Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  His visibility radiated well beyond left-wing circles. A newsman from the New York World engaged in the new-fangled practice of the journalistic interview with Marx just a month after the suppression of the Commune. Marx’s biography was the cover story of the November 11, 1871, issue of Paris’s Illustrated News, and the story, including his portrait, with the characterization of him as “chief of the International,” was reprinted in English, Spanish, Italian, German, and American newspapers. The end of the 1870s saw a new wave of interest in the aging revolutionary. Queen Victoria sent a personal envoy, with the impressive name of Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, to meet with Marx at the beginning of 1879. A biography appeared in a Dutch collection of lives of prominent men, sort of an early Who’s Who, and two different British literary and general interest periodicals, The Contemporary Review and Leaders of Modern Thought, published thumbnail sketches of Marx’s life and ideas. American journalists appeared at the house on Maitland Park Road, and even in Ramsgate, when Marx was at the seashore with his family, to interview the revolutionary veteran.2

  Marx was flattered by the attention paid to him, but annoyed by the many inaccuracies in the biographical accounts and the unwillingness to take his ideas seriously. By far the most sophisticated of these pieces, written by the Scottish journalist John Rae (who would later write a life of Adam Smith), contained a perceptive account of the Young Hegelian roots of Marx’s intellectual and political development. The essay was part of an informal series on socialist thinking in Germany. Unlike Rae’s two other, equally well informed pieces in the series, the article on Marx contained no description of his economic ideas, continuing what was for Marx a frustrating lack of attention in the country that had invented political economy. Oddly enough, Rae himself began his essay on Marx by noting that very fact.3

  Even a good decade after the end of the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government that had briefly existed in continental Europe’s largest city remained a source of fascination and horror, and the continued interest in Marx was closely linked to his ostensible ties to the Commune. The descriptions based on personal encounters, the newspaper interviews, and the secret report to Queen Victoria emphasized this connection in perverse fashion. Marx’s personal appearance was that of an aging Teutonic scholar in his book-lined study, a proper, politely spoken old gentleman, a kindly grandfather playing on the beach with his grandchildren. As Grant Duff noted, “the whole expression rather pleasant than not [is] by no means that of a gentleman who is in the habit of eating babies in their cradles.” Yet that very same man, as all the accounts noted, endorsed the Commune and promoted ongoing schemes of upheaval. Such contradictory pictures were all portraits of a veteran revolutionary.

  IF THE PARIS COMMUNE was the source of Marx’s expanded public image, it was also at the origin of the struggle for control of the IWMA that would lead to its destruction. The Franco-Prussian War and subsequent revolutionary uprising made the planned 1870 IWMA Congress impossible and also ensured that one could not meet the following year. Marx proposed to hold, instead of a congress, a conference: an informal gathering of delegates from whatever branches of the International could manage to send them. The conference met in September 1871 in closed session, issuing no reports of its proceedings to the press.4 Officially, it was to deal primarily with organizational matters. It reiterated the IWMA’s previous call for sections to gather statistical information on workplaces, approved the creation of exclusively female sections, and devised a standardized organizational structure in which individual local sections in each country were to send representatives to a nationwide “Federal Council,” a name emerging from the Commune, where federalist ideas had been very influential. As a distinct organizational novelty, the conference created a Federal Council for England; previously, the General Council had dealt with English affairs.5

  All IWMA-affiliated societies were to be either regionally based or trade unions; politically oriented sections were prohibited, a proposal aimed at Bakunin’s anarchist adherents. If that vague point was not enough, the conference also declared that the General Council would expel any affiliates connected to the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, Bakunin’s onetime front group. For good measure, the conference condemned secret societies, even in countries where government persecution had made the regular functioning of IWMA affiliates impossible. The conference adjudicated the dispute between the pro-Bakunin and anti-Bakunin groups, each claiming to represent the IWMA in francophone Switzerland, but the committee evaluating the opposing claims met at Marx’s home, and was so evidently stacked in favor of the anti-Bakunin associations that Paul Robin, who represented the pro-Bakunin ones, stalked out the door, shouting, “I despise you.”6

  The conference issued just one policy recommendation, but it was a very large one. The working class could only act as a class “by constituting itself as a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes. . . .” It may be hard to grasp how radical a departure this proposal was. At the time of the conference, anything resembling the proposed workers’ party only existed in Germany—two actually, the followers of Lassalle, and those of Bebel and Liebknecht. Neither was represented at the conference, and Marx had not shown much faith in the political activities of either one of them. The British trade unionists, with whom he had been closely allied since the founding of the IWMA in 1864, were generally adherents of the Liberal Party—definitely not the recommended workers’ party. Of course, Bakunin and his anarchist followers opposed all kinds of political parties. The resolution was a direct slap in their faces.

