Excerpt from: Deconstructing Karl Marx & Communism
(Abbreviated from the original publication) Ironically, the man renowned for his critique of capitalism had insurmountable trouble managing his own capital. Marx’ relationship with money was a peculiar one: while he accepted gifts as gladly as he loved spending money, he hated those who accumulated it as much as he refused to earn it. His inability to manage funds became apparent early on. As a student, his allowance seemed to evaporate. Halfway through his first year at Bonn university, a complaint arrived from his father:
“Your accounts, dear Karl, are à la Carl, incoherent, inconclusive. If only they had been shorter and more succinct, with the numbers arranged in orderly columns ... I believe that, for the moment, the acquisition of many books is inadvisable and burdensome, especially large historical works.”
An extra 50, then 100, then another 20 talers were sent to Bonn. Undoubtedly, becoming the president of the students’ Tavern Club had something to do with the excessive spending. Karl ran up numerous (and considerable) tabs, which his father had to settle. Nothing changed when he moved to Berlin the next year – quite the contrary. On December 9, 1837, the patient yet increasingly distressed father addressed the matter yet again.
“As if we were made of gold, Herr son dispenses in one year of almost 700 talers, contrary to all agreements, contrary to all customs, whereas the richest don't spend 500. And why?”
According to Rolv Heuer's book Genius and Riches, only 5 percent of the population had an annual income greater than 300 talers at that time. Karl Marx – a university student – somehow managed to spend more than double. Where did all the money go to? His father left us a hint: “Everyone has his hand in his pocket, and everyone deceives him.” Was this how Karl explained his excessive spending? Or was the young lad truly an easy prey? No matter, “a new money order is soon written again.” And another 160 talers was sent to Berlin. A few months later Marx senior passed away.
After borrowing a total of 950 talers from his mother, Karl asked her for an advance on the inheritance that he would receive after her death, which she refused. He never forgave her. Karl then tried to squeeze the rest of his family for cash, even travelling to Holland to beg for a loan from his uncle Lion Philips, founder of the company later known as the Philips Electronics multinational. Lion told him to get lost and find a job.
In 1842 Marx began to work as a journalist for the Rheinische Zeitung, and soon became its main editor. The paper was shut down by the Prussian authorities and he was again left without an income. Three months later, on June 19, 1843, after a seven-year engagement, Karl finally married Jenny. In October the newly-weds settled in Paris, together with a maid, Helene Demuth, previously working for Jenny’s family. Jenny’s mother also gave the couple a little chest with “small sum” she’d just inherited. The daughter of a close friend wrote in her reminiscences:
“When they had visits from friends or fellow-thinkers in need they put the chest open on the table in their room and anyone could take as much as he pleased. Needless to say it was soon empty.”
Despite having no income, the Marx household nevertheless managed to live high on the hog. Gary North made a thorough investigation of Marx' finances between 1844 and 1848.
“In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx's friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter ... another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800-franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the ‘Cologne Circle’ of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung ... In any case, his total income ... should have been enough for several years.”
All of this tells us that Karl Marx was rather adroit at gaining people’s trust. But however much money he gathered, he was unable to hold on to it for very long. In a letter of 1844 Arnold Ruge described, not without some derision, Marx’ spending drift:
“His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil can’t ride nor does he have a horse. Everything he sees he wants to “have” – a carriage, fancy clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon...”
In December of 1844, Marx received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family. Engels generously gave him his advance from his book The Condition of the Working Class in England. Another 750 francs was received from Cologne. Marx also raked in a 1,500 francs advance on a book he never wrote. In 1848 he received 6,000 francs from his father's estate, amounting to a total income of 15,000 francs between 1844 and 1848. All of these sums combined made for a well above average income – about ten times the average, according to North's estimates.
