Karl Marx

When Marx refused to be present at the Geneva congress on the ground that the completion of his main work--up to the moment he had done only minor things, he thought -seemed more important for the cause of the workers than anything he could do at the congress, he was engaged in polishing and putting the final touches to the first volume. At first this final work, which began on the 1st of January 1366, proceeded quickly, for "naturally it gave me pleasure to lick the club clean after so many birth pangs".

These birth pangs had lasted approximately twice as many years as Nature needs months for the production of a human being, and Marx was justified in saying that probably no work of the sort had ever been written under more difficult circumstances. Again and again he had fixed a time limit for its completion. In 1851 it was "five weeks", and in 1859 it was "six weeks", but always the time limit had been ignored owing to his merciless selfcriticism and the tremendous conscientiousness which continually drove him to make new investigations, neither of which could be shaken by even the most impatient exhortations of his best friend.

At the end of 1865 the work was finished, but only in the form of an enormous manuscript which could have been prepared for publication by no one apart from himself, not even by Engels. From January 1866 to March 1867 Marx turned out the first volume of Capital in the classic form in which we have it to-day, as an "artistic whole" out of this tremendous mass of material. It was a feat which bore eloquent witness to his magnificent working capacity, for the year and a quarter in which it was performed was troubled by chronic ill-health and even really dangerous illnesses, such as the one in February 1866, by an accumulation of debts which threatened to overwhelm him, and not least by the wearisome preparations for the Geneva congress of the International.

In November 1866 the first bundle of manuscript was sent off to Otto Meissner in Hamburg, a publisher of democratic literature who had previously issued a small work of Engels on the Prussian military question. In April 1867 Marx himself took the rest of the manuscript to Hamburg and found Meissner "a decent fellow". Short negotiations proved sufficient to settle all the arrangements. Marx was anxious to remain in Germany until the first proofs arrived from Leipzig, where the book was to be printed, and in the meantime he visited his friend Kugelmann in Hannover, where he was most hospitably received. He spent a number of pleasant weeks with Kugelmann and his family, and afterwards referred to this period as "one of the happiest and most agreeable oases in the desert of life".

His good spirits were certainly heightened to some extent by the fact that he was treated with respect and sympathy in educated circles in Hannover, treatment to which he was unaccustomed from such quarters, and on the 24th of April he wrote to Engels: "You know, we two have a much better reputation amongst the 'educated bourgeoisie' than we thought." And on the 27th of April Engels answered: "I have always felt that the damned book on which you have worked so long was the real reason for all your misfortunes and that you would never be able to overcome them as long as you had not shaken it off. Its incompletion dragged you down physically, intellectually and financially, and I can well understand that you feel a different fellow altogether now that you have finally got rid of it, particularly as you will find when you come back into the world that it is no longer quite so depressing as it was." And for himself Engels expressed the hope that he would soon be able to emancipate himself from "this damned business", because so long as he was in it up to his eyes he would be unable to do anything worth while, and now that he had become a partner in the firm the situation had grown worse owing to his increased responsibility.