140 years on Marx, Engels, Beards & Capitalist Crisis
Karl Marx died 140 years ago today on 14th March 1883 in North London.
He would not have been surprised to find that the anniversary coincides with another capitalist crisis- specifically in banking around the closure of Silicon Valley Bank. Marx wrote frequently about banking crisis and indeed the more general crisis of 1857/8
A rather less important question, although one not without some importance, is what role the beards of Marx and Engels played in capitalist crisis, their analysis of them, and ability to influence socialist organisation in relation to them.
Analysis of the issue is limited but the core text is an Appendix to Volume 2 of Hal Draper’s Marx’s Theory of Revolution, where he summarises at least some of the comments Marx and Engels made on facial hair.
He notes that the radical Hegelian D F Strauss preferred an autocratic or police state to a ‘proliferation of beards’ and goes on to interpret a remark in the memoirs of the late Victorian socialist Belfort Bax that it might be suspected ‘that Engels preserved his beard in order to encourage the overthrow of the State’.
Towards the end of his life when in Algiers, Marx wrote to Engels (28th April 1882) that he had shaved his prophet’s beard. Why he did this is not fully clear. Photographs were taken but they are not known to be extant. The one that can be found on the interwebs is a fake.
By contrast Engels maintained his full beard into his last years in the 1890s.
The key theoretical point was the importance of the beard in analysing capitalist crisis. Whether this was best done with a full organic beard as sported by Engels or the trimmed down version worn by Marx in 1882 is a matter of legitimate debate.
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