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Reviewed by:
  • Love and Capital, Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of Revolution
  • Len Wallace
Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital, Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of Revolution (New York: Little, Brown and Company 2011)

Mary Gabriel informs us that when Marx’s first volume of Capital was finally published after years of torturous research, rewrites, and frustrating delays, during which he physically and emotionally drove himself into the ground, with dire effects on his family through years of poverty, the great revolutionary critique unveiling the capitalist system and bourgeois political economy fell on deaf ears. One young Marx sympathizer who often visited the London home (in part to court one of the daughters) stated that, when delivered the book he felt as if an elephant had been delivered to him and that he didn’t know what to do with it. Another ally delivered to the household an enormous statue of the head of Zeus as a form of congratulations. The flabbergasted Marxes did not know what to make of it. Perhaps that bust was an anticipation of what was to become of Marx’s legacy, artistically expressed in the enormous granite head erected in the 1950s at the family grave site in Highgate cemetery. The symbol stares down almost godlike, celebrating the man’s powerful intellect and reflecting a 20th-century Marxism considering itself monolithic, unmoving, orthodox. The names of the members of his family and household buried with [End Page 339] him are hardly noticeable. The former grave was simple and unadorned.

The central figure of Gabriel’s well researched book still remains Karl Marx, but more than any other work it has placed him alongside the influence of his lifelong partner, lover, spouse, Jenny Westphalen, too often given side mention in Marx biographies. It also places their lives within a grand narrative sweep of revolutionary history from the philosophical stirrings of German’s Young Hegelians through Europe’s national and class rebellions of 1848, years of counter-revolution, the rise and dissolution of the International Workingman’s Association, the US Civil War, Fenian uprisings, and the Paris Commune. Great attention is paid to the political community that participated.

What is particularly important in Gabriel’s work is her ability to cast events in the light of human characters in their richness, foibles, and folly, detailing the struggling conditions of daily lives just to survive while attempting to build a movement and hopefully a different society. Reading the intimate details of the Marx household one would almost think one is reading a Dickensian novel. Karl Marx, plagued like Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, forced to disguise himself to avoid a host of creditors at the door so that he can slip out and visit the library to continue his writings in peace; Jenny, often deserted, trying to keep up Victorian bourgeois appearances while forced to pawn clothes, silver, her children’s toys; the riotous calamity of boisterous, artistic and intellectual daughters forced into the situation of many young women of the Victorian era to find husbands in order to survive economically. Their home is invaded with the wildest array of flamboyant revolutionaries, utopians, self-serving politicians, the occasional police spy, and starving emigrés from failed rebellions. The dust, mire and smells of London’s slums, the emotional stresses of such poverty, the constant appeals both Karl and Jenny made for money to pay for medicines, and burial of children at the very moments when Marx is plagued by both illness and the seemingly unending bitter personal attacks made upon him by opponents of both left and right often make for difficult reading.

Gabriel’s history is just as much the story of the building of a revolutionary socialist movement as it is an intimate examination of one man’s key role. It is an insight into the difficulties of holding together divergent groups, associations and rival factions of those who spoke in the name of the working class, the petty jealousies and backbiting within the movement, intellectual debates, the endless hours spent in meetings, raising monies, propagandizing, and publishing tracts, and the enormous toll taken in the process.

Gabriel’s account is...

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