Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

the place of a heart; his private life as infamous as his public life is odious - even now when playing the part of a French Sulla, he cannot help setting off the abomination of his deeds by the ridicule of his ostentation."4

The second section dealt with the events immediately preceding the establishment of the Commune. T h e only obstacle to Thiers' counter- 1 evolutionary conspiracy was armed Paris. To overcome this, Thiers had invented the lie that the cannon of the National Guard were the property of 1 he state. It was Thiers who had begun the Civil War by sending soldiers to remove the cannon. T h e only violence practised by the Com - mune was the shooting of the two generals Lecomte and Thomas by their troops and the dispersal of an armed demonstration in the Place Vendome, which was as nothing compared to the atrocities of the Versailles Government with their wholesale shooting of prisoners.

T h e most interesting part of the Address is its third section, where Marx described the political organisation of the Commune - both actual

.mil potential. His organisational model was noticeably less centralised 1 linn that in the parallel passage at the end of the Communist Manifesto. I Ins change of emphasis was marked right at the beginning of the section: I he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinII y, and wield it for its own purposes'.115 Marx then defined the organs

• •I state power as being the 'standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, <IIK1 judicature' and gave a history of its developments in France up to die Second Empire which

professed to save the working class by breaking down Parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subservience of Government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding then economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it prolessed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory. In reality, the Empire was the only form of government possible

it a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.116

I lie Commune was the 'direct antithesis' to the Empire and was the positive form' of the Republic of 1848. Marx then described the election ol the Commune (he exaggerated the working-class nature of its

• imposition) and the transformation of the standing army, police, admininiiaiion and judicature into elected, responsible and revocable agents of tin < ommune:

I lie Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in

3 6 2 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralised Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. . . . T h e Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. T h e rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. T h e few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore stricdy

to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.. . . Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Com - munes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business, generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it prompdy. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hierarchic investiture."7

T h i s passage reveals much more about Marx's view of the shape of the future communist society after the revolution than it does about the plans of the Communards, a majority of whom would probably not have agreed with Marx's projects."8

Marx then mentioned some misconceptions about the C o m m u n e: it was not a throw-back to the Middle Ages; it was not aimed at the breaking up of the nation; and it was not the sort of self-sufficient economic unit advocated by the Proudhonists.

Marx wrote of 'the multiplicity of interpretations, to which the C o m - mune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour', but claimed that the C o m m u ne was nevertheless 'the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour'.1 1 '' He elaborated on the character of this 'economic emancipation' by accepting the charge that the C o m m u n e intended to abolish class property and expropriate the expropriators by setting up

'united co-operative societies' which would 'regulate national production upon a common plan'. At the same time he declared:

The working class have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. T h ey have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen's gentlemen with the pen and the ink-horn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.120

Marx further proclaimed that the measures of the C o m m u n e also bene-

No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serf-owners, and VVallachian boyars. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without Police of any kind.121

I Ins was very different from:

die Paris of the francs-fileurs, the Paris of the Boulevards, male and Irinale - the rich, the capitalist, the gilded, the idle Paris, now thronging with its lackeys, its blacklegs, its literary boheme, and its cocottes at Versailles, Saint-Denis, Rueil, and Saint-Germain; considering the Civil War but an agreeable diversion, eyeing the battle going on through irleseopes, counting the rounds of cannon, and swearing by their own honour and that of their prostitutes, that the performance was far better

In 1 he fourth and final section, Marx described Thiers's feeble attempts in 1 use an army against Paris and his reliance on prisoners released by

Bismarck once the peace was signed. When eventually the final battle for Paris began, the atrocities of the Versailles Government were monstrous:

To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome. The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood, the same disregard, in massacre, of age and sex; the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud. There is but this difference, that the Romans had no mitrailleuses for the despatch, in the lump, of the prescribed, and that they had not 'the law in their hands' nor on their lips the cry of civilisation.125

To the charge of incendiarism Marx replied that in war fire was an arm as legitimate as any. A few hostages had also been killed, but their lives had also been forfeit many times by the shooting of prisoners by the Versailles Government. T h e result of the Commune was that class antagonisms had been sharpened:

