Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The upheaval began with Bismarck, who launched a diplomatic campaign in the spring of 1866 that led to a war between Prussia and Austria in June of that year. Bismarck demanded the abolition of the German Confederation, the league of central European states created by the Congress of Vienna. In its place, he wanted a united German nation-state, including a German parliament elected by universal manhood suffrage. Contemporaries found it hard to believe that the conservative prime minister would make such demands, since they were an endorsement of the radical, nationalist program of the revolutionaries of 1848. They feared that a war between Prussia and Austria arising from Bismarck’s initiative would enable Napoleon III to seize German territory on the Rhine. Almost all the smaller German states took Austria’s side in the diplomatic confrontations and ensuing war. Marx and Engels shared their contemporaries’ doubts and fears, mocked Bismarck’s nationalist credentials, and saw his policy as dictated by Russia in allegiance with Louis Napoleon’s France. They expected a Prussian defeat in the war and hoped that it might lead to a revolutionary situation—although both were doubtful that the Berliners would have the courage to rise up against Prussian rule.

  In a military campaign that astonished Europe, Prussia’s outnumbered but better armed and led troops scored a decisive victory over Austria and its allies in just six weeks, so quickly that Louis Napoleon had no time to mobilize his army. Even Engels, Marx’s military expert, was profoundly impressed. No less astonishing, Bismarck carried out his revolutionary proposals. He abolished the German Confederation, annexed into Prussia a number of German states that had fought on Austria’s side, and united this expanded Prussia with the smaller states of northern Germany into a new North German Confederation (in spite of its name more a federal state than a Confederation) with a Reichstag, or parliament, elected by universal manhood suffrage. Nationalists and former revolutionaries of 1848, along with members of the Party of Progress and the National Association, rallied to the Prussian statesman who had carried out their ideas as they themselves could not.76

  There was an effort to bring Marx into these ranks. Already in the fall of 1865, one of Bismarck’s agents, Lothar Bucher, another 1848 revolutionary involved in the revival of the labor movement (Lassalle had named him executor of his will), offered Marx employment as a financial columnist for the official Prussian gazette, the State-Advertiser. Marx, informed by Wilhelm Liebknecht of Bucher’s change of political allegiance, rejected the proposal. In April 1867, when Marx was visiting his German friend Dr. Kugelmann in Hanover after bringing the manuscript of the first volume of Capital to his publisher in Hamburg, the pro-governmental forces tried again, inviting Marx to a meeting with Rudolf von Bennigsen, the head of the National Association, one of the most prominent liberal nationalists to go over to Bismarck. The meeting was arranged by Bennigsen’s close associate Johannes Miquel, a onetime member of the clandestine Communist League, whom Marx had regarded as one of his most promising followers. It is unclear whether Marx actually met with Bennigsen, but he certainly was not prepared to follow Lassalle in endorsing Prussian policies in the name of German nationalism.77

  While Marx and Engels were unwilling to join the crowd of revolutionaries entering the camp of the Prussian prime minister, they recognized a fait accompli when they saw one: “one must take the garbage as it is,” Marx wrote. Rather than denouncing Germany’s new political circumstances, they thought the labor movement should exploit them, particularly the democratic franchise in elections to its Reichstag.78 Wilhelm Liebknecht certainly saw things in this way. Teaming up with a young woodworker named August Bebel, then at the beginning of a political career that would transform him into the patriarchal head of the German labor movement by 1900, Liebknecht turned to the federation of German workers’ educational societies, and wrested the leadership of this group away from the liberals who had founded it. Liebknecht and Bebel both ran for the North German Reichstag, and both were elected by constituencies in Saxony. Marx was quite impressed with the way these two leftists could get things done in parliament even though they were so outvoted. He was particularly impressed by Liebknecht’s amendment to the law abolishing the guilds and instituting freedom of movement. It stated that nothing in the law overruled previously existing Prussian legislation limiting children’s working hours, and secured almost unanimous support from the distinctly non-socialist deputies.79

  But there was a problem with Liebknecht, as far as Marx was concerned, particularly his combination of labor agitation and radical politics. Liebknecht had been elected to the Reichstag on the ticket of the People’s Party, a South German, democratic (Marx and Engels said “petit-bourgeois”), anti-Prussian political movement, not as a workers’ candidate. In his public speeches and in the Democratic Weekly, the People’s Party newspaper he edited, he stated that labor concerns would have to take a backseat to political issues, the struggle for democracy and against authoritarian Prussian rule. Liebknecht even supported the cause of the monarchs, the king of Hanover and the prince of Hessen, deposed by the Prussians after the 1866 war. Such rulers, in Marx’s view, were just outdated reactionaries, whose departure from the scene was hardly regrettable.80

  The Lassalleans, on the other hand, had no hesitations about denouncing bourgeois and petit-bourgeois democrats while proclaiming the organization of the working class as their prime political task. Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, after writing to Marx to praise him as the “head of the European labor movement,” printed in 1869 a twelve-part series in the Social Democrat about Marx’s newly published Capital, the most publicity the work had ever received. But Marx’s earlier differences with the policies of the General German Workers’ Association, particularly the group’s tacit support for authoritarian Prussisan rule, did not vanish in the new political environment.81

