Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  The accusation was picked up by numerous conservative newspapers in Europe. It was then followed by a diplomatic note by Jules Favre, the foreign minister of the provisional government, sent to all of the European powers, claiming that the IWA was responsible for the insurrection of the Commune. This accusation became widely spread, and it moved Marx to write a letter to The Times and other papers categorically denying it and referring to the IWA’s repeated calls, including in the second address, condemning a revolt against the provisional government. But the denials were, understandably, not always granted credibility, and the relatively wide distribution of The Civil War in France did not help these denials, especially in light of the statements in the article that the Commune could, despite its failure and defeat, be viewed as a model for a future socialist society.

  The upshot of this extraordinarily complex situation was that, for the first time in his life, Marx became famous as an international revolutionary masterminding a worldwide revolutionary socialist conspiracy.

  Marx’s attempts to distance the IWA—and himself—from being viewed as responsible for the Commune had of course a practical aim: if governments and public opinion accepted the accusation, the future work of the IWA, which always insisted on working within the confines of the law, might be endangered. Yet on a personal level it appears that Marx drew some satisfaction, albeit a bitter one, from his new fame and notoriety. In a letter to his Hamburg correspondent Ludwig Kugelmann, he wrote ruefully on 18th June 1871:

  I have the honor of being at this moment the best vilified and most menaced man in London. That really does one good after a tedious twenty years’ idyll in my den.

  Be this as it may, and despite all his encomia about the Commune in The Civil War in France, Marx never retreated from his view that the Commune was not a socialist uprising and that, by implication, it had set back the chances of the working-class movement in Europe. Ten years later, in a letter of 22nd February 1881 to the Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis, Marx reiterated his view that a socialist government can come into power only if conditions enable it to take all possible measures necessary for transforming society radically, and then, referring to the Commune, added:

  But apart from the fact that it was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be. With a modicum of common sense, however, it could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people—the only thing that could have been reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to put an end with terror to the pretensions of the Versailles people, etc. etc.

  The political turmoil caused by the Franco-German War and the Paris Commune also had a direct impact on the private life of the Marx family. Marx’s daughter Laura and her husband, Paul Lafargue, were caught in the cauldron of the upheaval, and initially managed to stay out of trouble, mainly in Bordeaux. In the summer of 1871, after the defeat of the Commune, Laura’s sisters Jenny and Eleanor traveled to Bordeaux and met the couple. The visit did draw the attention of the French authorities, and Jenny and Eleanor were put briefly under temporary arrest, while Lafargue fled to Spain. The two sisters eventually made their way back to London, and Lafargue was able to return to France later, but the incident, though not widely publicized, added a personal worry to Marx’s unease about what some members of the French section of the IWA had wrought, through what to him was an irresponsible lack of political judgment.

  A NASCENT SOCIAL DEMOCRAT?

  Marx had become convinced that the events of the Paris Commune called for serious reassessment as well as organizational reforms if the IWA was to survive. He enjoyed a public standing, both inside and outside the socialist movement, which he had not had before. Part of it, as we have seen, came from the false accusations of him being the leader of the IWA’s involvement in the Paris Commune; part came from his growing reputation as the author of Das Kapital, which was being translated into Russian and French.

  What eventually emerged was not free from personal tensions and animosities, mainly between Marx and Bakunin. This first came to a head in an informal conference of the IWA in London in September 1871, when unsettled conditions in France did not yet allow the convening of a regular congress. A year later, the internal crisis reached its zenith at the IWA Congress held in The Hague in September 1872. This was the Fifth Congress of the association—and was to be its last one. It was also the only congress attended by Marx himself. The issues that were bones of contention between the followers of Marx and of Bakunin can be categorized as organizational, ideological, and ultimately personal.

  One of the issues Marx raised at the London meeting called for a change in the IWA rules that explicitly guaranteed the autonomy of each member section of the association. Although the rule was initially meant to allow smooth cooperation among the rather disparate member groups, the experience of the Commune pointed to some dangers involved. Even after the IWA had warned its French members in the second address against an insurrection and called for obedience to the provisional government, members of the French section, mainly the Blaquists, pushed for a revolt, which ended up making the IWA complicit in an act of political violence it had opposed, and branding it as the instigator of the Commune. Against the views of the anarchists and Proudhonists, Marx pushed for a resolution empowering the General Council to decide and direct overall policies, curtailing the autonomy of the individual sections. This move was opposed also by some of the Italian, Spanish, and Swiss sections and led to a nasty fight over accreditation, as Bakunin and his supporters made accusations against what they started calling Marx’s authoritarian and dictatorial inclinations. When Marx was elected as corresponding secretary for Russia, this was clearly viewed as a frontal attack on Bakunin.

