Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

THE 'ECONOMICS'

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that showed his intimacy with Vogt. When Marx realised how mistaken

he was, he wrote to Freiligrath one of his most attractive letters. He

claimed that his struggle against Vogt was 'decisive for the historical

vindication of the party and its subsequent position in Germany', and

continued:

I tell you frankly that I cannot decide to let irrelevant misunderstandings

lose me one of the few men whom I have loved as a friend in the

eminent sense of the word. If I am guilty of anything towards you, I

am willing to make amends. Nihil humani a me alienum puto. ...

We both know that each of us in his own way, putting aside all

private interest and from the purest motives, has held aloft for years

over the heads of the philistines the banner of the classe la plus laborieuse

et la plus miserable-, and I would consider it a petty crime against history

if we were to break up because of trifles that are all explainable as

misunderstandings.^75

Freiligrath accepted Marx's explanations, but replied: 'My nature, like
the nature of any poet, needs freedom. The party is also a cage, and it is
easier to sing outside it, even for the party, than inside it.'^76 Marx was
pleased with Freiligrath's reply: 'Your letter pleased me a lot, for I give
my friendship to only a very few men, but then I hold fast to it. My friends
of 1844 are still the same.' But he thought Freiligrath's interpretation of
the party was much too narrow:

After the 'League' was dissolved in November 1852 on my proposition,

I no longer belonged to any Society whether secret or public, nor

do I; thus the party in this completely ephemeral sense ceased to exist

for me eight years ago... thus I know nothing of the party, in the

sense of your letter, since 1852. If you are a poet, then I am a critic

and had more than enough with the experiences of 1849-1852. The

'League'... like a hundred other societies, was only an episode in the

history of the part}' which grows everywhere spontaneously from the soil

of modern society.^77

Thus Marx and Freiligrath repaired their friendship; but it never became
as intimate as previously and all contact between the families was broken
off by Jenny who was, as Marx admitted, 'of an energetic nature'.^78
Meanwhile Marx had begun a forlorn prosecution of the National
Zeitung in Berlin and the Daily Telegraph in London, both dismissed for
lack of evidence, and began to collect material for a refutation of Vogt.
Vogt's attack, thought Marx, had been on a large scale and a large-scale
reply was needed, a reply which Marx also saw as a revenge for the
Cologne trial of 1853. In March he went to Manchester for six weeks to
check the archives of the Communist League in Engels' possession as