8 Ancestors, Family Life and School Trier in the early nineteenth century ha-Cohen, Meir Katzenellenbogen, rabbi and head of the talmudic college in Padua (d. 1 565), and Abraham he-Levi Minz (i.e. from Mainz, died about 1 525) Rabbi of Padua. The latter's father (born about 1 408) had left Germany about the middle of the century on account of the persecutions and was 'one of the greatest authorities of the German and Italian Jewish communities'. Marx's grandfather on his mother's side or one of his ancestors had emigrated from Hungary to Holland; this grandfather was Rabbi of Nijmegen. A sister of the mother, Sophie, married the banker Lion Philips, grandfather of the founder of the Philips business. Marx often visited this family in Zaltbommel ; he frequently had financial dealings with the uncle, who acted as trustee for his mother, and until 1870 he was certainly friendly with these Dutch relatives. During the Middle Ages (which in the case of the Jews lasted until about 1800) the Jewish communities possessed full autonomy in their own affairs. From an economic, religious and cultural point of view, the communities carried on an independent life; as far as the state and city were concerned, they were represented principally by their rabbis. Since the communities largely had their own lation and jurisdiction for civil rights, the rabbi was also directly concerned in looking after these; it was to him, and not to the secular
l\.iarx's student friend KOppen (caricature by Engels) presents itself as a complete and total world in which idea and reality are blended together in absolute harmony, is faced with actual reality whose petty restrictedness makes it seem a hostile contrast. The world is thus split, but it is faced with a philsophy that is a totality in itself. The way in which this philosophy is seen to act is therefore also split and contradictory; its objective universality gets turned round into subjective forms of the individual consciousness in which it is alive and active. . . . Anyone who does not understand this historical necessity, must as a result deny that it is possible for men to live at al in accordance ,vith a total philosophy; or else he must hold the dialectic of proportion to be the highest category for a mind cognizant of itself, and must, together ,vith some of those who understand Hegel, maintain that mediocn'ty is the normal appearance of the absolute mind• • . . Marx considers it incorrect to explain a number of weaknesses in the Hegelian system (as many HegeJians do) as a 'compromise' with reality, i.e. usually political reality; it seems to him necessary to analyse Hegel's ideology itself: It is conceivable that a philosopher should be guilty of this or that inconsistency; he may himself be conscious of it. But what he is not conscious of is that in the last analysis this apparent compromise is mis-
The Power of New Ideas : Communism 53 and migrant artisans who had been drawn to the 'Capital ofFreedom'. On the other hand Marx occasionally visited meetings of French workmen, and these made a great impression on him. Paris 1849 : A concert at a meeting of French workers When the communist artisans meet, they seem to be meeting for the purpose of propaganda, etc. But in the process they also acquire a new need, the need for society, and what seemed to be a means has become an end in itself. One can see the most illuminating effects of this tical process if one watches a meeting of socialist French ouvriers . Smoking, drinking and eating are no longer merely an excuse for meeting. The society, the entertainment, which is supposed to be for the purpose of meeting, is sufficient in itself; the brotherhood of Man is no idle phrase but the real truth, and the nobility of Man shines out at us from these faces brutalized by toil. For a time Marx and his wife lived with the Ruges in the Rue Vanneau, in a 'communist community' set up by them for reasons of convenience. This experiment soon failed. Ruge did not like the spirit of Marx's essays for the Jalzrbiiclzer ; he always remained a liberal, and besides was very narrow-minded. The quarrel was accentuated by personal antipathy. It is from those months that we
96 1848 - Revolution as Idea and Reality posed of fighters of all nationalities, now stands facing Old Europe embattled in the Russian Army; from Paris comes the menace of the "Red Republic"!' As the tide of revolution ebbed, the attitude of the newspaper became more and more radical (though there was a certain inner logic in this). In view of the final success of the counter-revolution, this would have been almost impossible to understand, if it had not been that Marx and his friends really believed that the revolution would continue. It was not till over a year later that they realized the defeat was a final one, and that there was absolutely no more hope of the revolutionary democracy for which they believed selves to be fighting. In the summer of I 848 Charles Dana and Albert Brisbane visited Cologne, where they met Marx. They were, respectively, editor and correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, a paper for which Marx later became the European correspondent. Brisbane bered Marx as follows : 'At that time he was just beginning to make his mark. He was a man in his thirties, of a stocky burly build, with a distinguished face and thick black hair. His features bore an pression of great energy, and behind his moderate reserve one could detect the passionate fire of a bold spirit.'
