KARL MARX

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go KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
with its limited and double nature, a ruling group in society to society's
detriment. 106
Thus Ruge's idea that social revolution necessarily had a political soul
was the opposite of the truth:
Every revolution is social insofar as it destroys the old society. Every
revolution is political insofar as it destroys the old power.... Revolution
in general - the overthrow of the existing power and dissolution of
previous relationships - is a political act. Socialism cannot be realized
without a revolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its
particular aims are formulated, when its soul comes forward, then
socialism casts aside its political cloak. 107
This controversy marked the end of all contact with Ruge. Although
Marx continued his friendship with Herwegh, this also did not last long,
and Marx soon admitted that there was something after all in Ruge's
strictures. Herwegh's sybaritic character and his sentimental version of
communism could never harmonise with the temperament and ideas
of Marx of whom Herwegh wrote at the time that 'he would have been
the perfect incarnation of the last scholastic. A tireless worker and great
savant, he knew the world more in theory than in practice. He was fully
conscious of his own value.... The sarcasms with which he assailed his
adversaries had the cold penetration of the executioner's axe.' 108 Disillusioned
with Herwegh, Marx spent more and more time with Heine,
the only person he declared himself sorry to leave behind on his expulsion
from Paris.
Heine had made Paris his base immediately after the 1830 revolution
there. As well as flourishing as a poet in a city which could boast Musset,
Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Ingres and Chopin among many other famous cultural
figures, Heine was much attracted to the doctrines of Saint-Simon
and the later French socialists. Embittered by the banning of his books
in Prussia, he regarded the success of communism as inevitable, but feared
the triumph of the masses and 'the time when these sombre iconoclasts
will destroy my laurel groves and plant potatoes'. 109 His friendship with
Marx coincided with much of his best satirical verse in which Marx is
said to have encouraged him with the words: 'Leave your everlasting
complaints of love and show the satiric poets the real way of going about
it - with a whip!" 10 According to Eleanor:
There was a period when Heine came daily to see Marx and his wife
to read them his verse and hear their opinion of it. Marx and Heine
could endlessly revise a little ten-line poem - weighing every word,
correcting and polishing it until everything was perfect and every trace
of their working-over had disappeared. Much patience was necessary as