London, London. And there was Marx, who came here after the botched revolution of 1848, living penniless in guest houses and rooms. What poverty he knew! What desperation! Cholera took away one of his children; another died of pneumonia. Still, it barely touched him.
'He lives the life of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely ...', said a Prussian police spy. This could be a description of me, W. says, were it not for the word 'intellectual'.
'Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do'. A great deal of work - if only we had that, W. says. If only the sense of something urgent to communicate, something on which would steer us through the days and nights!
'He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world' ... If only we could sleep after such great labours, W. says. If only knew what it was to sleep, really sleep, after the righteousness of work!
'When you enter the Marx flat your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around a first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything is covered with finger-thick dust; it is dangerous to sit down. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, and everything in the greatest of disorder'. - 'Marx lived in squalor, like you', W. says.
And Marx was writing great articles explaining why the French revolution of 1848 hadn't failed; why Louis Napoleon's victory in the Presidential elections signified to the proletariat, the overthrow of bourgeois republicanism. Marx set up a Political Economic Review in which he embarked on wild jeremiads against would-be allies.
'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against out self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', Marx wrote. 'A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little manikin', that's what the old Marx called Rudolf Schramm. 'Ferret face': that's what he called Arnold Ruge ...
Ah, that's what we need, W. and I agree: a Marx to abuse us! But when it came to political work, Marx was an advocate of patience. While the other exiles were busy planning world revolution, he spent his days in the reading room of the British Museum, preparing arms for the fight which would come not today nor tomorrow, but years hence, decades hence ...
'England, the country that turns whole nations in proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace ... England seems to be the rock against the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb': thus Marx on New Year's Day, 1849 ... And he was right, wasn't he?, W. says. It's the rock against which we are breaking ourselves ...
The metropolitan proletariat, which Marx thought was England's great strength, met its match in the self-confident bourgeoisie. 'History is the judge - its executioner, the proletarian', Marx wrote. But the English proletariat never landed its blow, and the 'bourgeois cosmos' remained intact. 'Drat the British!', W. wrote on his deathbed. Drat them indeed ... Drat London!