Not all of it was spent on useless riding apparel, however. Marx used part of his father’s inheritance to buy weapons for insurgent Belgian workers, as Jenny related in her memoirs. The couple was arrested but the Belgian authorities could not prove the allegations. They were released from custody but banned from the country – effective immediately.
By the end of 1848, most of the lenders were spent. Karl begged his in-laws for money, obtaining cash from Jenny’s mother and an uncle – large sums that quickly disappeared. In May 1849 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was shut down after one year and Marx was expelled from Germany.
In October 1849 Marx moved his children and heavily pregnant wife into a £6-a-month rental house in London – a price tag he could impossibly afford. Halfway 1850, the penniless family was evicted and, with their three young children and a baby, forced to take refuge in a tiny studio. Dangerously in debt, a desperate Marx dispatched Jenny to his uncle Philips. She reported home:
“Since I was alone with him for the first quarter of an hour and I wanted to go to the attaque as quickly as possible, I attacked him as directly and safely as possible with my whole project, skillful evasion, evasion was the answer ... I continued to play the positive, gave a positive explanation and positive lectures, but also went over to the necessary positive means.”
Whatever these “necessary positive means” may have been, uncle Philips had no intention of doing the couple any financial favors. Jenny was furious.
“Incidentally, when I see the local idyll, which is based purely on coffee sacks, tea boxes, haring cans and oil bottles, I want to become a murdering fire starter and roam the country with a torch!”
In December, the family moved into a one-bedroom apartment on Dean Street. Though Engels now regularly sent Marx much needed cash – and even pilfered money off the family business to do so – the household kept drowning in debt. After the birth of Franziska in March 1851, Marx wrote to Engels:
“The birth was easy, but [Jenny] is still in bed for domestic reasons more than physical ones. I have literally not a farthing in the house, but I have no shortage of bills from shopkeepers, the butcher, the baker, etc. ... I am up to my neck in the petty-bourgeois mire. And then into the bargain I am accused of exploiting the workers – and striving for a dictatorship. How horrible!”
In August 1851, he wrote to Weydemeyer:
“As you can imagine, my situation is very bleak. My wife will go under if things continue like this much longer. The constant worries, the most petty bourgeois struggles are wearing her out.”
Later that month, the editor of The New York Daily Tribune, a leading US newspaper, asked Marx to write a series of articles about the European Revolution. Marx was busy with his economic work, so he asked Engels to write the articles for him (but Marx would collect the checks). The articles – 19 in all – were a great success but hardly sufficed to pay off the family’s debts. According to his grandson, “Marx could not leave his house because he had pawned his clothing” in the winter of 1851-52.
For a man advocating the total abolishment of inheritance laws, Marx had no qualms about lusting after inheritances. When an elderly uncle of Jenny’s was gravely ill, Marx hoped “the dog” would die soon.
In the autumn of 1852, The Tribune asked Marx if he wanted to work as one of their European correspondents. Initially, Marx wrote his articles in German, and Engels translated them. Though he now had a somewhat steady income, he still had many outstanding debts. In June, a frightened Jenny wrote to her husband (who was out of town at the time), clearly in a state of panic over an abundance of angry creditors.
“[The landlady] can’t and doesn’t want to wait any longer, she really put me in a state of fright. She has already auctioned off everything. And in addition, baker, governess, tea grocer, grocer, and that terrible butcher man. I am in a state, Karl, I don’t know what to do. For all these people, I am exposed as a pure liar.”
By September 1852, the Marxes were surviving on a meager diet of potatoes, pressured by a small army of debtors.
“I did not write any articles for [The Tribune], because I did not have the pennies to go and read newspapers ... Also the baker, the milkman, the tea-guy, the greengrocer, old butcher's bills. How am I supposed to cope with all this devil shit?”
But with a relatively steady income from The Tribune – and regular infusions from Engels – the skies eventually began to clear. In 1854 Marx claimed to have reduced his debts from 80 to 50 pounds. Finally, the Marx family was doing well.
