A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Marx was exultant; at last, the revolution had arrived. He had published his Communist Manifesto
in the very month of the French uprising, in which he explained that the real enemy was the
‘bourgeoisie’, the middle classes. Communism would abolish the bourgeoisie as well as property.
(But he was careful to explain that in the future communist state, personal freedom would be
respected.) Now Marx rushed from Brussels to Paris - only to find that the revolutionary fever was
already subsiding now that the king had gone. But it had reached Germany, where King Frederick
William IV had been forced to grant a parliament, a free press and a constitution. Marx moved to
Cologne and set up a revolutionary newspaper. It was popular, but disappointingly, no one seemed
to want to disembowel the bourgeoisie or hang them from lamp-posts. In a few months the
newspaper collapsed. Marx returned to Paris, and was quickly expelled. He and Jenny left for
London with their three children; Jenny was pregnant with a fourth.
From the personal point of view, the remainder of Marx’s life was a long, frustrating anticlimax.
He lived in poverty - at one point they were even evicted into the street - and his baby son died.
Engels, now running one of his father’s mills in Manchester, provided the money that supported
them. A police spy who was set to watch Marx reported: ‘The dominating trait of his character is a
limitless ambition and love of power.’ But after observing Marx for some time, the British
authorities decided he was a harmless German intellectual.
Marx joined the Communist League in London, and was soon engaged in his favourite activity of
trying to purge it of ‘traitors’. Two more children died, while the maidservant, Helene Demuth,
became pregnant by Marx; to preserve his dignity as a revolutionary leader, Marx spread the story
that Engels was the father. He became increasingly domineering, increasingly resentful. A comrade
named Techow wrote of him: ‘The impression he made on me was that of someone possessing a
rare intellectual superiority, and he was evidently a man of outstanding personality. If his heart had
matched his intellect, and if he had possessed as much love as hate, I would have gone through fire
for him... Yet it is a matter for regret... that this man with his fine intellect is lacking in nobility of
soul. I am convinced that a most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him.’
This is a perceptive summary of Marx’s chief defects. He hungered for fame, for success, for
influence. And since the only circles in which he had any influence were socialist, the dominance
expressed itself in the form of violent denunciations and ‘purges’.
In 1864, the field of that influence suddenly expanded. French workingmen had come to London in
1863 to see the Industrial Exhibition, and had made contact with English socialists. Someone
thought of the idea of an international organisation of socialists. Marx was voted on to the
committee by London’s German socialists, and, in his usual manner, he had soon taken charge. He
drew up the rules and made sure the subjects discussed were dictated by himself. With bullying,
effrontery and various subterfuges, he usually succeeded in getting his own way.
During all these years, Marx had been labouring on his major work, his own Hegelian system; the
first volume appeared in 1867 under the title Das Kapital. Hegel was trying to demonstrate that
history was moving towards the complete expression of spirit. Marx set out to demonstrate that
history was moving inexorably towards communism. But how could such a proposition be
sustained in view of the obvious fact that history is the story of a continual struggle for power
among individuals’? How could anyone who studies the progress of civilisation from the first cities
of Mesopotamia believe that mankind is moving towards the abolition of private property?
According to Marx, the answer lay in a concept which he called ‘surplus value’. What is the value
of, say, a table or chair? It is obviously the value of the materials, and of the labour that has gone
into it. If a carpenter asks a certain sum for a table, this is what he is charging for. If the carpenter is