries, except Abraham Lincoln, of whom we are assured he was "a most passionate and devoted admirer." The virulence of his language towards other Socialists who showed any signs of acquiring an influence which might rival his own often savoured of jealous spite. He spoke harshly of Lassalle and Liebknecht when they brought about the fusion of the two rival Socialist groups in Germany

and created the Social Democratic Party of that country. He alluded in terms of scorn and distrust to Mr. H. M. Hyndman, the most brilliant and influential of the English Socialists of the period following the decay of the International. Nevertheless in his own circle he seems to have been a gentle, affectionate and much-beloved man, explosive at times but with a soft side. With children he was tender and playful. The little people of his neighbourhood were always sure of a smile and a caress from the whitehaired, white-bearded, unkempt old fellow whom they called Daddy Marx. He was punctilious in all the personal and financial relations of life, so that "as honest as old Marx" became a phrase among his intimates. A volcano with grassy slopes-Etna amid Sicilian meadows, smoky, sulphurous and effulgent, but presenting some amiable moods, and with goats bleating round about-so does he seem; and Etna is no extinct volcano, we may as well remember.

It is unfortunate that Marx should be chiefly known to those who suppose themselves to be his followers through the Communist Manifesto, which its authors themselves declared to be "in some details antiquated"-a mild statement of the case concerning it. The Manifesto bears upon it the impress of the strenuous times when and for which it was written. There is interesting material in it, analysing historically the development of modern industry; but its animated style too often rises to a shrieking note, and it makes too much of an appeal to the kind of Socialists who are, as Labriola says, "insufficiently grounded and who are sentimental or hysterical." It evokes well-deserved ridicule to find people who are quite comfortably situated quoting such phrases as "the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains," with no sense of their utter incongruity. Some of its statements were only partially true when written, and have become still more falsified with the general improvement in the condition of the working classes, insufficient as those improvements admittedly are. The statement "but does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit!" is contradicted by the statistics of Trade Unions' and Friendly Societies' funds, and by the millions of instances in which artisans own their houses and other property besides. The statement was written before Trade Unionism had begun to exercise a strong