In 1855, Jenny’s ailing uncle died at last; he left her £100. In a letter to Engels. After Jenny's mother passed away, a small inheritance of “a few hundred talers" allowed the family to move to a larger home in October 1856, with a yearly rent of £36, a good price for a spacious house in an unpaved street. By December, Jenny’s money was “largely gone.” From 1857 there was a second servant in the house, Helene Demuth's younger sister, Marianne.
Alas, Charles Dana, The Tribune’s editor-in-chief, didn’t quite like Marx’ new articles as much as the early ones that were authored by Engels, and began refusing increasingly more. Marx threatened to leave for another newspaper, and negotiated that they pay him one article a week, regardless of whether it was published, thereby effectively cutting his original income in half.
In 1857 Dana asked Marx if he would like to contribute to the New American Cyclopedia. Marx would write about military history. Engels convinced him that this was his opportunity for a complete financial recovery. Together they produced 67 articles for the encyclopedia, 51 of which were written by Engels (although Marx assisted with some of the research). At the end of 1857, The Tribune was forced to cut back due to the ongoing economic crisis.
“When I wrote you my last letter from the top floor, my wife was being besieged by hungry wolves downstairs, all of whom were using the pretext of ‘heavy times’ to extort money from her, which she didn’t have.”
By 1858 Marx’ debt had again increased to well over 100 pounds; in July, Engels lent money to support him, but to no avail: on November 24, Marx wrote that he was, once again, flat broke. In February 1859 he complained to Joseph Weydemeyer about turning down “very lucrative offers” so as to “pursue my aim through thick and thin and not let bourgeois society turn me into a moneymaking machine,” only to later be puzzled at finding himself in yet another bout of dire straits. In September he couldn’t pay rent and school bills: “This week they’re threatening to cut off the gas and water.”
In the beginning of 1861, the ailing cooperation with The Tribune came to a halt. Marx went to see his uncle Philips in February and managed to obtain a £160 loan from him. He used the money to travel through Germany for eight weeks,spending time in Elberfeld, Barmen, Cologne, and two days in Trier to visit his seventy-four-year-old mother. She had quietly canceled his German debts, but that did little to change his feelings for her.
By the end of the year, Marx was £100 in debt and once more forced to appease his creditors with small sums. “It is astonishing,” he remarked, “how a loss of all income, together with debts that have never been completely cleared, has the old shit resurging in spite of the detailed help.”
With new debts and no income whatsoever, poverty soon returned, only this time to the point of threatening the family’s survival. A letter to Lasalle from April 28, 1862, suggests that, in this episode of dire need, Marx had degraded himself on occasion to doing the odd job:
“In order to avoid starvation during the last year I’ve had to do the most contemptible tools of the trade and have often not been able to write.”
Marx provided no further details, but his wage-labor was obviously insufficient. In June, he told Engels that the £50 he’d sent Marx only covered half of his debts:
“My wife tells me every day that she wishes she was in the grave with the children, and I really can't blame her, because the humiliation, torments and fears that we go through in this situation are indeed indescribable.”
Engels promptly sent him another £10, promising to send another £10 the next day, and more later. Six weeks later, Engels received a letter that included the bills for Marx’ piano installment, landlord, butcher (“my total quarterly income from the press!!”), and remaining creditors: “tea grocer, greengrocer, and whatever that devil's spawn is called.” But by now, Engels’ reserves had been depleted. “A nice hole has been shot in the new fiscal year,” he replied, still promising more aid as soon as circumstances permitted.
By September, Marx was so desperate that he intended to confide his children to some friends, to dismiss his two maids, to go into furnished rooms with his wife and look for employment. Marx applied for a job as a cashier at the local railway station but was refused because of his – very much indeed – illegible handwriting. It would remain the only time he applied for a job.
By the end of the year, Jenny travelled to Paris to meet with an old acquaintance who had grown rich but remained generous. Upon her arrival, Jenny learned that the old friend had unexpectedly died just a few days earlier. When Jenny returned home, thoroughly desperate, she was informed that Marianne, Helene’s sister, had died from a heart attack a few hours earlier.
