Or is Marx gremlin coded
In his private life he is a highly disorderly, cynical human being and a bad manager. He lives the life of a gypsy, of an intellectual Bohemian; washing, combing and changing his linen are things he does rarely, he likes to get drunk. He is often idle for days on end, but when he has work to do, he will work day and night with tireless endurance. For him there is no such thing as a fixed time for sleeping and waking. He will often stay up the whole night and then lie down on the sofa, fully dressed, around midday and sleep till evening, untroubled by the fact that the whole world comes and goes through his room.
Marx lives in one of the worst, and therefore one of the cheapest, quarters of London. He occupies two rooms. One of then looks out on the street: that is the salon. The bedroom is at the back. There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture to be found in the whole apartment: everything is broken, tattered and torn; there is a thick coat of dust everywhere; everywhere, too, the greatest disorder.
In the middle of the salon stands a large old-fashioned table covered with oil cloth. On it lie his manuscripts, books and newspapers, then the children’s toys, his wife’s mending and patching, together with several cups with chipped rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an ink-pot, glasses, dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash; in one word everything is topsy turvy, and all on the same table. A rag-and-bone man would step back ashamed from such a remarkable collection.
When you enter Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so badly, that you think for a moment that you are groping about in a cave. Gradually your eyes become accustomed to the fog and you can make out a few objects. Everything is dirty and covered with dust. It is positively dangerous to sit down. One chair has only three legs. On another chair, which happens to be whole, the children are playing at cooking. This one is offered to the visitor but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away: if you sit down you risk a pair of trousers. None of this embarrasses Marx or his wife.
This is from a Prussian spy’s report on Marx. Sounds like a gremlin to me.
This is severely ADHD coded to me, which honestly tracks. It explains how he can write books so significant and meticulously detailed-- his hyperfocus.
I thought it was bipolar, since he spends periods wasting away and when he’s active he disregards sleep, which sound like periods of depression and mania to me.
That thought crossed my mind too but we rarely hear anything about mood instability, more like periods of activity and inactivity. Bipolar periods often go for months at a time as well, unless presenting with cyclothemia (shorter shifts between moods iirc). His fighting in his younger days could also fit with issues with impulse control, though that could have just been the culture at the time.
His fighting in his younger days could also fit with issues with impulse control, though that could have just been the culture at the time.
Also his alcoholism.
Idk if it really counts as adequate evidence of mood instability for this purpose, but I think he was also said throughout his life to get furiously angry pretty readily, both in person and in letters and such.
Still, you make a good point, so I am content to say that my guess is substantially less likely than yours.
Young marx was more angry/aggressive, by the late 50s and 60s he mellowed out a lot
Do you have more information on that latter part?
It’s just the sense i’ve gotten in my reading about him
from Kugelmann’s 1928 Reminiscences is an example of mellow marx i could find quickly in my saved excerpts. Very different from the “bangs table and shouts” Marx of the 1840s.A good series of snapshots of what Marx was like at different times in his life can be found in McLellan’s collection: https://archive.org/details/mc-lellan.-karl-marx-interviews-and-recollections/page/n5/mode/2up People describing Marx in the 40s and earlier 50s have very different emphases than those talking about him later on
Two very good biographies are Mary Gabriel’s “Love and Capital” and Liedman’s “A World to Win,” both show the shift pretty well, but don’t rly draw attention to it iirc. Another good (and short) one showing the softer side of Marx, albeit one that falls a bit into (well researched) hagiography, is “The Marx he Knew” by Spargo.
Can also just generally see this in his writing, there’s a big contrast between the satirical works of the mid 40s and the polemics around the 48 revolutions and aftermath; and his work on “Capital,” economic lectures, newspaper articles and the like. According to Engels (preface to “The Housing Question”), in their division of labour, it fell to Engels to write popular and polemical works whereas Marx focused on “Capital” and political work.
It sounds like depression to me, I’m depressed and this is literally how my life is organised. Sometimes I can’t get things done for days on end, even household chores, but when I’ve got energy I spend it on getting my work done as tirelessly as I can manage.
Though a lot of neurodivergence and mental illness has overlap with each other, it’s a spectrum of behaviours, and it’s impossible to actually properly diagnose someone from 150 years ago.
HE IS JUST LIKE ME
And people say Marx isn’t relatable smh.
It should be noted both
a) this report is from quite possibly the lowest point in marx’s life, emotionally and financially
b) marx’s brother in law was the boss of the secret police and the report was likely written to appeal to his biases
That said i will die on the hill of marx being autistic and/or adhd
Scribbles on The German Ideology:
Yes, it’s me, Marx Gremlin, private eye
Oh for sure
Unmistakably so.