  The other issue was more fundamental and had to do with Marx’s insistence that the IWA aimed at organizing the working class for the capture of political power. Bakunin and the Proudhonists objected to these political aims: the revolutionary proletariat, they maintained, should smash all political power, not capture it: Marx was consequently accused of “Statism.” When Bakunin intimated that Marx’s authoritarian tendencies resulted from his being a Hegelian, a German, and a Jew, the level of argument had indeed slipped considerably.

  Those tensions became almost unbridgeable at The Hague Congress. Engels also attended it, and Marx was accompanied by his wife Jenny and daughter Eleanor. His position about the aims of the IWA was clear: for a successful revolution, the proletariat had to take control of the state. This was opposed by Bakunin and his anarchist followers, especially after Marx gave a speech in Amsterdam, accompanying the Congress, that presented a nuanced view of what a proletarian revolution would mean. The speech is a powerful insistence on the need to gain political power but also expresses a highly pluralist approach to the question of how gaining political power would come about—through violent revolution or through peaceful means, shocking the anarchists by maintaining that in some significant cases orderly electoral politics might be the handmaid of socialism.

  The workers must one day conquer political supremacy in order to establish the new organization of labor. … But we do not maintain that the attainment of this end requires identical means. We know that one has to take into consideration the institutions, mores [Sitten] and traditions of the different countries, and we do not deny that there are countries like England and America, and if I would be familiar with your institutions, also Holland, where labor may attain its goal by peaceful means.

  That this most explicit statement of Marx’s mature approach to how socialist transformation could come about appears in the context of a bitter struggle against Bakunin may be of wider significance when one ponders some of the future developments of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Marx viewed with great concern the tendency of Bakunin and his Russian followers to use violence, personal terrorism, and assassination in their activities—a developme
nt that came to a head with the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, and much later also accompanied the 1917 revolution. The ugly disagreements at The Hague Congress were also accompanied by the unwillingness of the Bakuninists to accept majority decisions made at the Congress—another feature that would eventually mar the Russian revolutionary movement, culminating in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

  The debates at The Hague Congress were indeed bitter and vicious. Bakunin and his followers objected to a resolution giving the General Council authority over policy decisions of the individual sections, and challenged the majority that approved it. Consequently, they were expelled from the IWA, so they set up a parallel organization (“The Jura Federation”), which for some time brought together various anarchist associations. At Marx’s suggestion, the seat of the General Council was moved to New York, which clearly meant that the IWA no longer believed that it could be the central coordinating focus of a European socialist movement. A few years later it was finally disbanded.

  The split and eventual demise of the IWA did not put an end to the debate about the strategy of the working-class movement, and gave rise to venomous public controversies. In 1873, Bakunin published a Russian volume entitled Statism and Anarchy, in which he attacked Marx and his followers, whom he accused of being prisoners of the Prussian state philosophy of the Hegelian school. The critique of Marx is laced with anti-Semitism, and at one point Bakunin argued that Marx on one hand and Disraeli and Rothschild on the other were the heads of the two wings of an international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world—prefiguring, in a way, what the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion decades later made the cornerstone of their conspiracy theories.

  Marx responded to these attacks in a pamphlet a year later, in which he compared Bakunin’s anarchist ideology with the ways his movement in Russia actually operated. One of Bakunin’s followers, Sergey Nechaev, was put on trial at that time for a number of terrorist acts, and this confirmed Marx’s argument that such violent practices would ultimately determine the nature of the revolution once it gained power: a movement based on terror, intimidation, and blackmail will ultimately produce a society based on these methods as well. (Later, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and other democratic socialists used these same arguments against the violent Leninist ascent to power.)

  Marx’s reading of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy reveals what to him was a fundamental contradiction: while Bakunin argues that the anarchists aim at smashing state power and state institutions, his “principles of social order” would in reality introduce a new form of tyranny.

  What a wonderful example of barracks communism! Everything is here—common pots and dormitories, control commissioners and control offices, the regulation of education, production, consumption—in one word, control of all social activity; and at the same time, there appears Our Committee, anonymous and unknown, as supreme authority. Surely, this is most pure anti-authoritarianism!

  Marx appears here to be pointing out that even apparently radical libertarian ideologies, such as anarchism, can be accompanied by coercive and oppressive tendencies, which he clearly discovers in Bakunin’s disdain for any activity that uses the political process with its institutional constraints on power.

