Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Marx treated the German labor movement with angry ultimatums and demands to follow a particular political line. His relationship with the labor movement in France was quite different. Following the electoral and parliamentary victories of supporters of the republican form of government over the monarchists in the late 1870s, French socialists began political organizing. The 1880 amnesty for participants in the Commune allowed exiles to return, including both of Marx’s sons-in-law, and to become involved in socialist politics.

  French socialists founded a multiplicity of parties and factions; adherents of one of those groups, led by a man named Jules Guesde, became known as “Marxists.” Although the term had been used earlier, generally in pejorative fashion, to refer to supporters of Marx in the struggles for control of the IWMA, the designation by Guesde’s followers was its first sustained and positive use. Marx was not happy having his name associated with this group of supposed supporters, and told Paul Lafargue, according to Engels’s reminiscence, “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.” Marx also told Engels that the doctrinaire “Marxists” and “anti-Marxists” alike in France were ruining his stay there while visiting his family in the fall of 1882. Both men saw differences among French socialists as primarily a product of idiosyncrasy, personal vanity, and obscure and unnecessary doctrinal disagreements. Meeting with these socialists in person during visits to his family in 1881 and 1882, Marx encouraged them to put aside such differences. The London exiles treated disagreements among German socialists, by contrast, as important questions of political principle, a difference in attitude testifying to Marx and Engels’s political involvement and personal investment in the German labor movement.43

  Also unlike the case in Germany, Marx’s interventions in the French labor movement came at the request of the French socialists themselves. This was true of Marx’s relationship with socialists in Russia, although similar circumstances involved a very different country. Marx had lived in France, knew the language well, and had, for decades, perceived France—Paris in particular—as central to his plans for global revolution and a communist future. Russia, by contrast, was for Marx the enemy, the czarist regime suppressing revolutionary movements in Europe and across the world. Opposition to Russia was one of the few political areas where Marx was willing to work with people of very different views, such as David Urquhart. His suspicions of Russia extended to Russian revolutionaries, whom he persistently suspected of being agents of the czar or pan-Slavists, using radical and nationalist ideas to expand czarist power in Eastern Europe. Late in Marx’s life his opinions about the revolutions in the Balkans and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 exemplified this viewpoint. The Russian academic Maxim Kovalevsky, who visited Marx in London frequently during the mid-1870s, remembered that Marx’s attitude toward Russia “was not essentially different from the prejudice of 1848 revolutionaries . . . who saw in Russia just the bulwark of all kinds of reaction and the strangler of democratic and liberal revolutions.”44

  But interest in Marx and his ideas grew rapidly in Russia. Academics there were intrigued with On the Critique of Political Economy and waited anxiously for the main part of Marx’s economics treatise to appear. Russian was the first language into which Capital was translated. As an oppositional revolutionary movement began to develop in the core provinces of the czar’s empire during the 1870s, primarily among university students exposed to Marx’s ideas in their studies, its adherents began to turn to Marx for advice.

  Marx was, at first, bemused by the favorable reception of his ideas in a country he had repeatedly denounced. By the late 1860s, when he was regarding rural society as steadily more crucial to his revolutionary aspirations, Russia came increasingly to his attention. He studied the social and economic relations in Russian agriculture intensively for the sections on ground rent and farming in the planned second volume of Capital. In the 1870s, he developed greater political connections with Russian revolutionaries, both refugees from the Paris Commune and anti-Bakunin exiles in Switzerland. Some very guarded correspondence, often written in English, with false names and cover addresses, began to be exchanged between the veteran socialist in London and potential Russian insurgents. Political exiles and Russian academics abroad made their way to the house on Maitland Park Road.45

  In 1881, Vera Zasulich, acting on behalf of a group of Russian émigrés in Switzerland, sent a letter to Marx, dealing with the very common practice of Russian peasants holding their village land in common. In view of the discussion in Capital of the end of feudalism and the development of capitalist agriculture in Western Europe, the émigré revolutionaries wanted to know the post-revolutionary future of this property form: would rural land have to become private property, as in Western Europe, or was there the possibility of maintaining collective ownership in some future communist society? Marx had already received a similar inquiry from the clandestine, revolutionary committee in St. Petersburg, and had found it filled with difficult implications.

  One was theoretical. His stages model of history, outlined in the Critique of Political Economy, set out a universal process of social evolution through which all countries would go, albeit at a different pace and at different times. Marx regarded collective ownership of agricultural land in Russia as an earlier, more primitive stage of society, seen in ancient German tribes, or in slowly moving Asian societies. Engels especially, but Marx as well, had always mocked the idea, sometimes propounded by Russian radicals, that the collective ownership of farmland in the czar’s empire was a precious and unique form of society, a sort of Russian gift to a communist future. For Marx and Engels, the continuing presence of this form of land ownership was archaic and backward; praise of it was politically pernicious, part of reactionary, Pan-Slavist schemes.46

