Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness … these inoffensive social organizations disorganized and thrown into a sea of woes … we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive as though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.
We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns [as if these were mere natural disasters]. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence, evoked on the other part wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction, and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindoostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances … and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
Reading this today, it is easy to condemn Marx for his European cultural hegemonism; yet it is equally justified to see in it a deep humanistic commitment, aware of the complex challenge of how to condemn British imperialistic brutality without falling into the pitfall of romantic idealization of the cruelties of pre-modern societies. The condemnation of Britain is clear and unequivocal, yet moral condemnation is a poor substitute for historical understanding, and it is here that Marx takes up the task of painting a wider canvas.
England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.
He then goes on to suggest how British rule has already transformed India and will continue to transform it in the wake of the suppression of the revolt.
The political unity of India, more consolidated and extending … than under the Great Moguls, was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The Indian army, organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common off-spring of Hindoos and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction. The Zamindaree and Ryotwar themselves, abominable as they are, involve two distinct forms of private property in land—the great desideratum of Asiatic society. From the Indian natives … a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science [italics added].
And so it goes on and on. Eurocentric as it obviously is, this postulate is one of the most profound nineteenth-century analyses of the impact of Western imperialism on the Third World—and it spells out in detail what Marx described in the Manifesto as the revolutionizing role of the capitalist mode of production.
Yet all this is accompanied by an unequivocal condemnation of British interests in India, and his rhetoric equals his scorn: “The [British] aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, the millocracy to undersell it.” But, he insists, “this is not the question.” The question is that Britain is causing “a social revolution in Hindoostan.” He then concludes:
Can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, what may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution.
It must have taken some moral courage to pass this judgment in the midst of the understandable revulsion among the European and American democrats and socialists at the sight of the brutalities committed by the British in the course of putting down the Indian Revolt. Yet paradoxical as it may sound, the Indian Revolt served to validate Marx’s world-historical analysis of capitalism, its discontent—and its crucial dialectical role in bringing about a worldwide socialist transformation.
7
The First International and Das Kapital
BETWEEN FAMILY CONCERNS AND LASSALLE
AS MARX’S FINANCIAL SITUATION gradually improved in the mid-1850s, he found it possible to concentrate more on his economic studies, though his need to provide almost weekly reports for the New York Daily Tribune and other papers still consumed much of his time. He also had health problems—intestinal complaints, boils, and other troubles—and these added to the family’s expenses. The cures he had to undergo sent him to various spas, and he and his wife began spending time in resorts, both in England and then also on the Continent. As time passed, it also became clear that any hope of ever returning to Germany had evaporated, and attempts to regain his Prussian citizenship did not succeed.
The Marx family experienced the tensions of many émigrés who managed to gain some sort of economic comfort yet, deprived of a stable source of income or independent means, continued to live on a precipice. The Marxes were constantly burdened by debts, while at the same time making every effort to give their daughters language and music lessons and private tutoring, as befitting the children of what would be called in German the Bildungsbürgertum (academically educated middle class).
With three growing daughters, this was not an easy task for Marx. The surviving correspondence between father and daughters shows a warm and loving parent who, while insisting on their education, also introduced them to the thinking of the radical milieu the family moved in during their permanent London exile. All three daughters—Jenny, Laura, Eleanor—found husbands or partners, two of them French, who were involved in the democratic and socialist movement, and were themselves active to various degrees in politics and eventually also helped in publishing posthumously their father’s oeuvre.
A glimpse into Marx’s concern for his daughters as a responsible paterfamilias emerges from his letters concerning Laura’s engagement to the young French socialist and medical student Paul Lafargue, then resident in London. Marx liked his future son-in-law, but the four years between the couple’s engagement in 1864 and their marriage in 1868 are replete with concerns about their future financial situation. In letters to Lafargue Jr. as well as to his father back in France, Marx admonishes the young man first to finish his studies, and avoid for the time being political engagements: such activities, the worried future father-in-law claims, would be more effective when his professional standing was securely established. Marx also insisted on knowing exactly what sums Lafargue Sr. would commit himself to settle on the young couple. Marx obviously felt a bit uncomfortable with these typical bourgeois concerns, but in a revealing and moving letter to the older Lafargue he justified this by writing that he did not want his daughter to experience the same hardships and deprivations he himself had condemned his own wife and family to because of his political engagement.