But the battle must break out again and again and in ever-growing dimensions, and there can be no doubt as to who will be the victor in the end, - the appropriating few, or the immense working majority. And the French working class is only the advance guard of the modern proletariat.... Wherever, in whatever shape, and under whatever conditions the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that members of our association should stand in the foreground. The soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out the Governments would

Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. The martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.124

T h e Civil War in France (the title given to the Address) was the most brilliant of Marx's polemics, and had an immediate success unknown to any of the previous pronouncements of the General Council. It ran through three editions in two months, sold 8000 copies in the second edition and was translated into most European languages. In an overall

thought it is important in providing Lenin with a basis for the Bolshevik

State and Revolution, Lenin put great emphasis on Marx's remark that the proletariat 'cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and use it for its own purposes'125 - though in fact Lenin's view of the Party

.is the vanguard of the proletariat is more akin to Blanqui's conceptions; and Lenin strained the facts of the Commune even further than Marx.) ihe Civil War in France is only one interpretation of the Commune: there were Proudhonist, Blanquist and anarchist interpretations that were as instified as Marx's in that their views were similarly represented to the (Commune. It must also be remembered that the Civil War was an obituary126 and scarcely the place to offer a critical assessment: Marx's letters show him much more reticent about the achievements of the Commune, and later he even went as far as to say (in a letter to the Dutch socialist I )omela Nieuwenhuis) that the Commune 'was not socialist, nor could it have been'.127

Nevertheless, amid the reaction that swept over Europe following the defeat of the Commune, the very success of the Civil War, with its

greatest threat to society and civilisation. T h e most incredible rumours were published as fact in the Press: the International had conspired with Napoleon; it had conspired with Bismarck; Marx had even been Bismarck's

the International. Favre, Foreign Minister in the Thiers Government, not content with stifling the remnants of the Commune in France, issued a circular to all European governments declaring the International a menace

only country that agreed to the extradition of the French refugees. In spite of the almost universal condemnation of the Commune in the British Press (complete with the wildest inaccuracies which Marx spent a lot of

((iranville) said the British Government had no right to expel refugees who had not contravened any British law or committed any of the crimes specified in the treaty of extradition.

It soon became known that Marx was the author of the infamous Address; from being virtually unknown in England, except to a very small

45 2

honour to be at this moment the most abused and threatened man in

the more lurid of the rumours about the Commune. He said that the International 'does not impose any particular form on political move-

and he claimed to be under police surveillance even when he spent a few days at Brighton. On the Marx household the Commune had a profoundly depressing effect: many of their closest friends were involved in the

than five months the International supported, that is to say held between life and death, the great mass of the exiles'.132 In addition to all the business of the International, Marx found that he 'not only had to fight against all the governments of the ruling classes, but also wage hand-to- hand battles with fat, forty-year-old landladies who attacked him when one or other communard would be late with his rent'.133

For all its notoriety, the International after the Commune was a spent

the impetus towards internationalism declined. Reaction could only be met by better political organisation, and this could only be carried on within national boundaries. T h e hope of revolution in France had been destroyed and, with it, all chance of revolution in Europe. Moreover, although men like Varlin had helped defeat Proudhonist views in the International, their syndicalist opposition to political action was soon to bring them into conflict with the General Council. T h e General Council itself was much weakened by co-opting a large number of French refugees who soon began to bicker among themselves in the same way as after 1848.