  Marx’s reply to Zasulich’s letter went through five different lengthy drafts—a considerable effort at a time when his physical strength was failing, demonstrating the importance he placed on the topic. In the end, he just sent her a short note, stating that in Western Europe the transition was from feudal private property in land to capitalist private property, so not applicable by analogy to Russia. The peasant commune might serve as a “fulcrum for the social regeneration of Russia,” but only if at first “the deleterious influences assailing it from all sides” were “eliminated.” How, exactly, this might happen was specified a year later, when Marx and Engels wrote a brief preface to a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, noting that if a Russian revolution were a signal for a “proletarian revolution in the West,” the two movements might be mutually complementing and common property in land could “serve as the point of departure for a communist development.”47 Such formulations, reminiscent of speculations Marx and Engels made about Western European socialist regimes’ reforming colonial empires, suggest a continuing perception of Russian backwardness. They were also a reference to an implausible future, since at the time the preface was written, Marx was enthusiastic about the possibilities for revolution in Russia, but saw the socialist labor movement in Western Europe as in a relatively early stage of development. It was hard to see how a Russian revolution would coincide with a Western European workers’ uprising.

  In these difficult and repeatedly qualified formulations, Marx was wrestling with how to reconcile his long-held theories of social development with his growing interest in the revolutionary potential of rural society, and his desire to remain on good terms with the Russian revolutionaries. In the end, he was equivocal. Future Russian revolutionaries would treat Marx’s formulations as tea leaves to be read so as to make their country the central point of a global communist revolution, which, for all Marx’s equivocations, was certainly not how he saw things.

  THE ELDERLY MARX’S MUSING on the possibilities of revolution in Russia were just one aspect of the views he held, toward the end of his life, on revolution and a post-communist revolutionary future. Some aspects of these views demonstrated a lifelong continuity. Marx’s vision of revolution, for instanc
e, was always modeled on the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. The new-fangled designation of fellow socialists as “comrades,” a usage beginning with the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, was one that Marx rarely employed, and when he did, it was within quotation marks in ironic fashion. Following good Jacobin practice, in the IWMA he was always “Citizen Marx.” Another indication of Marx’s revolutionary ideals was the closing salutation that appears in most of his letters to Engels, the French word Salut. By itself just a common French term, it was also the abbreviated form of the Jacobin greeting, Salut et Fraternité. Marx used the full form, or its German version, Gruß und Handschlag, in letters to other leftists.48

  If the echoes of the Jacobin regime of 1793 remained in Marx’s revolutionary vocabulary throughout his life, so did his advocacy of political change by means of the violent overthrow of existing governments. There were occasional qualifications, especially the speech he gave at a banquet and public meeting in Amsterdam, the day after the end of the 1872 IWMA Hague Congress. In this speech, for which no written transcript survives and which is known only through summaries printed in Dutch newspapers, Marx asserted that in most countries, the workers would need to seize power via violent revolution, but in some—the United Kingdom, the United States, and perhaps the Netherlands—they could come to power by peaceful, legal means. Marx had addressed this issue the previous year in his interview with an American journalist, R. Landor, of the New York World. Landor had suggested that in view of the long history of peaceful political change in Britain, the workers could achieve power without revolution. Marx’s reply was:

  I am not so sanguine on that point as you. The English middle class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the voting power. But mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions, we shall see here a new slave-owner’s war.49

  The workers’ peaceful attainment of power which Marx suggested was possible in a few countries would only be a prelude to a violent confrontation, begun by the outvoted capitalists, just as southern slaveholders had begun a civil war when anti-slavery advocates were voted into office in the United States.

  If Marx’s advocacy of violent revolution persisted, he was also willing to consider new kinds of revolutionary action. His thoughts on this were strongly influenced by the Russian revolutionaries, who had begun a terrorist campaign of killing high government officials. Striking down police chiefs and provincial governors with bullets and explosives, their campaign culminated in 1881 with the assassination by a suicide bomber of Czar Alexander II. Marx fervently endorsed the terrorists’ actions and poured scorn on other groups within the Russian revolutionary movement who thought that political organization and propaganda should have priority. Such pro-terrorist sympathies were shared by quite a few of his contemporaries in Western Europe and North America, including Victor Hugo, the American abolitionist Wendell Phillips, and even Mark Twain. But Marx himself did not become a proponent of terrorism as a universal revolutionary strategy. He endorsed it as effective only against czarist autocracy, a regime that eliminated civil liberties and any possibilities for open political activity. Even for Bismarck’s nominally constitutional but authoritarian German Empire, which severely limited possibilities for open, legal politics, Marx opposed terrorist activities. Everyone at Maitland Park Road was very distressed at the news of the assassination attempts on Emperor Wilhelm I, fearing that the socialists really were behind them, and that such measures would be a provocation for severe persecution.50

  Another newer feature of Marx’s views, along with his limited endorsement of revolutionary terrorism, was a willingness to comment publicly on the institutions of a future communist society. From the 1840s onward, Marx had refused to do so, and sharply criticized fellow socialists who did. But in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” he sketched a very brief outline of some key economic features of a communist regime, building on speculations concerning the labor theory of value he had first developed in the unpublished early drafts of Capital.

