A Good Hater
Karl Marx : A Study in Fanaticism. By E. H. Carr. (Dont. 12s. 6d.)
No biographer of Marx may .hope to please everybody ; but Mr. Carr's work can at least claim very painstaking thoroughness and a sincere attempt to be objective. As he recognizes at the outset, that will not be sufficient either for the Marxists, or the anti-Marxists of our day. But I am not sure that he need equally have discounted in advance the verdict of what he calls the pseudo-Marxists, meaning the various persons of _academic eminence who, " though unable to don the shining raiment of Marxist orthodoxy, clutch pathetically in their hands a few shreds of the precious robe." . For while differing from him on this or that point, most of them would surely concede that he has done a good piece of work.
Marx's life falls into two sections—the active and adventur- ous part, which ended with his final flight from Germany in May, 1849, and the studious part, to which he settled down in London till his death in 1883. There are sub-divisions in both sections, but that is the main parting. And one of the first things to seize is that he arrived at his complicated theory of history and economics, not in the second period, but in the first. He formed it, that is to say, as the result, not of prolonged bookish study in the British Museum, but of fierce hustling contacts with the world of affairs ; and the business of the bookish period was merely to elaborate arguments and proofs for positions already adopted. How he was led to adopt them, Mr. Carr shows very well, on the whole, in his sixth chapter ; where he makes it his object " not to expound or criticize or refute Marxism, but to show how it came to be what it is."
Marx's most striking feature throughout life was his egotistic cocksureness. At all stages and in all contexts, he felt certain that his own opinion was the right one. This might not have mattered, if his opinions had always been wrong, or even if they had been (as most fanatics' opinions are) mere echoes of the opinions of others. But. Marx had a high intelligence ; he always did his own thinking; and beyond question he made serious additions to the world's stock of ideas. It is the com- bination of thought with intolerance that distinguishes him. Mr. Carr describes him as exemplifying the truth, " that fanaticism is as easily compatible with intellect as with emotion." Omit " easily," and that is a fair statement.
Bigotry for any creed is seldom an agreeable trait ; but bigotry for the creed that one's individual ideas are invariably right, is not easily separable from mere self-assertion. Nor was it in Marx's case. It is perfectly clear that in whatever committee or council or conference he might be engaged, his great aim was to " boss " it. If he succeeded, well ; if not, he would rather break it up than let it go forward under other auspices. Working men would stand these imperious ways from one whose learning and intelligence were in a different class from their own. Middle-class educated men would not, and the history of Marx's career is one- long story of middle- class friends whom he converted into enemies. Engels is almost the sole exception. Rutenberg, Bruno Bauer, Ruge, Prouditon, Weitling, Herwegh, Lassalle, Kinkel, Vogt, Freiligrath, Schweitzer, and Bakunin—such is the imposing catalogue of successive ex-associates, for whom his bitterest wrath and scorn were reserved. If ever a man had a genius for hatred, Marx had ; but to draw out its sourest vials two qualifications were needed. One was to have been his ally ; the other was to have given him money. For the last thirty- three years of his life he was incessantly sponging on his friends and acquaintances. He never earned a living, and never seriously attempted to. But those who gave him money • earned no grace or gratitude ; on the contrary, he felt it as an assertion of their superiority and instinctively hated them for it. That played a large part in his miserable attitude to Lassalle ; which, as revealed in his correspondence, is in all its meanness and insincerity one of the more repellent revelations of his character. The one exception here also was Engels ; because, just as he never failed to defer to Marx's opinion, so be never concealed his sincere conviction that in giving to so great a man all the favour was on the recipient's side and only good fortune on the donor's. -
There were some inconsistencies in Marx's temperament.
He was devoted to his wife (though he committed her to a terrible existence), and his three daughters adored him. On the other hand he was a bad son to both his parents, and his
later references to his mother in his letters are hopes that she may die that. money may come to him. Anyone reading the sordid sequence of his squabbles and feuds, unrelieved by devotion to a single person save Engels outside his home,
might think that he need not look beyond his own heart for his theoretic faith in the virtues of hatred. But Mr. Carr brings some evidence to show that he imbibed it from the poet Herwegh, who as a Romantic got it from Byron. And his comments on the class-hatred doctrine are just : " It was orie of those discoveries which are doomed from the first to instant success. It combined all the advantages. It was romantically passionate and abstrusely philosophical. It voiced the.moral protest of the reformer and the jealous resentment of the under-dog. Its massive simplicity made a universal appeal. But it is odd—and characteristic of the neglect of psychology common both to Utopian and to ' scientific ' Socialism—that class-hatred should have been regarded by Marx as the instrument destined to lead mankind into the perfect communist commonwealth."
Here, again, one word is excessive—" universal." There have always been leading Socialists (even such a militant as Keir Hardie, for example) whom Marx's hate-doctrine repelled.
Mr. Carr's concluding pages bring out an aspect of Marxism, which until the last 20 years had been fully grasped, perhaps, by few. That is the depth of his anti-individualism. For him the unit that he cares about is always the group, the class. He " was the first important thinker for three centuries, who did not deign to pay service to the fetish of individual liberty." The mass-will, mass-rule, mass-dictatorship—these "slogans" of Communism and Fascism ane—are what Marx foreshadowed. And they have come, as he thought that they must, from mass-
production. In such broad senses he was a prophet.
R. C. K. ENSOR.
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