These years also saw Marx’s evolving ambivalent relations with Ferdinand Lassalle, who emerged in the early 1860s as the successful founder and charismatic leader of the first working-class mass movement in Germany—at a time when Marx was spending his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, toiling away at his economic studies as well as gathering material for his newspaper dispatches to New York.
Lassalle’s background was similar to that of Marx but also markedly different from it. He was born in 1825, the son of Heyman Lassal, a wealthy Jewish silk merchant in Breslau, in Prussia’s southeastern province of Silesia. His father destined him to take over the family business, but the young Lassalle—who Frenchified the Jewish-sounding “Lassal” to “Lassalle”—rebelled and decided instead to study philosophy and law at Berlin University. Like m
any of his generation, he was deeply influenced by Hegelian philosophy, but while joining radical groups he did not forsake Hegel’s insistence on the crucial role of the state in history and society—one of the future points of disagreement with Marx. He became associated with the League of Communists, but stayed out of trouble in 1848, remained in Germany, and was able after the failure of the revolution to live as an independent scholar supported by his family’s wealth.
Lassalle published a number of serious—but little noticed—scholarly works on property rights and the dialectical philosophy of Heraclitus, but he gained fame—and notoriety—in the 1850s when as a lawyer he defended Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in a celebrated divorce and alimony litigation against her husband that lasted for years. Presenting his argument as a battle for a woman’s rights in matrimony, he won the case—and the money—for the countess, who became his patron and, despite being twenty years his senior, also his companion. Her wealth helped to cushion his somewhat ostentatious lifestyle.
During the Prussian parliamentary crisis of the early 1860s, Lassalle succeeded in bringing together a number of radical and working-class groups, and in 1863 founded in Leipzig the General German Workers Association (ADAV). Using his considerable rhetorical powers and his public visibility as a celebrated popular lawyer who stood for a maligned woman, Lassalle succeeded in turning the ADAV into a mass movement—actually the first organized working-class mass party not only in Germany but in continental Europe. Through massive public rallies, often accompanied by his aristocratic companion, dramatic press pronouncements, leaflets and brochures, the ADAV quickly became a political force calling for universal suffrage, workers’ rights and participation in the political process, with a strong emphasis on German unification. His support for universal suffrage created an implicit alliance with the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck, who played with the idea as a way of circumventing the liberal middle-class parliamentary ascendancy in the Prussian Diet, which was elected through a limited, property-based suffrage. Bismarck and Lassalle held a number of meetings—an extraordinary event, and a strange alliance, evoking both support as well as extreme criticism. In his memoirs, Bismarck praised Lassalle with a backhanded compliment as “this clever Jew.”
Lassalle’s meteoric rise could only have been viewed with some ambivalence by Marx. On one hand, they differed on a number of issues, mainly Lassalle’s attempt to forge a conservative-proletarian anti-bourgeois alliance, while Marx always believed in supporting—albeit critically—bourgeois claims so as to promote capitalist industrial development and thus strengthen the power of the proletariat, which would eventually overthrow bourgeois rule. On the other hand, Lassalle’s phenomenal historical success in organizing a mass working-class movement was a major breakthrough that Marx could not overlook. The two corresponded frequently, Lassalle visited London and helped Marx financially, and he also introduced him to German-language democratic and socialist editors. Marx was obviously grateful and in a way beholden to him for this. Yet it was only natural that he viewed the success of the younger Lassalle with some reservation, and his lifestyle was not exactly what one would expect from a leader of a socialist movement.
In 1864, however, Lassalle was killed in an absurd duel with a Romanian nobleman, Janko von Racowitza, over a three-cornered romantic involvement with another noblewoman, Helene von Dönniges. The event only emphasized one of the bizarre aspects of Lassalle’s life: nothing could be more outlandish than a socialist leader killed in a duel concerning an aristocratic lady.
