We have a criticism for Karl Marx, but maybe not one you might expect.

A friend of SorryWatch was reading the correspondence between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and came across a remarkable 1863 exchange of letters they knew would startle us.

As this small tale begins, Marx was living in London with his wife Jenny von Westphalen and their children. Engels was living in Manchester with his long-time companion Mary Burns and her sister Lizzy Burns. Engels and Burns didn’t believe marriage was a benign institution, and they didn’t marry, but they had been together for 20 years, and Engels sometimes wrote of Burns as “my wife.” Marx and Engels were longtime friends and colleagues, and Engels provided a great deal of financial support to Marx, who wasn’t getting rich off his writings.

Little is known of Mary Burns, who left no writings – some say she was illiterate – and about whom little was written. No photographs are known. People speculate and deduce. She might have been a textile factory worker, a street fruit peddler, a domestic servant… She seems to have been a radical Irish patriot (Ireland then under British rule), and traveled with Engels to Ireland, where he was horrified to behold the reality of famine. Wikipedia says (or said last time we looked), “It is likely that Burns guided Engels through the region, showing him the worst districts of Salford and Manchester for his research for The Condition of the Working Class in England.” Some have tried to restore her to what is likely to be her just place in history or to uphold her as a little-known founder of socialism.

In 1863, Engels wrote to Marx, telling him that Burns had suddenly died. (This letter isn’t in the collected correspondence.)

Marx wrote back promptly, with a brief acknowledgement of Burns’s death and a quick pivot to his personal financial straits. With a swipe at his own wife. Whose outbursts almost keep him from working.

Dear Engels,

The news of Mary’s death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.

The devil alone knows why nothing but ill-luck should dog everyone in our circle just now. I no longer know which way to turn either. My attempts to raise money in France and Germany have come to nought, and it might, of course, have been foreseen that £15 couldn’t help me to stem the avalanche for more than a couple of weeks. Aside from the fact that no one will let us have anything on credit — save for the butcher and baker — which will also cease at the end of this week — I am being dunned for the school fees, the rent, and by the whole gang of them. Those who got a few pounds on account cunningly pocketed them, only to fall upon me with redoubled vigour. On top of that, the children have no clothes or shoes in which to go out. In short, all hell is let loose, as I clearly foresaw when I came up to Manchester and despatched my wife to Paris as a last coup de désespoir. If I don’t succeed in raising a largish sum through a loan society or life assurance… [details], then the household here has barely another two weeks to go.

It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time. But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, au bout du compte, what else can I do? In the whole of London there’s not a single person to whom I can so much as speak my mind, and in my own home I play the silent stoic to counterbalance the outbursts from the other side. It’s becoming virtually impossible to work under such circumstances. Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life … ? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of ‘civilised men’ under the pressure of certain circumstances.

Salut.

Your
K. M.

The hell you say, Karl.

Marx was horribly unfeeling in his response to Engels’ news of Burns’s death. He was indeed in bad financial shape, which suggests to us that he could have written TWO SEPARATE LETTERS, one of sympathy and the other his plea for help. We also think it would’ve been nice if he hadn’t made nasty remarks about how his wife turned him into a “silent stoic.” Also, saying it would’ve been better if Marx’s mother died instead of Engels’ wife… um, doesn’t seem like comfort.

Several days later, Engels replied.

Dear Marx,

You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner.

All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs afflict me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. Soit!

You know the state of my finances. You also know that I do all I can to drag you out of the mire. But I cannot raise the largish sum of which you speak, as you must also know. Three things can be done:…

[Marx could try a loan society; Marx could buy life insurance and borrow against it; Engels might be able to get £25 for Marx and also write him “a bill” for £60 if they can make sure Engels won’t have to pay it back for 6 months.]

I can see no other possibility.

So, let me know what steps you take and I will see to my side of it.

Your
F. E.

In Engels’s reply he sadly points out the casual nature of his friend’s condolences, and how hurtful he found it, before turning his focus to helping with Marx’s money woes.

It was a week and a half (an unusually long time for them) before Marx replied to that letter and its sad and reproachful start.

Dear Frederick,

I thought it advisable to allow some time to elapse before replying. Your position, on the one hand, and mine, on the other, made it difficult to view the situation ‘dispassionately’.

It was very wrong of me to write you that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness. As my wife and children will testify, I was as shattered when your letter arrived (first thing in the morning) as if my nearest and dearest had died. But, when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme. The landlord had put a broker in my house, the butcher had protested a bill, coal and provisions were in short supply, and little Jenny was confined to bed. Generally, under such circumstances, my only recourse is cynicism. What particularly enraged me was the fact that my wife believed I had failed to give you an adequate account of the real state of affairs. [How can a person WORK in such an atmosphere?]

