A Letter from Jenny Marx to Karl written in Paris between August 11 & 18, 1844

My dearest, unique Karl,

You cannot believe, darling of my heart, how very happy you make me by your letters, and how your last pastoral letter, you high priest and bishop of my heart, has once again restored soothing calm and peace to your poor lamb. It is certainly wrong and silly to torture oneself with all sorts of cares and glimpses of dark distant perspectives. I am very well aware of that myself in those self-tormenting moments — but although the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak, and so it is always only with your help that I am able to exorcise those demons. Your latest news truly brought me such real and tangible solace that it would be quite wrong to start brooding again. I expect now that it is going to happen as in a game of cards, and I hope that some external circumstance will determine the time of my return home. In any case I shall be coming before the winter, how could I indeed resist such dear, heart-warming friendliness as that which shines on me from your lines. And then in the background are dark feelings of anxiety and fear, the real menace of unfaithfulness, the seductions and attractions of a capital city — all those are powers and forces whose effect on me is more powerful than anything else. How I am looking forward after such a long time to rest comfortably and happily once more close to your heart, in your arms.

How glad you will be to see the little creature. I am convinced that you will not be able to recognise our child, unless her little eyes and black crest of hair reveal the secret to you. Everything else is really quite different now, only the resemblance to you becomes ever more obvious. During the last few days she has begun to eat a little broth made from the herbs which I have brought with me, and she relishes it greatly. In the bath she splashes with her little hands so much that the whole room is flooded, and then she dips her tiny finger in the water and afterwards licks it hastily. Her little thumb, which she has always kept bent and then made to peep out between her fingers, has become so unusually supple and flexible owing to this habit, that one cannot help being astonished by it. She can become a little piano player — I believe she can do magic tricks with her little thumb. When she cries, we quickly draw her attention to the flowers in the wall-paper, and then she becomes quiet as a mouse and gazes so long that tears come into her eyes. We must not talk to her for too long because it makes her over-exert herself. She wants to imitate every sound and answer it, and the fact that her forehead swells and reddens is a sign of excessive strain. Incidentally, she is the acme of cheerfulness. Every kind of look you give her makes her laugh. You ought to see what a darling little creature I shall bring with me. When she hears anyone speaking she at once looks in that direction and goes on looking until something fresh happens. You can't have any idea of the liveliness of the child.

Karl dear, how long will our little doll play a solo part? I fear, I fear, that when her papa and mama are together once again, and live in common ownership, the performance will soon become a duet. Or should we set about it in the good Parisian style? Usually one finds the greatest number of children where the means are smallest.

You dear good Karl, darling of my heart. How I love you, how my heart yearns for you. Do write to me again quite soon. I am so very happy when I see your handwriting. You dear, good. sweet, little wild boar. You dear father of my little doll.

Adieu, heart of my heart.
Max Stirner. In 1839 Stirner got a position teaching literature at a respectable girls' school in Berlin.
In 1841 Stirner joined Die Freien (The Free), a group of left Hegelians gathering at Hippel's Weinstube. In 1842 Stirner published, aside from various journalistic articles, Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung (The false Principle of our Education) and Kunst und Religion (Art and Religion) in der Rheinische Zeitung, two pieces where we clearly can see the direction Stirner's thought. In 1843 he married Marie Dähnhardt. At the end of 1844 Stirner's magnum opus Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own) was published copies were rapidly distributed to bookstores to avoid the censorship, and the book was dated 1845.

Stirner left his teaching job in 1844. In the time after the publication of The Ego and Its Own Stirner wrote two essays in reply to his critics that serve to illuminate his philosophy well. Stirner's last book was a Geschichte der Reaktion (History of the Reaction) published in 1852.

It has been claimed that Stirner lived in poverty towards the end of his life, constantly fleeing from his creditors. He spent two periods in debtors' prisonin Berlin. It has been suggested, however, that he managed his maternal inheritance rather well towards the end of his life, affording him a decent though not affluent lifestyle. His social life included visits to the salon of Baroness von der Golz, where he is said to have aired "radical opinions".