Lassalle and German Social Democracy 1 45 the violence of Marx's attacks on these points. Nor did Liebknecht think it at all necessary to the workers' movement that, after its organization and effectiveness within the framework of the day State' had been acknowledged, this present-day State (whose reality was drastically demonstrated each day) should be made out to be a mere 'fiction', and one that would vanish with the appearance of its roots in bourgeois society. Marx mistakenly believed that, in bringing out this programe, the party leaders were committing 'a monstrous attack on the view that was current among the mass of the Party' ; for at no time were his views by any means widely current. At the beging of 1891 Engels succeeded in getting Marx's critique of the programe printed in the Neue Zeit, and thus achieved some belated satisfaction at the expense of Lassalle. It was another source of satisfaction that the Erfurt Programe of the same year drew upon some of the doctrines expressed in Marx's critique. But if one attempted to maintain that this Programme enabled Social Democracy to pursue a 'proper' Marxist policy, or if one were to think that a programe could guarantee a correct policy, then once again 'the difference between scientific discovery and political action would largely disappear'.
The Unfinished Life-work 159 The Paris Commune, Spring 1871 : barricades in the rue de Rivoli near the Place de la Concordc ift this sciefttific life-work of his. It too remained no more thaft a torso ; but it is a torso such that its limbs are of gigantic size and have occupied whole generations of specialist scholars. The preliminary studies began during 1843-4, with the analyses of wages, profits and rent in the Paris Ecollomic alld Philosophic Manuscripts. If Marx had ftot coftsidered these important as his iftg-poiftt, they would certainly ftever have beeft preserved. As
Index References to illustrations are in italics after the references to the text. Only illustration references are listed for Karl Marx Adler, Georg, 10 Aeschylus, 42 Andersen, Hans Christian, 54 Annenkov, Paul, 72-3 Aristotle, 19, 40 Assing, Ludmilla, u6 Auerbach, Berthold, 43 Bakunin, Mikhail, 54, 60, 92, 132, 146, 150-1, 152, 153, 158 ; 150 Bangya, Colonel, 108 Bauer, Bruno, 18, 37, 39, 40, 42-3, 44, 58, 64, 66, 70, 100 ; 43 Bauer, Edgar, 40, 64, 66 Bebel, August, 2, 11 4, 123 and n, 136, 141, 153, 174; 137 Becker, Johann Philipp, 153 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 126 Bernstein, Eduard, 2, 77, 152, 155 Bismarck, Otto, Prince von, 141 ha-Cohen, Josef ben Gerson, 7-8, 9 Conradi, Johann Jakob, 5 Considerant, Victor, 47 Cornu, Auguste, 3 Cremer, William Randal, 149 Dana, Charles, 96, u8, 127 Democritus, 40 Demuth, Frederick, 122-5 Demuth, Helene, 97, 122-5, 168 ; 122 Dickens, Charles, 126 Dronke, Ernst, 89 Dubnow, Simon, 10, 60 Diihring, Karl Eugen, 60 Engels, Friedrich, I, 2, 3, 22, 40, 44, 46, 51, 54, 59, 60, 64-6, 67, 68, 7°, 72, 77, 80, 82, 84, 86-7, Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm, Graf von, 90 Brisbane, Albert, 96 Burns, Mary, II 9, 139 Cabet, Etienne, 146 Camphausen, Ludolf, 90 Camus, Albert, 80 Carr, Edward Hallett, 2 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 20 Claessen, Heinrich Josef, 67 167, 168, 170, 173-4 ; 41, 65, II7, 140 Epicurus, 40, 42, 174 Euripides, 18 Farbstein, 10 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 51, 54, 55, 64, 70 ; 71 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 30 Fourier, Charles, 44, 146 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 134 ; 133