  Marx and Engels viewed the competition between the two labor movements in terms of the personal failings of their leaders. Schweitzer, the chief Lassallean, was very “clever,” but also a “scoundrel.” Marx thought that Schweitzer did have one thing right: Wilhelm Liebknecht’s “incompetence.” “Little Wilhelm,” as Marx and Engels liked to call him, “is getting stupider every day.”82 In making such derisive judgments, Marx was personalizing a dilemma of his long-term political strategy, evident since the 1840s: uniting anti-Prussian and anti-capitalist movements. In 1848–49, he had not been able to bring the two diverging forms of opposition together; twenty years later, they had become independent political parties. Marx blamed the personal shortcomings of their leaders for their inability to pursue jointly these divergent goals.

  In his official capacity as IWMA corresponding secretary for Germany, Marx refused to take sides between the two German labor movements, to the considerable annoyance of Liebknecht, who kept calling on Marx to denounce the Lassalleans publicly. But for all Marx’s refusal to take a public stand, for all the nasty remarks he made about Liebknecht in letters to Engels, and for all the positive comments he had about Schweitzer and the Lassalleans, there can be no doubt that Marx saw Liebknecht, Bebel, and their followers as the future of the German labor movement. The problems with them would be resolved, Marx thought, by their coming to see things his way; the solution he saw to the problems of the General German Workers’ Association was that group’s dissolution.83

  Marx’s hopes by the end of the 1860s did in fact seem on their way to realization. At a congress held in the Thuringian city of Eisenach in August 1869, Liebknecht’s and Bebel’s federated labor associations reorganized themselves as the Social Democratic Labor Party, and affiliated with the International Working Men’s Association, thus breaking with members of the People’s Party who could not accept the new group’s socialist goals. Marx’s critical comments to and about Liebknecht by no means came to an end, but in his evaluations of the progress of the labor movement across all of Europe he became increasingly positive about developments in Germany. He and Engels began to wonder if the priority they had always assigned to the workers of Paris was sti
ll valid, or if the Germans had now taken over a leading position in continental Europe.84

  NOTHING IN THE NEW European circumstances following the war of 1866 changed Marx’s commitment to the IWMA, and his extended efforts on its behalf. At times, though, repeatedly tormented by his skin disease and overwhelmed by recurring financial difficulties, he seems to have been weighing an escape from his commitments. Marx’s proposal to move the General Council of the International Association from London to Geneva, thus taking the group’s operations out of his hands—an idea he floated to Engels in August 1868, and repeated in a similar way a year later—certainly sounds like that. In the end, his commitments to the International continued unbroken.85 At the very least, a major reversal of his family’s finances at the end of the decade helped to make this decision easier.

  By 1866–67, Marx had run through the inheritances he had received a few years earlier; the recurring family financial crises, complete with debts, medical expenses, disputes with his wife, and increasingly desperate pleas to Engels, had come to the fore again. Following a couple of years of the usual temporary expedients, a new inheritance, received not by Marx but by Engels, finally provided a permanent resolution. When Friedrich Engels, Sr., passed away in 1861, Friedrich Engels’s siblings, deeply suspicious of their communist brother, decided his portion of their father’s estate would not include any share of the family textile manufacturing business in Germany. Instead, the family money invested in the firm of Ermen & Engels in Manchester, for which Engels had worked as a clerk since 1850, would be used to secure Friedrich a partnership in the business.86

  Engels feared that he was being cut out of the family’s property and pawned off with the dubious promise of a partnership, but he did become a partner in Ermen & Engels in 1864. Five years later, he sold his interest in the firm to the Ermen brothers, taking out the value of the partnership, plus an additional sum for signing a non-competition agreement, although the communist businessman had no intention of opening a competing enterprise; he wanted to retire and devote himself to the politics of the labor movement. The settlement he received meant that even after paying off his family, not only could he live from the interest but he also had enough money to settle Marx’s debts. In addition, he was able to increase his largesse by paying Marx an annual income of £350. Marx was “quite knocked down by your too great generosity,” which brought to an end three decades of chronic financial difficulties beginning with his father’s death in 1838.87