All three Marx daughters were intimately involved in the aftermath of the Commune. Laura and Paul had just got out of Paris before it was

the Commune and both Jenny and Eleanor set off to help Laura, arriving on 1 May. On the fall of the Commune the four adults and two children

into Spain. Laura joined him there, her only remaining child ill with dysentery. Jenny and Eleanor left to return to London but were arrested on the frontier, submitted to a lengthy interrogation and spent the night 111 gaol. Jenny only just managed to get rid of an incriminating letter from Flourens, one of the Commune leaders. T h ey were deported to Spain, and after further difficulties with the Spanish police managed to sail from St Sebastian, with Laura, at the end of August.1 34

In Germany, now the main centre of European socialism, the Eisenach party could not associate itself publicly with the International and anyway no longer needed its support against the A D A V with whom the old rivalry was beginning to decline. Although the Eisenach leaders were still loyal to Marx and Engels, appeals from London showed that (unlike the pre-1871 years) the General Council needed the support of the Germans more than they needed it. In fact, Lassalleanism continued to be the main force in German socialism; and though Marx's prestige remained high, it was more for personal than doctrinal reasons. In Britain, the publication of the Civil War occasioned the resignation of Odger and Lucraft from the General Council, but no trade union disaffiliated and the General Council continued to be active in assisting strikers. Nevertheless, British trade unions generally were becoming less radical: since the Reform Bill of 1867 and the failure of their candidates in 1868, they were looking to an alliance with the Liberals as the most effective means of securing their ends; and their support for Gladstone's pro-Russian policy made them even less congenial to Marx. Apart from Belgium, the only areas where the International made progress after the Commune were strongholds of anarchism: Spain and Italy.

But this situation was only slowly perceived by Marx who, for almost a year after the Commune, was imbued with a thoroughgoing revolutionary optimism and saw a parallel between the harassment of the International and the persecutions suffered by the first Christians which had failed to save the Roman Empire.1 3 5 By the autumn of 1871 there had been no congress of the International for two years. On the General Council Marx was instrumental in changing a proposal to hold a congress in Amsterdam into a decision to convene a private conference in London similar to the one held in 1865. T h e conference was to concern itself solely with organisational questions, and Marx's intention was that it should check the growing influence of Bakunin; indeed, he had already proposed a conference to this end a year earlier, in August 1870. Bakunin's influence was centred mainly on Switzerland where the Geneva section had split

4 52 K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

and his supporters had set up a Jura Federation - with a Bakuninist group

the differences between Bakunin and Marx: Marx gradually gave up expecting a quick revolution and was unwilling to have the International committed to the support of spasmodic risings in Italy, Spain and Russia (the countries chiefly susceptible to anarchist doctrines). T h e anarchists considered any revolutionary uprising to be justified as a step towards the total destruction of contemporary society. To them, the General Council was an authoritarian irrelevance.136

T h e inevitable clash provoked by divergent assessments of the political situation was aggravated by more personal factors: extraordinary though it seems, Bakunin had undertaken in 1869 to translate Capital into Russian. About the same time Bakunin had had the misfortune to meet and trust a young psychopathic revolutionary, named Netchayev, who had just escaped from Russia with fabricated stories of widespread revolutionary activities among the students. Netchayev was utterly ruthless in his methods and when Bakunin - predictably in one who never completed any of his own works let alone the translation of those of others - wished to suspend his labours on Capital and pay back the advance, Netchayev wrote to Bakunin's agent threatening him with death if so much as asked for the money back. Marx attributed Netchayev's reported activities to Bakunin's hatred for him, and his unreasonable suspicion of Bakunin was fed by his Russophobe friend Borkheim and by Nicholas Utin, both of whom continually worked on Marx with tales of Bakunin's intrigues. Utin, a Russian exile who had collaborated and then quarrelled with Bakunin in Switzerland, had started a Russian section of the International in Geneva in opposition to Bakunin.137 This section - which numbered only half-a-dozen members and was purely ephemeral - asked Marx to represent them on the General Council - a tribute which Marx accepted, remarking to Engels:

A funny position for me, functioning as a representative of young Russia! A man can never tell what he is capable of and what strange bedfellows he may have to accept. In the official reply I praise Flerowski and emphasise that the main task of the Russian branch is to work for Poland (i.e. help Europe dispense with having Russia as a neighbour). I considered it safer to say no word about Bakunin, either in the official or in the confidential reply.138

200

SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Switzerland simply two ex-supporters of Bakunin, including Utin.1 39 T h e only strong delegation was the six-man group from Belgium where the

