The German Genius

commodity, how can ‘profit’ be extracted from the productive process?” Only by paying the worker much less than what he is worth can the capitalist secure his profit. For Marx this counted as exploitation and “Workers who never read Capital nevertheless could now trust that there was a scientific underpinning to their feeling of being exploited.” 47
    There were many shortcomings in Marx’s arguments. For example, if surplus value arose because capitalists undervalued labor, how was it that industries using a lot of machinery, and very little labor, were frequently more profitable than labor-intensive industries? Marx never came up with a satisfactory answer.
    He kept some of his most vivid prose for his account—and critique of—the accumulation of capital. Where does it originate? For him, it arose not from the capitalist’s hard work and savings, but from “brutal confiscation, slavery and rapine…Capital comes into the world covered in blood from head to foot…accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious.” There was no way out. Capital, he insisted, will become more concentrated, in fewer hands, added to which there will also be a long-term decline in profit as competition grows. The end result, one end result anyway, is that the law of increasing misery shows itself. Marx called it a “law,” but in fact in most capitalist countries the conditions of most workers have improved. 48
    But is Das Kapital intended to be read as a dry textbook? Not really. “It is a passionate drama, an epic poem, in which we descend into capitalism’s innermost circles, go through its purgatory fires, in order to emerge at the end with a glimpse of its downfall and a promise of future salvation. It is Marx’s imagery…which grips us.” 49
    The other flaws in Marx’s theories are now well known. The most important is his assumption that all political power is in the hands of the capitalist, to the exclusion of the worker, that “bourgeois democracy is a sham.” Yet the very parliamentary inquiries into working conditions that Marx himself used to damn the capitalists actually produced important improvements (slow in coming, it is true) and in 1867, the year Das Kapital was published, urban workers were given the vote in Great Britain. Steadily, if slowly, in the bourgeois European democracies, a “welfare state” came into being. We are now at a sufficient distance from Das Kapital to be able to generalize that, when workers have had a clear political voice, they have never voted to overturn the capitalist industrialist system, rather for a greater share of its “surplus.” Even this is to misread and misunderstand the purpose of Das Kapital , which was, as Engels saw, the Workers’ Bible, part of a campaign to kindle revolution.
    Despite these shortcomings, Marx’s key insight was to grasp that the developing productive forces of a society create new social relations, binding economics and sociology together. 50 Moreover, with his Hegelian background, he offered an evolutionary perspective.
    On a personal level, Marx was a great fighter, incorrigibly struggling for a better world. Marxism aside, Marx the man stressed—as Francke, Herder, and Hegel had stressed before him—that a society’s ethos and values are created by its members. This is the other German ideology and one that we still espouse, despite everything that has happened.
    “T HE M OST L EARNED M AN IN E UROPE”
     
    Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, summed up Engels’s character in 1890, when he was seventy: “Next to his youthful freshness and kindness, nothing is so remarkable about him as his many-sidedness. Nothing remains foreign to him,” she wrote, “natural history, chemistry, botany, physics, philology…political economy and last not least, military tactics.” 51 Theodor Cuno—founder of the Milanese section of the First International, and later a member of the American Knights of Labor, whose life had been saved by Engels when Cuno had nearly drowned swimming in the sea for the first time in 1872—also remarked of his savior that “His brain was a treasury of learned knowledge.” Marx too “was proud of Engels.” In fact, Marx regarded Engels as “the most learned man in Europe.” 52
    Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 in the Rhenish town of Barmen, now part of Wuppertal. His father was a staunch Pietist, but