It was as if scales fell from my eyes. For the first time I saw clearly the logic of world history and could trace the apparently so contradictory phenomena of the development of society and ideas to their material origins.
I felt dazzled, and the impression remained for years. He was remarkably skilled in making use of the knowledge and observations accumulated during years of intellectual work. You could question him at any time on any subject and get the most detailed answer you could wish for, always accompanied by philosophical reflexions of general application. His brain was like a man-of-war in port under steam, ready to launch into any sphere of thought. There is no doubt that Capital reveals to us a mind of astonishing vigour and superior knowledge.
But for me, as for all those who knew Marx intimately, neither Capital nor any other of his works shows all the magnitude of his genius or the extent of his knowledge. He was highly superior to his own works.
I worked with Marx; I was only the scribe to whom he dictated, but that gave me the opportunity of observing his manner of thinking and writing. Work was easy for him, and at the same time difficult. Easy because his mind found no difficulty in embracing the relevant facts and considerations in their completeness.
But that very completeness made the exposition of his ideas a matter of long and arduous work He saw not only the surface, but what lay beneath it. He examined all the constituent parts in their mutual action and reaction; he isolated each of those parts and traced the history of its development. Then he went on from the thing to its surroundings and observed the reaction of one upon the other.
He traced the origin of the object, the changes, evolutions and revolutions it went through, and proceeded finally to its remotest effects. He did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings: he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion. His intention was to disclose the whole of that world in its manifold and continually varying action and reaction.
Marx was never satisfied with his work — he was always making some improvements and he always found his rendering inferior to the idea he wished to convey Marx had the two qualities of a genius: he had an incomparable talent for dissecting a thing into its constituent parts, and he was past master at reconstituting the dissected object out of its parts, with all its different forms of development, and discovering their mutual inner relations.
His demonstrations were not abstractions — which was the reproach made to him by economists who were themselves incapable of thinking; his method was not that of the geometrician who takes his definitions from the world around him but completely disregards reality in drawing his conclusions.
Capital does not give isolated definitions or isolated formulas; it gives a series of most searching analyses which bring out the most evasive shades and the most elusive gradations. Marx begins by stating the plain fact that the wealth of a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production presents itself as an enormous accumulation of commodities; the commodity, which is a concrete object, not a mathematical abstraction, is therefore the element, the cell, of capitalist wealth.
Marx now seizes on the commodity, turns it over and over and inside out, and pries out of it one secret after another that official economists were not in the least aware of, although those secrets are more numerous and profound than all the mysteries of the Catholic religion.
Having examined the commodity in all its aspects, considers it in its relations to its fellow commodity, in exchange. Then he goes on to its production and the historic prerequisites for its production. He considers the forms which commodities assume and shows how they pass from one to another, how one form is necessarily engendered by the other. He expounds the logical course of development of phenomena with such perfect art that one could think he had imagined it.
And yet it is a product of reality, a reproduction of the actual dialectics of the commodity. Marx was always extremely conscientious about his work: he never gave a fact or figure that was not borne out by the best authorities. He was never satisfied with secondhand information, he always went to the source itself, no matter how tedious the process.
To make sure of a minor fact he would go to the British Museum and consult books there. His critics were never able to prove that he was negligent or that he based his arguments on facts which did not bear strict checking. His habit of always going to the very source made him read authors who were very little known and whom he was the only one to quote.
Capital contains so many quotations from little-known authors that one might think Marx wanted to show off how well read he was. He had no intention of the sort. Marx was just as conscientious from the literary as from the scientific point of view. Not only would he never base himself on a fact he was not absolutely sure of, he never allowed himself to talk of a thing before he had studied it thoroughly. He did not publish a single work without repeatedly revising it until he had found the most appropriate form.
He could not bear to appear in public without thorough preparation. It would have been a torture for him to show his manuscripts before giving them the finishing touch. He felt so strongly about this that he told me one day that he would rather burn his manuscripts than leave them unfinished. His method of working often imposed upon him tasks the magnitude of which the reader can hardly imagine.
Thus, in order to write the twenty pages or so on English factory legislation in Capital he went through a whole library of Blue Books containing reports of commissions and factory Inspectors in England and Scotland. He read them from cover to cover, as can be seen from the pencil marks in them. He considered those reports as the most important and weighty documents for the study of the capitalist mode of production.
He paid them this brilliant tribute in the Preface to Capital. From these Blue Books Marx drew a wealth of factual information. Many members of Parliament to whom they are distributed use them only as shooting targets, judging the striking power of the gun by the number of pages pierced. Others sell them by the pound, which is the most reasonable thing they can do, for this enabled Marx to buy them cheap from the old paper dealers in Long Acre whom he used to visit to look through their old books and papers.
Professor Beesley said that Marx was the man who made the greatest use of English official inquiries and brought them to the knowledge of the world. He did not know that before Engels took numerous documents from the Blue Books in writing his book on the condition of the working class in England. To get to know and love the heart that beat within the breast of Marx the scholar you had to see him when he had closed his books and notebooks and was surrounded by his family, or again on Sunday evenings in the society of his friends.
He then proved the pleasantest of company, full of wit and humour, with a laugh that came straight from the heart.
His black eyes under the arches of his bushy brews sparkled with pleasure and malice whenever he heard a witty saying or a pertinent repartee. He was a loving, gentle and indulgent father. There was never even a trace of the bossy parent in his relations with his daughters, whose love for him was extraordinary.
He never gave them an order, but asked them to do what he wished as a favour or made them feel that they should not do what he wanted to forbid them.
And yet a father could seldom have had more docile children than he. Marx used to spend hours playing with his children. These still remember the sea battles in a big basin of water and the burning of the fleets of paper ships that he made for them and set on fire to their great joy. Moreover, he could — and did — write fluently in all of these different languages. American History Ancient History Literature. Friedrich Engels embraced foreign languages and used his polyglot skills to spread the message of socialism across Europe As might be expected of a man whose mission was to try and educate the international working class about socialism and Marxist theory, Friedrich Engels was extremely adept at speaking different languages.
Some hours later, when we were standing at the door waiting for him, we saw him coming across the little field opposite his home. He was flourishing his walking stick in the air and singing, and laughing all over his face. In September Engels moved to London, settling near the home of Marx, whom he saw daily. A generous friend and gay host, the fun-loving Engels spent the remaining 25 years of his life in London, enjoying good food, good wine, and good company.
He also worked hard, doing the things he loved: writing, maintaining contact and a voluminous correspondence with radicals everywhere, and—after Marx's death in —laboring over the latter's notes and manuscripts, bringing out volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital in and , respectively. Engels died of cancer on Aug. Following his instructions, his body was cremated and his ashes strewn over the ocean at Eastbourne, his favorite holiday resort.
Engels was medium-height, slender, and athletic. His body was disciplined by swimming, fencing, and riding. He dressed and acted like an elegant English gentleman. In Manchester, where he maintained two homes—one for appearances, as befitted a member of the local stock exchange, and another for his Irish mistress—he rode to hounds with the English gentry, whom he despised as capitalists but by whose antic behavior he was sardonically amused.
Engels had a brilliant mind and was quick, sharp, and unerring in his judgments. His versatility was astonishing. A successful businessman, he also had a grasp of virtually every branch of the natural sciences, biology, chemistry, botany, and physics.
He was a widely respected specialist on military affairs. He mastered numerous languages, including all the Slavic ones, on which he planned to write a comparative grammar.
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