It was almost as if all of the worst traits of humanity were bundled into this one spiteful man, who then constructed a philosophy based on his own bitterness and self-loathing.
Here is how he was described in a Prussian police report circa 1850:
“Washing, grooming, and changing his linens are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. ... He has no fixed times for going to sleep or waking up ... everything is broken down. ... In a word, everything is topsy-turvy. To sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business.”
As someone of German ancestry, I can attest that this type of slovenliness is not a typical trait of Germans, then or now. Germans tend to pride themselves on their cleanliness.
At one point, he joked to his partner Friedrich Engels that he had become “the object of plagues just like Job.”
“Though I am not as God-fearing as he was,” he said.
I bring all this up for a reason.
Marx was devising a system for living that had universal ambition. His manifesto demanded “a massive change” in human nature in its quest to achieve the secular righteous goal of “[establishing] the truth of this world.” (One can only wonder if such lines were what his father had in mind when he chided his son, who “every week or two discovers a new system.”)
But for all his grand words, and all his grandiose visions for humankind, he could not even manage his own home. His own health. His own life.
I don’t wish to minimize these tasks.
Managing one’s own life is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes it feels as if there are a thousand hurdles in front of us that prevent us from living the life we want and twice as many pitfalls. But jumping those hurdles and learning how to avoid the pitfalls is the path to individual growth. And that is the path to a better world.
Jordan Peterson has expounded on this idea more recently, advising that if someone wants to improve his own life—and the world—he should start by cleaning his room.
“If you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?” Mr. Peterson asked.
It’s advice Marx would have benefited from. But I don’t think he would have been capable of heeding it.
One of the things I noticed in Kengor’s book is that Marx received a lot of good advice from people who loved him and worried about him. His father wrote a touching (and prophetic) letter to his son telling him that he worried about his ability to find happiness.
“Will you ever—and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart—be capable of truly human, domestic happiness?” Heinrich Marx asked his son.
Karl Marx’s response was to ask his father for more money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp9599kwnhM
