/lit/ - Literature

>>22860393
>Marx arrived in London as a political exile in 1849, expecting to stay in the city for a few months at most; instead, he ended up living there until his death in 1883. His first few years in London were marked by dire poverty and personal tragedy—his family was forced to live in squalid conditions, and by 1855 three of his six children had died. Isaiah Berlin describes Marx’s habits during this time:

>His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British [Museum] reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. “I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing,” he wrote in 1858.

>Marx was, by 1858, already several years into Das Kapital, the massive work of political economy that would occupy the rest of his life. He never had a regular job. “I must pursue my goal through thick and thin and I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine,” he wrote in 1859. (In fact, he later applied for a post as a railway clerk, but was rejected because of his illegible handwriting.) Instead, Marx relied on his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels to send him regular handouts, which Engels pilfered from the petty-cash box of his father’s textile firm—and which Marx promptly misspent, having no money-management skills whatsoever. “I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff,” he noted. Meanwhile, his boils would get so bad that he “could neither sit nor walk nor remain upright,” as one biographer put it. In the end, it took Marx two decades of daily suffering to complete the first volume of Das Kapital—and he died before he could finish the remaining two volumes. Yet he had only one regret. “You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle,” he wrote to a fellow political activist in 1866. “I do not regret it. On the contrary. Had I my career to start again, I should do the same. But I would not marry. As far as lies in my power I intend to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life has been wrecked.”

>>22479795
>Marx arrived in London as a political exile in 1849, expecting to stay in the city for a few months at most; instead, he ended up living there until his death in 1883. His first few years in London were marked by dire poverty and personal tragedy—his family was forced to live in squalid conditions, and by 1855 three of his six children had died. Isaiah Berlin describes Marx’s habits during this time:

>His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British [Museum] reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. “I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing,” he wrote in 1858.

>Marx was, by 1858, already several years into Das Kapital, the massive work of political economy that would occupy the rest of his life. He never had a regular job. “I must pursue my goal through thick and thin and I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine,” he wrote in 1859. (In fact, he later applied for a post as a railway clerk, but was rejected because of his illegible handwriting.) Instead, Marx relied on his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels to send him regular handouts, which Engels pilfered from the petty-cash box of his father’s textile firm—and which Marx promptly misspent, having no money-management skills whatsoever. “I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff,” he noted. Meanwhile, his boils would get so bad that he “could neither sit nor walk nor remain upright,” as one biographer put it. In the end, it took Marx two decades of daily suffering to complete the first volume of Das Kapital—and he died before he could finish the remaining two volumes. Yet he had only one regret. “You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle,” he wrote to a fellow political activist in 1866. “I do not regret it. On the contrary. Had I my career to start again, I should do the same. But I would not marry. As far as lies in my power I intend to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life has been wrecked.”