  Compounding the drastic nature of the decision was the process by which it was made. The delegates to the conference were mostly members of the General Council and a random few others: only the Belgian affiliates of the IWMA sent an actual delegation. Members of the General Council, in turn, were co-opted by existing members, which is how Engels, following his move to London, became a member of the Council and corresponding secretary for Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Quite a number of refugees from the Paris Commune, for whom Marx was busy collecting money—his experiences in 1849–50 had taught him about the links between assisting political refugees and drumming up support—had also been co-opted onto the Council. That the conference’s decisions were taken in secret only made the whole procedure seem more arbitrary and irregular.7

  What impelled Marx to take this drastic step, which was sure to conjure up vehement opposition? Engels, with a long history of such backroom maneuvering, had first proposed the idea of a conference in place of a congress. Marx’s worries about the influence of Bakunin and his followers, busy organizing sections of the IWMA in Southern Europe, had not diminished. The actions of the anarchist leader during the Franco-Prussian War, when he turned up in Lyon, declared the state abolished, and proposed to begin burning property documents, only increased Marx’s anxiety about a person with such views gaining control of the International.8

  An anti-anarchist move did not have to include drastic policy changes. Looking back on the events several years later, Engels suggested that from the very beginning the IWMA was a mixture of politically heterogeneous groups that had been willing to work together. But the revolutionary effect of the Paris Commune led “every tendency” in the IWMA to exploit the impact of that uprising for its own ends, and to work to change, fundamentally, the nature of the association. Engels conveniently excluded from judgment the “German communists” (himself and Marx), who, he asserted, wanted to “go on working on the basis of the old, comprehensive program.”9 But the London Conference decision endorsing workers’ parties was the very opposite of previous policy. In the wake of the Commune, Marx and Engels were trying to reshape, drastically, the IWMA. The possibility that their initiative would fail, and lead to the dissolution of the organization, was a chance Marx was prepared to take.

  The secret decisions of the London Conference did not remain secret very long: a member of the General Coun
cil, the London-based German tailor Johann Eccarius, promptly leaked the decisions to the press. Eccarius had been a long-term ally of Marx and Engels in the London German Communist Workers’ Educational Society, and the two bourgeois intellectuals had, over the decades, helped him out financially, assisted him when he was ill, and put him forward for paid positions in the IWMA and as a journalist. Unlike Marx and Engels, Eccarius sympathized with the English trade unionists and their ties to the Liberal Party. His independent stance could be perceived as an example of the maturity of the working class, able to choose its own political positions, and no longer reliant on the ideas of bourgeois intellectuals. Not surprisingly, Marx and Engels did not see it that way, but took Eccarius’s action as a personal insult, and an example of rank ingratitude; they broke off all contact with him.10

  But once the word was out, opposition to the decisions of the London Conference spread throughout the IWMA. Anarchist groups, such as the pro-Bakunin francophone Swiss sections or the newly formed Italian and Spanish sections, generally under Bakunin’s influence, denounced the decisions, and demanded that the General Council be stripped of its powers. The Belgian Federation, not controlled by Bakunin and his followers, also called for a full congress of the IWMA to revise the London Conference decisions.

  These were all initiatives from French-speaking or Latin countries, and their declarations opposed to the General Council contained references to malign Prussian influences—in other words, Marx and Engels, neither of whom, in spite of their origins, was exactly pro-Prussian. These assertions, along with the tendency of the Swiss affiliates of the IWMA to break down along German-speaking, pro–General Council and French-speaking, anti–General Council lines, suggest that the nationalist tensions provoked by the Franco-Prussian War could infiltrate the workers’ international organization. Other, distinctly non-Latin affiliates joined in condemning the decisions of the London Conference, including the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, both in Germany and among the German workers in London. Marx and Engels enjoyed the irony of a group known for its support of the Prussian government and its calls for state aid to producers’ cooperatives working together with anti-statist anarchists; but their enjoyment did not lessen the opposition. Marx’s long-term allies, the British trade union leaders, were becoming steadily more sympathetic to this opposition: although hardly anarchists, in view of their lengthy affiliation with the Liberals, they were no supporters of working-class political parties. The newly formed British Federation quickly became a center of anti–General Council views.

  Within a few months of the London Conference, Marx was faced with a full-blown rebellion against the new course of the International he had orchestrated. While Marx and his friends continued to control the General Council, his position in the affiliated societies was quite shaky, since many of his potential allies were gone: the British trade unionists in opposition, the French sections outlawed by the post-Commune conservative government. The German followers of Liebknecht and Bebel had not sent any delegates to the London Conference, paid any dues to the General Council, or shown much interest in further affiliation with the IWMA, leading a frustrated Marx to open correspondence with a local group in Berlin, just to have some say on conditions in Germany. In contrast to the passivity or desertions of Marx’s former adherents, Bakunin’s followers were busy organizing new sections in Italy and Spain.11

