THE 'ECONOMICS' 3'17 4
3'159showing, almost beyond doubt, that Vogt did in fact receive subsidies
from Napoleon and that Marx, for once in his career as a polemicist, was
wholly justified.III. MARX AND LASSALLEDuring the early 1860 s Marx's relationship to working-class politics in
Germany was dominated by his relationship to Lassalle which was typical
of the ambivalence that characterised all Marx's personal relationships.
The son of a self-made Jewish tailor and seven years younger than Marx,
Lassalle had become intimate with him during the 1848 troubles.
Throughout the 1850 s Lassalle had been extremely accommodating to
Marx: he had offered to raise subscriptions to publish Marx's 'Economics'
and also got him his job as London correspondent of the Neue Oder
Zeitung. But Marx was not the man to appreciate favours and lent a ready
ear to a series of accusations against Lassalle delivered by one Levy, a
self-styled representative of the Diisseldorf workers who had already tried
to convince Marx in late 1853 that a revolution was imminent in the
Rhineland and paid him a second visit in 1856. According to Levy,
Lassalle was only using the working-class movement for his personal
affairs; he had compromised himself with the liberals, betrayed the
workers and embezzled from friends. Engels was even readier than Marx
to give credit to these accusations (although they were not supported by
a shred of evidence) and recommended the breaking off of relations,
declaring of Lassalle that 'his desire to push his way into polite society,
to parvenir, to gloss over, if only for appearance's sake, the dirty Breslaw
Jew with all kinds of pomade and greasepaint, was always disgusting'.^85
Marx refused to reply to Lassalle's letters thereafter and only gave him a
'short and cool' answer when Lassalle offered him the possibility of
writing articles for the Wiener Presse whose editor was Lassalle's cousin.
Marx was also looking for a publisher for his 'Economics' and it was
Lassalle again who acted as a very competent literary agent in the nego-
tiations with Franz Duncker whose wife was Lassalle's mistress. Thus
relations were temporarily restored: Marx complimented Lassalle on his
recent publication Heraclitus (though he expressed himself differently to
Engels) and Lassalle even turned to Marx for advice on the problem of
duelling. Marx's curious reply was that, although duelling was irrational
and 'a relic of a bygone culture, bourgeois society was so one-sided that,
in opposition to it, certain feudal forms of expressing individuality are
justified'.^86
This co-operation was, however, soon disturbed by differences of