Social And Literary Side Of Karl Marx

At most we always think of politics and revolutions when the name Karl Marx is mentioned, but the truth is that Karl Marx had huge non political life than most of us believe. He had a strong passion for romance and un-winded life. He was not always hard thinking as most of us tend to reflect about him especially given the conventional mindset that we always look at him through eyes of ideology that have conditioned us to see violent communism and radical philosophies as his key hallmarks.

Karl Marx was born in a soft middle class life, enjoying privileges of being son of a lawyer and having a mother who was a University professor of mathematics. He fondly read classics. Even he read Shakespeare’s King Lear at a tender age of only seventeen years. This was the time he was romantically upsurge in love with Jenny Westphalia. At the age of twenty three, he wrote a lot of poems, some poems he wrote as odes and others as love songs to his girlfriend Johanna Bertha Julie jenny von Westphalia.

Most notable of his poems are the three pieces; Ode to Satan, Evil Idol, and the lyrical sonnet, Ode to Jenny in which he sang that Jenny is love and love is Jenny. It was during this time that Karl Marx also wrote the drama in verses entitled Oulauem. It was a love drama. It was both farcical and tragical.Infact a classic case of mixed drama. This trait cuts across psychologies of all the great warriors. They are always full of compassionate love more than military violence.

Napoleon’s love for Josephine is such a testimony. And Adolf Hitler’s expression of love in his two poems; Ode to my mother and the in the wee of the night in the Fabian forest are testimony of contradiction to his blitzkriegs on London, Jewish Massacre and all other atrocities he perfected, the same way he was a perfect slave to love between himself and Eva Braun.

Marx was also gifted with the power of language acquisition more than most of people at his time. Karl Marx had mastered five languages at a very young age. He was excellent in French, English, Deutsch, Greek and Jewish. This is why he was able to write his famous book, Das Kapita in all of these five languages concurrently.

Going back to his knack when it came to love and romance both at level of theory and as well as a lifestyle. Karl Marx was brutishly a selfish lover. This is beautifully evinced in the love letters exchanged between him and Jenny. Jenny complained of him being emotionally outrageous and accusing her of dishonesty even if the opposite was the fact. His sense of passion for romance is also displayed through his efforts to arduously write more than one thousand pages of history of the famous European affinities, the book he wrote ten years before moving to London as a political asylum seeker.

Romance aside, Marx was also a mathematics scholar; he wrote a text book of integral and differential calculus, an area which at most puzzle learners of mathematics the same way it does the practitioners.

Reading The Marx He knew by John Spargo, you notice Karl Marx was average in terms of intelligence but very hard working and book-wormish, fond of eating fish comfortable with colour black. Black was his favorite color .He was jovial and full of jokes, always smoking and swallowing whisky tots, but ever broke to an extend that he was financially at the sympathy of his friend Friedrich Engels.

Marx was a poor planner at domestic level, had it not been prudence of his house girl Helen Demuth, when it comes to management of domestic finances, starvation would had killed him ten years before it had to kill him at the time of his final death. However, alongside domestic challenges he was a crowd puller, astute unionist, eloquent speaker, emotional emphatic, playful, very sociable as well as warm in companionship.

In Marx and Engels through the eyes of contemporaries, a book written by anonymous author and published by Progressive Publishers of Moscow, there is an interesting Sub-plot that Karl Marx was reckless socially. One time when he was walking through slums of northern London, he foolishly jumped into violence between a drunkard and his wife, the peasant left his wife alone and began boxing Karl Marx in a fully fledged rage. He left Karl Marx unconscious.

Alexander Khamala Opicho