‘Many strange stories have been told about Karl Marx…but to those who knew [him] no legend is funnier than that common one which pictures him a morose, unbending, unapproachable man, a sort of Jupiter, even hurling thunder, never known to smile, sitting aloof and alone in Olympus. This picture of the cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, of a man brimming over with good humour, whose hearty laugh was infectious and irresistible, of the kindliest and most sympathetic of companions, is a standing wonder – and amusement – to those who knew him’.

So wrote Eleanor, Marx’s youngest daughter, in A Few Stray Notes recalling happier days in the family household. Opponents would no doubt see things differently as Marx usually took no prisoners, and even with acquaintances patience for Marx was not always a virtue.

Eleanor recalls how she wanted to ‘run away to join a man-of-war’ and how Marx, or Mohr as his intimates called him, assured her that while it was possible she ought to keep it a secret until she could develop her plans. Mohr would read to his children: Homer, the Niebelungen Lied, Don Quijote, and the Arabian Nights, were favourites while Shakespeare – Marx peppered his work with apt quotations from his plays - was part of the family’s staple diet. 

Born in 1818 into a well-to-do Jewish family in Trier, Germany, Marx attended the University of Bonn ostensibly to read law yet, to the hair-pulling of his father, spent much of his time socialising and debt-ridden before transferring to Berlin. There he met various young radicals such as Moses Hess, and the atheist lecturer, Bruno Bauer, who introduced Marx to the writings of Hegel, the university’s professor of philosophy until his death in 1831.

During this period he fell for an aristocrat, Jenny von Westphalen, ‘the most beautiful girl in Trier’. They were married in 1843: Jenny’s white-knuckle ride with Karl, involving exile, bailiffs and pawnbrokers, and a unique contribution to mankind, had begun. She would later write: ‘the memory of the days I spent in his little study copying his scrawled articles is among the happiest of my life’.

Marx hoped for a lectureship, but finding university careers closed to radicals he moved into journalism and was appointed editor of the liberal Rheinische Zeitung in October 1842, during which he criticised Prussian absolutism and defended the freedom of the press.

After the Prussian authorities banned the paper in January 1843, Marx moved to more liberal pastures, Paris, to join a journal-in-exile, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher but only one edition was published before Marx and Ruge, the founder, fell out (many of Marx’s acquaintances were brief), but he did befriend the Romantic poet Heine (whose weaknesses, as he saw them, he overlooked), and met Engels. Engels showed Marx what would be his The Condition of the Working Class in England (he later donated the book’s royalties to Marx), and established an historic and lifelong friendship.

Marx’s economic writings can be considered in the following chronological sequence: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Grundrisse, and Capital, and it was in Paris that Marx completed the former. However, he was deported at the instigation of the Prussian envoy in 1845 for libel, and later exiled from Belgium by King Leopold I in March 1848 for conspiracy, though not before writing The German Ideology and finishing The Communist Manifesto.

He returned to Germany during the revolutionary turmoil that was 1848 and in June, leaving himself penniless, launched the daily Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a democratic voice, with money from an inheritance. This newspaper, though embroiled naturally in local events was internationalist from the start, paying close attention to developments in neighbouring France and the Chartists in Britain.

Police arrested workers’ leaders, while Marx addressed a mass meeting of workers in Cologne’s old market place. Martial law was declared and the newspaper was forced to suspend publication. The final issue was printed in a defiant red ink, the editors calling for the ‘emancipation of the working class!’ More lawsuits, alleging ‘incitement to revolt’, were issued against Marx. Unimpressed, Marx stood for president of the Cologne Workers’ Association in October 1848 and won.

We know of the 30 fruitful years Marx spent researching Capital in the British Library, but it was in agitation that Marx was at his best. He appeared before magistrates in July 1848 charged with ‘insulting or libelling the chief public prosecutor’ whom he had publicly accused of brutality, and stood trial the following February. Never one to mince words, he addressed the crowded courtroom:

‘I prefer to follow the great events of the world, to analyse the course of history, than to occupy myself with local bosses, with the police and prosecuting magistrates. However great these gentlemen may imagine themselves in their own fancy, they are nothing, absolutely nothing, in the gigantic battles of the present time…it is the duty of the press to come forward on behalf of the oppressed in its immediate neighbourhood…The first duty of the press now is to undermine all the foundations of the existing political state of affairs’.

He was acquitted amid loud applause. However, after another court appearance (the following day), the Prussian authorities (in May) recommended Marx be deported and he left for Paris a month later. By August he was forced to leave France again – and sailed to Dover.

