Marx’s last interview: two excerpts

Courtesy Jairus Banaji, whose brief introduction:

In September 1880 the American journalist and radical John Swinton, a strong supporter of Eugene Debs, conducted an interview with Marx while the latter was staying at Ramsgate, surrounded by two generations of his family. The interview (reconstructed by Swinton from his notes) was published in the New York Sun and appears in MEGA I/25. Here are two short extracts that are particularly interesting, the first because it seems to be Marx’s last reference to what he felt should come after Capital. And that, prophetically enough, would be a book on “credit”, he told Swinton; in other words, a special study of the financial system that would, doubtless, have drawn on much of the analysis in Vol. 3/pt. 5, but also constituted an original and more developed work.

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“Inquiring why his great work “Capital”, the seed field of so many crops, had not been put into English as it has been put into Russian and French from the original German, he seemed unable to tell, but said that a proposition for an English translation had come to him from New York. He said that that book was but a fragment, a single part of a work in three parts, two of the parts being yet unpublished, the full trilogy being “Land’, “Capital”, “Credit”, the last part, he said, being largely illustrated from the United States, where credit has had such an amazing development. Mr. Marx is an observer of American action, and his remarks upon some of the formative and substantive forces of American life were full of suggestiveness. By the way, in referring to his “Capital”, he said that anyone who might desire to read it would find the French translation much superior in many ways to the German original...

The afternoon is waning toward the long twilight of an English summer evening as Mr. Marx discourses, and he proposes a walk through the seaside town and along the shore to the beach…the talk was of the world, and of man, and of time, and of ideas, as our glasses tinkled over the sea. The railway train waits for no man, and night is at hand. Over the thought of the babblement and rack of the age and the ages, over the talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind one question touching upon the final law of being, for which I would seek an answer from this sage. Going down to the depth of language, and rising to the height of emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I interrogated the revolutionist and philosopher in these fateful words, “What is?”  And it seemed as though his mind were inverted for a moment while he looked upon the roaring sea in front and the restless multitude upon the beach. “What is?”  I had inquired, to which, in deep and solemn tone, he replied: “Struggle!”

At first it seemed as though I had heard the echo of despair; but, peradventure, it was the law of life.”