International was flourishing. This group mediated between Marx,

and dominant participant, began by recommending the General Council to limit its numbers and not to take its members too exclusively from one nationality. It then forbade the use of the title General Council by national committees, renewed the efforts of the Geneva Congress to obtain comprehensive working-class statistics, discussed ways of attracting peasants to membership of the International, and in general attempted to tighten discipline and make the International more of a political party than a forum for discussion: the London Conference resolutions are the first documents of the International to speak specifically of a 'workers' party'. But the main business was the dispute with the Bakuninists. T h e Conference re-emphasised the commitment to political action by declaring that 'in the militant state of the working class, its economic movement and its political action are indissolubly united'. This political action might well be within the framework of parliamentary democracy, for Marx declared: 'the governments are opposed to us: we must answer them with all the means that are at our disposal. To get workers into parliament is equivalent to a victory over the governments, but one must choose the right man.'140 Yet the onus of deciding whether the revolution would be violent or not lay with those who held power: 'we must declare to the governments: we will proceed against you peaceably where it is possible and by force of arms when it may be necessary'.141 T h e Conference dissociated itself from the activities of Netchayev, though Marx did not manage to implicate Bakunin. Marx also wished to get a condemnation of Bakunin's Alliance, but Belgian mediation persuaded the conference to consider the matter of the Alliance closed by remarking that it appeared to have dissolved itself and that the International would henceforth only admit sections or federations to membership. In Switzerland the dissident

also agreed to set up an English Federal Council. Marx moved this motion himself: he had at last given up his opposition to its establishment, realising that it was impossible for the General Council to infuse the English workers with internationalism and the revolutionary spirit. Marx also criticised the trade unions for being an 'aristocratic minority'1 42 and not involving lower-paid workers, to whom, together with the Irish, Marx increasingly looked for support.

In spite of Marx's view that it had 'achieved more than all the earlier

Congresses put together',143 the London Conference rendered more acute the divisions in the International, and there was almost immediate opposition to its decisions - opposition that very soon quenched for ever the optimism that Marx enjoyed throughout 1871.1 4 4 The Germans were as apathetic as ever (they had paid no financial contributions since September 1869) and Marx took the unprecedented step of asking all their sections to correspond directly with him.145 T he French section in London opposed the decisions of the Conference, as did the followers of Victoria Woodhull in America and the sections in Italy and Spain. This opposition was voiced by the Jura Federation which in November 1871 issued a circular denouncing authoritarianism and hierarchy in the International, accusing the General Council of being a kind of government and proposing that it be replaced by a correspondence bureau linking a free association of national sections. Marx wrote a reply for the General Council entitled The Alleged Splits in the International. Here he rightly exposed the futility of many of the anarchist doctrines, but also repeated the charges against Bakunin arising out of the Netchayev affair, made much of the fact that two of Bakunin's followers had turned out to be Bonapartist spies, and finally dismissed the followers of both Lassalle and Bakunin as sects which

have a justifiable existence at a time when the proletariat is not sufficiently developed to act as a class. Individual thinkers begin to criticize social contradictions and seek to overcome them by fantastic solutions which the masses of the workers have only to accept, propagate and carry out. By their very nature the sects which form around such pioneers are exclusive and hold themselves aloof from all practical activities, from politics, strikes, trade unions, in a word from every form of mass movement. The masses of the workers remain indifferent, or even hostile to their propaganda. Originally one of the levers of the working-class movement, they become a hindrance and reactionary immediately the movement overtakes them. Examples of this are the sects in France and England, and later on the Lassalleans in Germany, who, after having hampered the organization of the proletariat for years, have finally become simply tools in the hands of the police.146

What finally destroyed Marx's influence in the International were the increasing difficulties he had to face even in the bastion of Britain. At first the establishment of the English Federal Council created no problems: Hales, its Secretary, continued to support Marx and it managed to create numerous branches. T h e first sign of revolt came over the groups in America, known as Section 12, founded by Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin whose membership was middle class (and whose main energies were devoted to such causes as free love and spiritualism) in