In May 1856 contracted a fever as he was stung by a winged insect. The 25th of June 1856, Stirner died.
Heine, Heinrich- One of the greatest of German lyric poets, he had a varied career. After failing in business he tried law but found it uncongenial and finally turned to history and literature. His first published poems and plays established him as a young romantic. In the literary salon of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense he met, among others, Fouqué, Chamisso, Hoffmann, Grabbe, and Immermann; some of these became life-long friends, others bitter enemies. Disillusioned with Germany and in political disgrace because of his liberal sympathies, he left for Paris (1831), where he supported the social ideals of the French Revolution, becoming for a time a Saint-Simonist. As the tower i ng figure of the revolutionary literary movement Young Germany, he continued from Paris to disseminate French revolutionary ideas in Germany. He received a French government pension, worked as correspondent for German newspapers, and died after years of severe illness, during which he was nursed by his faithful "Mouche" (who used the pen name Camille Selden). Heine's writing reflects the dualism of his nature; it shows strong influences of both classic and romantic German literature. Despite a conversion to Christianity, Jewish themes frequently figure in his works, as does the influence of English and French literature. Heine's later poems and especially his prose works established him as a satirist of barbed wit and as an embittered critic of romanticism, of jingoistic patriotism, and of current social and political affairs.

 
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon "Property is not self-existent. An extraneous cause — either force or fraud — is necessary to its life ... it is a negation, a delusion, nothing."
Proudhon was the first attempt to use Hegelian ideas to make a radical critique of political economy. This work is first set out in What is Property? but his most famous work is The Philosophy of Poverty, the subject of Marx's famous Poverty of Philosophy. Proudhon's ideas were probably the most influential current among the participants in the Paris Commune of 1871. Proudhon's ideas are at the root of that type of anarchism which envisages a

 

 

 
world of small-scale producers living in self-sufficient, sustainable communities using local systems of exchange. It is often called "petit-bourgeois anarchism" because its ideal is the self-sufficient independent proprietor, and appeals to the self-employed trades person or small business person in capitalist society whose hatred is directed against big capital.

 

Eleanor (Tussy) Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, was born in London on 16th January 1855. A very intelligent child, she was mainly taught by her father and by the age of three she could recite passages by Shakespeare. Marx, who treated his daughter as a "friend and companion" could converse with her as a child in German and French as well as English. By the time Eleanor was sixteen, she acted as her father's secretary, accompanying him to international conferences on socialism. When seventeen Eleanor fell in love with a French journalist, Hippolyte Lissagaray. Although

 
Lissagaray and Marx shared the same political views, he disapproved of the relationship because at 34, Lissagaray was twice the age of his daughter.

 

She joined with Lissagaray and helped him write the History of the Commune of 1871. Although Karl Marx liked the book enough to translate it into English, he still refused to give his approval to his daughter's relationship with Lissagaray. In 1876 Eleanor Marx became involved in the campaign for female equality when she helped a female candidate win a seat on a London School Board.

In 1880, Karl Marx gave Eleanor permission to marry Hippolyte Lissagaray. However, Eleanor was now having doubts about the relationship and in January 1882,

 
Eleanor terminated her long engagement with Lissagaray.
In the early 1880s, Eleanor nursed her aging parents. Her mother died in December, 1881, and her father in March, 1883. Before his death, Karl Marx had given Eleanor the task of preparing his unfinished manuscripts for publication. Eleanor also had the task of dealing with the English publication of Das Kapital.

In 1884 Eleanor began involved with Edward Aveling. The two shared the same views on politics and religion and Aveling made his living from giving lectures on these subjects. As Aveling was already married, Eleanor lived with him as his common law wife.

 

 
Engels was born in Barmen on November 28, 1820, Engels took up commerce and worked as an office clerk from 1837 to 1841. After serving for a year as an army volunteer, he joined his father's business in Manchester in 1843, staying there until 1844. From 1845 to 1848, he lived in Brussels with Karl Marx and in Paris; from 1848 to May 1849. He worked for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. In June and July of that year, he took part in the uprising in South Germany as an aide-de-camp in Willich's volunteer corps. Then he went to London for a short time and, in 1850, rejoined his father's concern in Manchester, working first as a clerk and, from 1864, as a joint proprietor. In 1869, he retired from business for good. He has lived in

 

LeFargue: Physician, French socialist, and author of several works on the history of Marxism, he was one of founders of the French workers' party in 1879. La Fargue was Member of the International Working Men's Association (First International) . He was corresponding secretary for Spain between 1866-68 and was co-founder of the sections in France, Spain and Portugal. He married Laura Marx
 

 

 
Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian aristocrat and archetypal revolutionary firebrand, is the
most famous and important of 19th century anarchists. Bakunin was also a Young Hegelian, who turned Hegel's conception of the State as "the march of God on Earth" on its head, casting the state as the representative of evil. Initially an advocate of "Democratic Pan-Slavism" and a member of the Narodniks, who advocated terror as a weapon against the Czarist autocracy in pursuit of a type of communism founded on the Russian village commune.

Bakunin was won over to socialism and was notorious for his propensity to form secret organizations fomenting rebellion. Bakunin regarded Proudhon however as his foremost teacher and recognized Proudhon as the founder of anarchism.