Many figures inspired Marx, such as Prometheus (in Aeschylus’ play) who sought to displace the tyrannical gods by vesting their powers among men. In political economy, the work of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill was instrumental in Marx’s forging of Capital. Their shortcomings proceeded from a mistaken recognition that capitalism was natural and here forever.

In Marxist philosophy, it was the work of two outstanding individuals, Hegel (1770-1831), the ‘mighty thinker’ as Marx later called him, and Feuerbach (1804-1872), that Gulliver of materialism, which laid the philosophical foundation stones of what today we call Marxism: Marx mined their riches and revolutionised them.

In The Science of Logic, Hegel, argues that everything around us is dialectical; instead of considering our surroundings as finite, complete, stable, and ultimate they are in fact changeable and transient. A ‘whole’ consisted of its parts, and counterpart(s); and they comprise the ‘whole’, when taken together (he gives the human body as an example). Central to dialectics, too, is motion: ‘Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at work’.

In Hegel’s philosophy, however, nature was derived from thinking, ideas, and God so what was their origin? ‘Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity’, Engels stated later. ‘With one blow it pulverised the contradiction…it placed materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence…One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians’ (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy).

Credit for turning Hegel’s idealism on its head belongs to Feuerbach, his own pupil, and he earned Marx’s gratitude: ‘I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and – if I may use the word – love which I feel for you’ Marx wrote to him in 1844. ‘You have provided a philosophical basis for socialism’.

For Feuerbach, however, nature simply ‘existed’ and warranted ‘admiration’. In Capital Marx insists that nature must be respected ‘for man is part of nature’, yet also stresses, in The German Ideology, that even natural objects were the products of historical circumstance and human practice. For example, ‘the cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well-known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age has it become a ‘sensuous certainty’.

Marx gave a revolutionary voice, using the method of dialectics, which he separated from Hegel’s theological content, to those historical and material circumstances, and in this his role is unique. In real terms his contribution to our understanding of society, as one based on material, or economic, class interests has made a universal impact particularly in the field of history. Moreover, the one thread which runs through Marx is that ordinary human beings must struggle for what is rightly theirs, and this philosophy is the starting point for the downtrodden in today’s society.

At Marx’s graveside in Highgate, London (on 17th March 1883), Engels paid a glowing tribute to his brother-in-arms when he told the gathered mourners that ‘fighting was his element’. Why is this important?

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte Marx wrote that while ‘men make their own history…they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1934:10). Life is not what you make it. Yet, historical materialism also dismisses the notion that man and society is held in check, throughout the ages, by omnipresent conditions. Such would be a mechanistic interpretation of history, and one which cannot explain how circumstances change from one period to another. Those circumstances which shape and form our consciousness are not independent of human activity. Rather, man is both a product and changer of circumstances. ‘Circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances’ (The German Ideology).

There is, then, a dialectical relationship between those definite conditions into which we are born and which play a role in shaping us on the one hand, and practical activity which changes those conditions on the other and, notwithstanding his recognition of Marx’s personal vitality, this is the real significance of Engel’s tribute.

We all enjoy quoting Marx, but his own favourite was Terence’s ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ and it is a maxim by which he lived. Marx loved a good sing-song, German folk-tales – in one letter Engels asks him to return his copy of Grimm - Greek art and mythology (he read Aeschylus in the original), and thought the world of Shakespeare (nobody, he said, portrayed money better – see Timon of Athens).

The Marx family, as countless others in Victorian London, was plagued by ill-health and persistent poverty. When Franziska, Marx’s third daughter, died of bronchitis in 1852 aged one-year, a neighbour lent the family £2 to pay for a coffin.

Destitution was partly relieved by work for the New York Herald Tribune and by Engels’ renowned support. In April 1855, the fine-spirited Edgar, Marx’s 8-year-old son’ died of tuberculosis. Marx clearly struggled against the tide during his lifetime, but the death of his little jester was different. In a tear-rendering letter to the German socialist, Lassalle, three months after Edgar’s death, Marx was still inconsolable: ‘The death of my child has shattered me to the very core…My poor wife is almost completely broken down’.

Marx continued to fight, of course - Capital progressed and he was elected to the General Council of the First International in 1864 – but history will forgive him if a light was dimmed in this affable, cultured man.

Eleanor concludes her Few Stray Notes, quoting Macbeth: her parents ‘sleep well’, after ‘life’s fitful fever’: ‘If she was an ideal woman’, she says of her mother, ‘he – well, he was a man, take him for all in all, we shall not look back upon his like again’.

Indeed, we shall not.