  There would be no avoiding a congress of the International that would decide the future of the organization. The first eight months of 1872 saw feverish activities by both Marx’s and Bakunin’s adherents to rally supporters to control the forthcoming congress. Marx struck first, with his polemic, The Purported Schisms in the International, officially endorsed by the General Council in its meeting of March 5, 1872. A substantial document, laced with envenomed remarks and discussions of personal scandals, the piece denounced Bakunin and his followers for their introduction of secret society tactics into the IWMA. It recounted, with some relish, the story of Bakunin’s close connections to the psychopathic Russian revolutionary Nechayev. Bakunin and his followers struck back with their own polemics, denouncing Marx as a bourgeois, smoking cigarettes in his London villa, while the workers in Europe were fighting for their freedom. They condemned him as an authoritarian German, and contended that his faction of the IWMA was led entirely by Jews. Bakunin, in writing unpublished at the time, denounced Marx as the front man of an international Jewish conspiracy.12

  Mutual denunciations having set the stage, both sides turned to control of the forthcoming congress. Marx was determined to exploit to the fullest the General Council’s statutory authority to set the congress’s location. Geneva was the initial choice; Marx’s old ally there, Johann Philipp Becker, assured him that he could muster enough working-class supporters to rout the adherents of Bakunin should they try to seize control of the congress by force. This was not an entirely far-fetched precaution, since Bakunin’s followers had attacked Nikolai Utin, a pro-Marx Russian political exile, on the streets of Zurich in August 1872, and beaten him almost to death. In the end, Marx decided on The Hague as a better site: physically closer to Germany and the United Kingdom, from which he was expecting friendly delegates, further from the Mediterranean lands that were the base of Bakunin’s support. At its meeting on June 11, 1872, the General Council duly chose the Dutch city and set the first Monday in September as the date for the congress to convene.13

  Well before the time and place had been set, Marx and his associates were hard at work, trying to ensure that they would have a majority of delegates. Italy and Spain were the most difficult spots, since most of their sections had been recently founded by the anarchists. Engels, the General Council’s corresponding secretary for the two countries, had only a rudimentary knowledge of their languages. His correspondence with the sections there showed a distinct tendency to degenerate into vituperation of their pro-Bakunin leaders. Marx also had personal representatives in the southern Mediterranean. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue had been forced to flee to Spain to avoid persecution by the French government for his support of the Commune. Lafargue maneuvered skillfully, and was able to make the most of a bad situation, rallying as many of Marx’s supporters as he could. In Italy, Marx depended on a young German engineer working in Milan, Theodor Cuno, whom the Italian government quickly expelled from the country. For Cuno, it was the beginning of a lifelong political odyssey that would conclude as a member of a left-wing, multiracial commune in 1930s Louisiana; but his expulsion from Italy sixty years earlier left Marx without any way to gather support.14

  Marx and Engels had another string in their bow, getting the General Council to refuse to recognize the affiliation of the Italian and Spanish sections on the grounds that they had neither paid their dues nor adhered to the rules of the IWMA. The anarchists were outraged by this political maneuvering, but Marx could point out that the 1869 Basel Congress of the IWMA had granted these powers to the General Council with the enthusiastic support of Bakunin and his followers, as they ruefully admitted. They had probably supported the proposal because they hoped to gain control of the General Council and make use of it for their own ends. In adopting this strategy, Marx was looking forward to what we would today call a credentials fight, hoping to undermine the legitimacy of the anarchist delegations. Engels admitted that this was a risky move, because the IWMA’s German affiliates, who would provide crucial votes for Marx, had not paid their dues either.15

  Marx assiduously cultivated the French refugees from the Paris Commune residing in London, most of whom were followers of the ideas of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the veteran French revolutionary and devotee of secret societies: not ideal for Marx’s cause, but at least opposed to Bakunin. The IWMA affiliates in the United States were also the subject of Marx’s appeals: “This congress will decide the life or death of the International,” Marx wrote to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, a fellow 1848 revolutionary, then living in Hoboken, New Jersey. “You and at least one other if not two must attend.” Sections
that could not send delegates should send proxies instead, granting their votes to Marx and his friends. Since attending the Congress, even from European countries much closer to The Hague than New Jersey, was often an enormous financial challenge for potential delegates, Marx proposed that friendly affiliated groups provide him and his associates with proxies. Engels opened his wallet to help supportive delegates in England with travel costs.16

  By late summer 1872, it was increasingly clear that Marx had outmaneuvered Bakunin. The anarchists were either planning to boycott the Hague Congress altogether, in favor of their own to be held in Neuchâtel, or to put in an appearance in the Netherlands, be outvoted, and then go off to Switzerland. In spite of favorable auspices, Marx was determined to leave nothing to chance. He attended the Congress in person, outfitted with four votes, as a delegate of the General Council, and with proxies from sections in New York, Leipzig, and Mainz. Engels accompanied him, as did Jenny, who attended the sessions of the Congress sitting with her daughter Laura. Marx had never previously been to an IWMA congress; he had consistently refused to attend congresses of the German labor parties, although he received invitations from both the followers of Lassalle and those of Bebel and Liebknecht. The September 1872 Hague Congress of the IWMA was the only time Marx ever left England to attend a political meeting since his arrival there as a refugee in 1849—a clear indication of the great importance he placed in the meeting.17