Although Marx and Lassalle never allowed their differences to play out in public—and Marx could not really afford it, both personally and politically, as he was a relatively obscure émigré, compared with a successful political leader—some of his obvious frustration simmers to the surface in his correspondence. After a not very successful meeting in London in 1862, Marx reported to Engels about their disagreements, and then reverted to some crass and heavy-handed jocular language, a bit of ugliness that must have been compensation for his inner rage against a person he considered his intellectual inferior, who nonetheless provided the working class with an enormous organizational and political success. The fact that the comment came in a private letter—which decades later would embarrass many socialists, and Jewish socialists in particular—does not diminish its nastiness.
It is now completely clear to me, as proved by the shape of his [Lassalle’s] head and the growth of his hair, that he stems from the negroes who joined the march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side did not mate with a negro). This combination of Judaism and Germanism with the basic negro substance must bring forth a peculiar product.
Even if one is accustomed to Marx’s acerbic language about many other colleagues in the socialist movement who happened to disagree with him, this is particularly nasty, and shows how racist ideas were beginning to slip into the mainstream of European culture at that time, including the socialist movement. When Lassalle was killed in his bizarre duel, Marx and Engels exchanged comments about the utter stupidity and irresponsibility of it, yet Marx went on to praise Lassalle as one of the best and bravest in the working-class movement; his achievement could not be denied or gainsaid.
Marx’s ambivalence toward Lassalle stands in contrast to his attitude toward another, even more prominent person of Jewish ancestry, Benjamin Disraeli. Despite obviously opposing his conservative politics, he had great admiration for Disraeli’s political sagacity and statesmanship. In his articles and correspondence, Marx frequently refers positively to Disraeli’s stark opposition to Russia, and his initiatives to expand the suffrage as well as introducing bills regulating working conditions—Tory steps that were opposed by the free-market liberals and echoed the young Disraeli’s concern about Britain becoming “Two Nations.”
In a letter to his Dutch uncle Lion Phillips in 1860, Marx playfully referred to Disraeli as unser Stammgenosse (“our tribesman” or “our tribal colleague”). Phillips was married to Marx’s mother’s sister, and went on to found the Phillips electrical firm. Like the Marx and Disraeli families, the Phillips family also converted to Christianity, so the allusion to a common consanguinity may have had more than one meaning, ironical or otherwise. Yet it is an aspect of his awareness of some common background (with Disraeli, of all people!) that Marx never expressed in a similar way in letters to colleagues and friends outside the family.
ON POLITICAL ECONOMY
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [Zur Kritik der politschen Ökonomie] was Marx’s first published major economic work, appearing in Vienna in 1859. Lassalle helped him find a publisher, although at the time the work had a very limited circulation (an English translation appeared only many years later, after Marx’s death). Nonetheless, it was the first fruit of Marx’s years-long economic studies, and in many ways foreshadowed Das Kapital. Because of its relatively compact form, it eventually became much more popular in the socialist movement than the lengthy, much more technical and comprehensive—and never finished—later work.
The structure of the work, as Marx announces in the preface, follows the main headings he sketched out in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844 and later repeated in Das Kapital: “I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labor, the state, world market”—an ambitious aim that he never fully accomplished. As already mentioned in Chapter 2, Marx recounts in the preface how he came to the study of political economy through the internal critique of Hegel’s political philosophy; he further describes himself as “having studied jurisprudence subordinated to philosophy and history” and getting involved in “the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests” as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.
In mentioning some of the articles he wrote for the newspaper dealing with the link between economic interests and legislation as evidenced in the debates of the Rhenish Diet, he describes how this
led him to reach his conclusions in the DFJ essays that legal relations and political forms cannot be understood without the study of “the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers … embraced in the term ‘civil society,’ and that the anatomy of this civil society has to be sought in political economy.” He alludes to his beginning to study political economy in Brussels (the manuscripts eventually published by Engels as The German Ideology), but personal and political conditions made it impossible for him to conclude this work. He mentions the important contribution to the development of his theories made by the social and economic information provided by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), which supplied him with the necessary analytical and statistical data. This is a frank and honest admission by Marx that he never independently studied working-class conditions on his own. He sums up his conclusions in a passage that became the cornerstone of what could be called “historical materialism” (though he never adorned his theories with such a categorical definition).
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations that are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political structure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.
Karl Marx Page 13