In 1866, Bakunin joined the International Workingmen's Association and built up an anarchist wing within the International, along with James Guillaume, Errico Malatesta and others. After the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, a reaction set in Europe. Bakunin was expelled from the International at the Hague Congress in 1872, and he died in 1876.  

 
If you would like to schedule a performance of

MARX IN SOHO for your school, theatre company or

civic organization please contact Bob Weick at:

610-346-8793 or e-mail at BOMABESA@EARTHLINK.NET

 

 

Howard Zinn on War, Poverty, and Government

From Terrorism and War

 
We have to go through a real revolution in our thinking and no longer think of the United States as needing to be a superpower. Sweden is not worried about terrorists. Denmark, Holland, New Zealand. There are a lot of places in the world not worried about terrorists. They don't have their troops everywhere; they don't have their naval vessels everywhere; they're not bothering other people; they're not intervening. They don't have a record of massive military destruction and intervention. Let's be a more modest nation.

A recent report by the World Health Organization calculated that for $101 billion a year in basic medical research and treatment, 8 million lives could be saved annually in the poorer countries of the world. Spending that money on basic health would help in making us more secure. Bombing is not making us more secure.

I think the American public has not yet absorbed the statements that the Bush administration is making about this being a war that will go on and on. People need to ask, "Do we want our children and our grandchildren to be living in a state of perpetual warfare, with more and more of the world becoming hostile to us, and with the United States responsible for more and more human casualties in the world?"

If you look at them, the statements quoted on American Council of Trustees and Alumni's list are the most innocuous statements. Jesse Jackson made the list by saying that America should "build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls." And I was criticized for saying that "our security can only come by using our national wealth not for guns, planes, and bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people, and for people suffering in other countries. The simple exercise of the First Amendment, of saying that we should be able to criticize our government, is enough to put you on Lynne Cheney's list. I think that should be brought to more people's attention because I think Americans are sensitive to invasions of free speech. Unfortunately, they are most aroused when it's directed at American citizens rather than only at Muslims or immigrants.

There is another important connection between our situation today and the Cold War. Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.

The word "communism" was used to justify the most egregious violations of human rights. So much that went on during the Cold War was justified in the name of fighting Communism, leading to the deaths of millions of people in Southeast Asia and hundreds of thousands of people in Central America. A vast leap took place from "fighting Communism" to actions against people and governments that had nothing to do with Communism. In 1954, the United States overthrew the government in Guatemala, which was not Communist but which was expropriating the United Fruit Company. In 1973, the government in Chile was overthrown in the name of fighting Communism. The government was not Communist, but it was not serving the interests of Anaconda Copper and ITT. Missile defense is fundamentally a program to make profits for the corporations that are going to get the billions of dollars in contracts to build the system. This is an enormous theft from the American people. Remember the quote from Eisenhower. He said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.

Howard ZInn

 

 

 

Howard Zinn grew up in a working-class family in Brooklyn where he became a shipyard laborer and later, in World War Two, n decorated Air Force bombardier. After the War, Zinn was educated at Columbia University in New York under the GI Bill and earned his PhD in history, then taught in Georgia during the 1950s. He has also been a history fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna. In the late 1960s, he began teaching at Boston University in the political science department, and he and Noam Chomsky (of MIT) were two of the nation's most prominent academics in opposition to the war in Vietnam; in the '70s and '80s he was a critic of U.S. policy in Central America; and in the '90s he was a critic of the Gulf War. Professor Zinn has won numerous awards and honors including The Thomas Merton Award, The Eugene V. Debs Award, The Upton Sinclair Award and The Lannan Literary Award. In a career that has spanned over forty years, Howard Zinn, as a professor, radical historian, progressive political theorist, social activist, playwright and author, has brought a fresh, thoughtful, humane and common-sensical approach to the study and teaching of history. Zinn's book sought to tell the story of the United States from the perspective of the disenfranchised minorities rather than the more traditional perspective of the powerful elite. His social activism and written works have earned him scorn over the years, but his history book is a standard text in many U. S. high schools and he has had a strong influence on the public's perception of Columbus, the Founding Fathers and American foreign policy. Among his twenty books and plays are La Guardia in Congress, Disobedience and Democracy, The Politics of History, The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays, Declarations of Independence: Cross Examining American Ideology, You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train (his autobiography), The Zinn Reader, Marx in Soho and the seminal, celebrated A People's History of the United States: 1492 to the Present. He lives with his wife, Roslyn, in Massachusetts.

 

 

 

Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rockit fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children

Dwight Eisenhower