  At the time his money worries were put aside, Marx had two major concerns about the policies of the IWMA. One centered on the politics of Great Britain, the world’s leading capitalist nation. The actual results of the expansion of the franchise in the Second Reform Act of 1867 had proven a disappointment: labor candidates, standing for office before a more democratic, more working-class electorate, had been trounced at the polls by moderate liberals or even Tories. Following closely Engels’s reports on the elections in Manchester, Marx concluded that a major reason for this political debacle had been the hostility between English and Irish workers. The English despised and looked down on the Irish for what they saw as their alien religion and inferior colonial status. The solution to the problem, he thought, lay in an Irish revolution—a prospect enhanced by the rapid growth in the late 1860s of Irish nationalist agitation, after almost two decades in abeyance. An independent or at least autonomous Ireland would, Marx hoped, change the whole dynamics of working-class politics in England and throughout the entire world. He wrote in 1870: “After dealing for years with the Irish question, I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the ruling classes in England (and this is decisive for the labor movement all over the world) can be dealt not in England but in Ireland.” What Marx had in mind was an agrarian upheaval, in which Irish tenant farmers, keenly remembering the horrors of the Great Famine of 1846–51, would confiscate the property of the great landlords, who were members of the English aristocracy. Such a blow to the English aristocracy in Ireland would be a major step toward an English revolution. “I have always been convinced, that the social revolution must seriously begin from the ground up, that is from property in land.”88

  The central role of a socialist workers’ uprising in Paris, key to Marx’s revolutionary expectations for the previous quarter century, was giving way to an emphasis on the radical potential of Irish nationalism and the organizational strengths of the German labor movement. Both new expectations raised questions about future dilemmas of the labor movement that would not become entirely evident until some decades after Marx’s death. Unlike Engels with two Irish mistresses, or the Marx family’s enthusiastic endorsement of Irish nationalism (little Jenny and the adolescent Eleanor were particularly passionate partisans), English workers competing with the Irish for jobs were less ebullient. The devoutly Catholic Irish workers were similarly less than enthralled with the political goals endorsed by Marx and his left-wing English allies, such as the campaigns of the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi to seize the territory of the Pope for a united Italian nation-state.89 Marx’s endorsement of Irish nationalism to revolutionize the English working class pointed to a future long-term problem of the labor movement: the obstacles that religious, national, and ethnic differences presented to working-class solidarity.

  The other major issue faced by the International in the late 1860s was the relationship between Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The struggle between the two men, which grew particularly embittered in the following decade and led to the demise of the International, has become part of the anarchists’ political creed, pitting their ostensibly libertarian, decentralized, and anti-statist views against the authoritarian and state-centered perspective of the Marxists. This contrast, forged in the political confrontations between anarchists, socialists, and communists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was not particularly evident in the 1860s. Marx’s own views on a communist future, soon to be revealed in his writings on the Paris Commune, looked to a federalist and decentralized regime; Bakunin’s insistence that his followers owed him unquestioning obedience does not seem entirely anti-authoritarian.

  If there was an inevitable conflict between communists and anarchists, it certainly was not apparent in the relationship between Marx and Bakunin. The two had been friends as political émigrés in Paris during the 1840s, and had been on the same insurgent side during the Revolution of 1848. Following Bakunin’s escape from Siberia and his return to Europe in the 1860s, he and Marx had renewed their acquaintance. Marx was quite impressed, writing to Engels in 1864 that Bakunin was “one of the few people who after 18 years has not gone backwards but has developed further.” When Bakunin took up residence in Italy, Marx regarded him as a political ally, who would counteract the anti-communist ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini in the IWMA’s Italian affiliates. Marx’s favorable attitude toward Bakunin was particularly impressive in view of his long record of hostility and suspicion of Russia and all Russians.90

  What caused the breach between the two was the question of secret societies. Bakunin, always a fan of such groups, had been attempting since 1864 to gather European socialist revolutionaries in a secret organization. In 1868 he tried again, with the creation of an International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, whose members included many Swiss activists in the IWMA, among them Marx’s close ally Johann Philipp Becker, a long-term secret society enthusiast. It was Becker, not Bakunin, who proposed that the Alliance should join the IWMA as an affiliated society. But both Marx and Engels believed that Becker was only acting as Bakunin’s puppet, the tool of Russian and Pan-Slavist intrigues. Marx quickly convinced the General Council of the IWMA to reject the idea of affiliation with another international organization, especially one organized on a clandestine basis. Bakunin agreed to the dissolution of his group and the entrance into the International of its national branches as ordinary affiliated sections, which duly occurred in 1869.91

  Although the dispute seemed to have been
amiably resolved, the differences in political orientation were not so easily put aside. Marx’s opposition to the politics of secret societies and his determination to keep the IWMA clear of these organizations, previously focused on French radicals, now found a new source of enmity in Bakunin. The Russian émigré and his supporters were particularly active in Spain and southern Italy, parts of Europe where unions and workers’ associations were few and far between, and the politics of secret societies were prevalent. Increasingly, Bakunin’s followers became the IWMA in those countries. An initial clash between pro-Bakunin supporters of secret societies and anti-Bakunin proponents of the political line Marx endorsed in the General Council rocked the French Swiss affiliate of the IWMA in the spring of 1870. Amid accusations of manipulating mandates and packing meetings, each group expelled the other from the International. When Russian émigrés told Marx of Bakunin’s close ties to Sergei Nechayev, the Russian secret society leader who had had a member of his group murdered to gain control of his assets—an incident famously portrayed in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed—Marx became even more convinced of Bakunin’s pernicious influence.92