In January 1863, Marx, oblivious to the fact that Engels had just informed him of the unexpected death of his mistress, complained that he again had no money to pay for school. “On top of that, the children have no clothes or shoes in which to go out,” he added. Engels was appalled at his friend’s insensitivity. Marx later apologized, explaining he was considering declaring bankruptcy so as to get certain creditors of his back. In June, Engels gave Marx another £250 while another friend had sent him the same amount.
In 1864 Marx received a £100 inheritance from his mother and a £824 inheritance from Wilhelm Wolff, one of his devout followers (Das Kapital is dedicated to him – but not to Engels). That is almost a £1,000 worth of inherited money – in a time when the upper ten percent of Englishmen were earning on average 72 pounds a year. It should have been enough to live comfortably for ten years, yet Marx succeeded in burning through the entire amount in just one year. He had just learned about the stock market, after all. In July of 1864, he enthusiastically informed Engels that he’d made £400 trading stocks. He was now eager to make more:
“If I had had the money during the last ten days, I would have been able to make a good deal on the stock exchange. The time has now come when with wit and very little money one can really make a killing in London.”
By 1865 Marx was again flat broke. He was offered to write a monthly column on the movements of the money-market, but declined for reasons we can only assume. On October 13, 1866, Marx begged Dr. Kugelmann, on of his followers, for help:
“As a result of my long illness and the many expenses it required, my economic circumstances have deteriorated so much that I am facing a financial crisis in the near future, a matter which, apart from its direct influences on me and my family, especially here in London where one has to keep up appearances, would also be politically ruinous for me.”
Marx adds that he is already paying off “small sums” at interest rates between 20 and 50 percent. Marx hopes Kugelmann could point him to someone willing to lend him 1,000 talers.
Fortunately for Marx, Engels was again in a position to save the day. He had been working his way up and become a partner of the family mill, and promptly agreed to pay off his friend’s debts with another £210 gift (four to five times the average yearly salary at the time). Three years later, in 1869, Engels would sell his share of the cotton mill and settle in London, close to his friend, where he agreed to pay Marx an annual “pension” of £350 (which placed him, income-wise, in the upper two percent). Still, Marx argued that he required an annual income of at least £400 to £500 to be able to live comfortably.
It should be noted that the above, extensive as it is, remains an incomplete list of all the sums ever lent or given to Karl Marx.
One is compelled to pause for a moment to consider the absurdity inherent in the idea that a man who is wholly incapable of managing his own finances, would actually be capable of designing an economic system of superabundance that would actually function. Considering how much money passed through his hands, it is simply stunning that he always managed to not be able to pay for the most basic necessities such as food and housing. The children needed piano lessons, the children needed dancing lessons, one has to “keep up appearances,” and when Jenny went on vacation in Trier to recover from the eroding stress inflicted upon her by an army of bourgeois devils – grocer, tea grocer, the baker, the butcher – she of course needed to be dressed in style, like any a person of good standing.
To be fair, Marx did not waste all of his money on frivolities. A large amount of his funds went directly to his revolutionary projects: the printing of pamphlets, newspapers and books, including helping revolutionary refugees who just arrived from Germany. Marx emerged remarkably generous when it came to helping fellow émigrés, even at moments when he himself was in dire straits. Eccarius, a tailor Marx valued highly as a writer because of his “purely materialistic understanding” on account of his capacity as a worker, received continuous help from Marx. Even in his darkest hours, he would help his friend to get some writing published to earn some money. When Eccarius fell sick in 1860 and became unable to work, Marx paid for his lodgings at a time when the collaboration with The Tribune was quickly petering out.
Interestingly, biographer Francis Wheen described Eccarius as someone whose “gauche and humorless manner antagonized almost all who had worked for him.”
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