  The Amsterdam speech is the culmination of a lengthy post-1848 thought process, which led Marx to the conclusion that the proletariat can capture political power through peaceful means. Following economic and social developments in western Europe carefully, he clearly envisages the possibility of an evolutionary path leading the proletariat to the position of the ruling class through extending the suffrage. This reevaluation started quite early after 1849: at the time he was fighting the radical wing among the remnants of the League of Communists in London exile, he considered this possibility in an article printed in the New York Daily Tribune on 25th August 1852, entitled “The Chartists.”

  The carrying of Universal Suffrage in England would … be a far more socialist measure than anything which has been honored with that name on the Continent. Its inevitable result here is the political supremacy of the working class.

  The reasons for this, he argued, were the existence of a parliamentary system and the disappearance of any traces of a peasantry in England, thus eliminating a basically conservative class from the social fabric of the country.

  A decade and a half later, in a much neglected passage of Das Kapital, Marx suggested that developments in England were about to be replicated on the Continent, although he suggested that there might be differences and there obviously is no one size that fits all countries.

  In England the process of social upheaval [Umwältzung] is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must act on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself.

  This was written in 1867, after the Second Reform Act had opened the way to parliamentary suffrage for a part of the British working class, and suggesting the possibility of a further widening of voting rights. In the same year, on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Polish anti-Russian insurrection, Marx reiterated a similar prognosis at a London public meeting:

  It is possible that the struggle between the workers and the capitalists will be less terrible and less bloody than the struggle between the feudal lords and the bourgeoisie in England and France. Let us hope so.

  Four years later, Marx was even more emphatic. In an interview published in the American journal Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly on 12th August 1871, he said that in Britain the working class needed no violent revolution to achieve political power.

  In England, for example, the way is open for the working class to develop their political power. In a place where they can achieve their goal more quickly and more securely through peaceful propaganda, insurrection would be a folly.

  Marx made a similar point in an interview granted to an American journalist and published in the New York World on 18th July 1871.

  In England … the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work.

  The American reporter who conducted the interview in Marx’s house in Hampstead noted that on the table of the pleasant drawing room they were sitting in was displayed “a fine album of Rhine views.” They must have included the dramatic and almost mythical Lorelei rock in the Rhine Gorge, the subject of one of Heine’s most hauntingly beautiful ballads of that name. That the Rhineland still meant so much to Marx even after having left it more than a quarter century earlier may evoke the equally haunting epigram of the Ukrainian-born Hebrew poet Shaul Tschernichowsky that every person is formed by the design of his homeland’s landscape (ha’adam eyno ela tavnit nof moladeto). It is fair to guess that when looking at those images in the album, Marx was contemplating not only the stunning physical beauty of his Rhenish homeland, but also what it stood for in history and in the annals of his family. He had no sentimental attachment to Germany; but the Rhineland was a different matter.

  Yet it was political developments in Germany that greatly encouraged Marx. The newly established Bismarckian unified Germany extended voting rights for the Reichstag to all male citizens—a tremendous change from the restricted and property-based voting rights in Prussia and other individual German states. Consequently, despite the setbacks caused by the Paris Commune and the virtual demise of the IWA, the new conditions in Germany brought about the emergence of what would eventually become the strongest social democratic party in Europe.

  Since the 1860s, there had existed in Germany two working-class parties—the General German Workers Association, founded by Lassalle, and the Social Democratic Workers Party, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who were close to Marx. At a congress in the town of Gotha in May 1875, the two parties agreed to merge, forming the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

  A preparatory committee drafted a detailed
party program, and one of the drafters sent it to Marx in London for his comments. In his response, Marx maintained that in principle the united party did not need a detailed ideological program: a concise working plan dealing with concrete issues should suffice. But, he added, since a detailed program had been drafted, he would like to make just a few marginal comments, especially because some publications, mainly at the instigation of Bakunin, had suggested that Marx and Engels were clandestinely directing the newly established united party from London, and it would be important to distance himself from such a claims.

  This was the background for what would eventually be known as Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. His comments were never made public at the time or even later during his life, and were virtually disregarded by the founding congress at Gotha; they had no immediate impact on the united party’s policies. Marx’s comments were first published by Engels in 1891, with a preface by him, and thus eventually became part of the canonical Marx ideological corpus.

  Most of Marx’s Critique is of limited intellectual or historical significance and can be easily dismissed as a typical contribution to the work of a committee drafting a document that reflects nuances in terminology and approach by two different socialist traditions—the Marxian and the Lassallean. With some exasperation and anger—being far away from the action at Gotha—Marx reiterates his differences with Lassalle’s theories of labor, value, and the role of the state. Many of these comments are petty, trivial, and hair splitting: in a way they corroborate Marx’s basic view that the new party should not get involved too much in ideological arguments.