Indeed, your letter was welcome to me in as much as it opened her eyes to the ‘non possumus’ for she knows full well that I didn’t wait for your advice before writing to my uncle; that I couldn’t, in London, have recourse to Watts whose person and office are both in Manchester; that since Lassalle’s latest dunning notice I have been unable to draw a bill in London and, lastly, that £25 in February would not enable us to live in January, still less avert the impending crisis. As it was impossible for you to help us, despite my having told you we were in the same plight as the Manchester workers, she could not but recognise the non possumus, and this is what I wanted, since an end has got to be put to the present state of affairs — the long ordeal by fire, ravaging heart and head alike, and, on top of that, the waste of precious time and the keeping up of false appearances, this last being as harmful to myself as it is to the children. Since then we have been through three weeks such as have at last induced my wife to fall in with a suggestion I had made long ago and which, for all the unpleasantness it involves, not only represents the only way out, but is also preferable to the life we have led for the past three years, the last one in particular, and which will, besides, restore our self-esteem. [Thanks for making the woman see reason! Say one little thing in Latin and she flies into a rage!]

I shall write and tell all our creditors (with the exception of the landlord) that, unless they leave me alone, I shall declare myself insolvent by the filing of a Bill in the Court of Bankruptcy. This does not, of course, apply to the landlord, who has a right to the furniture, which he may keep. My two elder children will obtain employment as governesses through the Cunningham family. Lenchen is to enter service elsewhere, and I, along with my wife and little Tussy, shall go and live in the same City Model Lodging House in which Red Wolff once resided with his family.

[details about bills and not being able to send the kids to school] But by adopting the above plan I shall, I think, at least attain tranquillity without intervention of any kind by third parties.

Finally, a matter unconnected with the above. I’m in considerable doubt about the section in my book that deals with machinery. I have never quite been able to see in what way self-actors changed spinning, or rather, since steam power was already in use before then, how it was that the spinner, despite steam power, had to intervene with his motive power.

I’d be grateful if you could explain this.

Apropos. Unbeknown to me, my wife wrote and asked Lupus for £1 for immediate necessities. He sent her two. It’s distasteful to me, but factum est factum. [She hates it when I say that!]

Your
K. M.

Abarbanel is dead. Sasonow, too, has died in Geneva.

That next letter from Marx is not great, either. He does say it was “very wrong” of him to have written as he did, but then he’s on to excuses, complaints about Jenny’s unfairness to him, the state of his marriage, and guilt-tripping. He was FORCED TO BE CYNICAL! But DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME! I will just declare bankruptcy and send my children out as servants! No prob! It’ll be fine!

Dear Moor,

Thank you for being so candid. You yourself have now realised what sort of impression your last letter but one had made on me. One can’t live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death. I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not yet been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week; I couldn’t get it out of my head. Never mind. Your last letter made up for it and I’m glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.

To turn to your affairs. [Details about various schemes to get money for Marx, including a risky move that gets Marx £100, which Engels hopes won’t get him (Engels) in trouble.]

…

Your
F. E.

Engels accepted Marx’s lousy, self-centered apology, and forgave. People often accept inferior apologies, when they badly want them.

Marx replied:

Dear Frederick,

[After thanking Engels for the latest financial contribution] …I am well aware what a risk you were running in thus affording us such great and unexpected help. I can’t tell you how grateful I am, although I myself, in my inner forum, did not require any fresh proof of your friendship to convince me of its self-sacrificing nature. If, by the by, you could have seen my children’s joy, it would have been a fine reward for you.

I can tell you now, too, without beating about the bush that, despite the straits I’ve been in during the past few weeks, nothing oppressed me so much as the fear that our friendship might be severed. Over and over again, I told my wife that the mess we were in was as nothing to me compared with the fact that these bourgeois pinpricks and her peculiar exasperation had, at such a moment, rendered me capable of assailing you with my private needs instead of trying to comfort you. [The woman nearly ruined everything!] Domestic peace was consequently much disrupted, and the poor woman had to suffer for something of which she was in fact innocent, for women are wont to ask for the impossible. She did not, of course, have any inkling of what I had written, but a little reflection should have told her that something of the kind must be the result. [She had to know she forced me to be a selfish jerk to you!] Women are funny creatures, even those endowed with much intelligence. In the morning my wife wept over Marie [Burns] and your loss, thus becoming quite oblivious to her own misfortunes, which culminated that very day, and in the evening she felt that, except for us, no one in the world was capable of suffering unless they had children and the broker in the house.

[Follows many words on machinery, tools, power, and one “Izzy,” a “braggart” who has been ripping off their work.]

Marx’s next letter affirms his high regard for Engels and his friendship, partly demonstrated by how much Marx blames his wife for the whole business. “Women are funny creatures…”? Not like dispassionate male political philosophers, no no. We’re starting to feel more sympathy for the Engels-Burns position on marriage here.

What can we understand about Marxism or Communism from this? Probably not a thing. We can understand interesting things about individual people from this, not the masses of people.

(Thanks to Joseph G.)