  In the initial stages of a communist society, Marx asserted, labor value would be directly expressed: workers would not be paid in money, but in notes denominated in labor time. Pay would correspond to hours worked, after deduction of a “common fund” for investment and maintenance, and could be used to purchase goods, themselves priced according to labor time. “The same quantum of labor that he [the worker] has given society in one form, he receives back in the other.” Marx had been thinking about this idea for at least two decades, dating back to observations he made in the Grundrisse about the Saint-Simonian proposal for a bank that would issue notes denominated in labor time.

  This initial phase of socialism was, for Marx, egalitarian only in the measurement of compensation; other forms of inequality would persist. These would not be class inequalities, for everyone would be a worker. Some individuals could work longer or harder (labor time, Marx noted, would not just be measured in hours worked but also in the intensity of the labor) and would receive more labor time notes. Others would have to support a family on the same labor time pay as those who were single. These were “abuses,” but ones that were “unavoidable” in the initial phase of communist society. They would only end after the abolition of the “subordination of individuals in servile form to the division of labor” and the disappearance of the “opposition of intellectual and physical labor.” Only in this later phase of communism, when “labor is not just a means of life, but the first necessity of life,” and when the development of labor productivity has reached unparalleled heights, could “society write on its flag: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

  This vision of a communist future echoed Marx’s 1840s speculations about the abolition of the division of labor. Once, when Marx was visiting Dr. Kugelmann, another guest mocked the utopian aspects of the vision, asking Marx who would polish boots in his “state of the future.” Marx coolly replied, “You will,” a snappy retort, but one leaving the question unanswered.51 In Marx’s economic writings, from the Grundrisse to the second German edition of Capital, written just a few years before the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” he offered a different explanation for the abolition of the division of labor through the reduction of the working day to a minimum. The expansion of society’s productivity would reduce the amount of time required to be spent in alienated, divided labor and leave more time for individuals’ “development of their capabilities in art and Wissenschaft.” Such a vision of a socialist future embodied the values of an educated nineteenth-century German bourgeois, member of a social group with a very high opinion of art and Wissenschaft. Since Marx’s day, leisure time in economically advanced societies has greatly expanded, but most people do not use their time free from labor for the exalted purposes Marx expected. Late in his life, Marx replaced one utopian vision of the total abolition of alienated, divided labor with another, that of a humanity devoted to artistic and scholarly pursuits.52

  When did Marx expect this communist society to emerge? There were some revolutions he thought imminent. In September 1877, he informed his America adherent Adolph Sorge about a forthcoming Russian revolution: “If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable to us, we’ll experience the jubilation!” Three and a half years later, he congratulated his daughter Jenny on the birth of her son Marcel, stating that the new baby and his contemporaries “have before them the most revolutionary period men ever had to pass through. The bad thing now is to be ‘old’ so as to be only able to foresee instead of seeing.” This opinion was not a family secret, for at about the same time he had told the émigré German ultra-revolutionary Johann Most, “I will not see the triumph of our cause, but you are young enough, you can still live to see the people win the victory.”53 The revolution Marx was expecting imminently was the overthrow of the czar, bringing with it the end of the Prussian monarchy. This would represent the completion of the Fren
ch Revolution of 1789 in Eastern and central Europe, eliminating authoritarian rulers and establishing democratic and republican, if still capitalist and bourgeois regimes. This new state of affairs, much as Marx had expected since the Communist Manifesto, would open the way to a more intensive working-class organization and agitation. His grandson would experience the revolutionary and communist culmination of this organization and agitation, the second repetition of 1789, but Marx himself would not live to see it.

  MARX’S VIEW OF REVOLUTION during the last decade of his life continued to be dominated by strong emotions: excitement at the prospect of forthcoming uprisings in Eastern and central Europe, deep regret at realizing that he would not live to see the communist upheaval he had been advocating for decades. By contrast, his private life in the 1870s was placid and pleasant. His two oldest daughters were married and out of the house, and Eleanor was sometimes away, working as a schoolteacher, so in 1874 Karl and Jenny moved down the block from No. 1 to No. 41 Maitland Park Road, into a smaller residence. If no longer at home, the daughters remained nearby, because their husbands, political refugees as a result of the Paris Commune, could not yet return to France. Charles Longuet taught French at University College. Paul Lafargue, rather than practicing medicine, went into business printing art engravings, with the financial support of his father-in-law. The business failed and after some nasty legal skirmishing with Lafargue’s partners, he had to be rescued financially by Engels.

  All the Lafargues’ children died in infancy. Charles Longuet and his wife Jenny, in the ten years of their marriage, produced six children, four of whom reached adulthood. Through them, Marx’s descendants live in France today. The first surviving Longuet child, Jean-Laurent-Fréderick, born in 1876 and known to the family as Johnny, was, for Marx, the “apple of my eye.” All the child’s play in which Karl had so delighted with his children, he could repeat with his grandchildren. Jenny von Westphalen was overjoyed as well. “When he [Johnny] in carriage and four, i.e., the marital perambulator, is brought by, everyone jumps on him and greets him with jubilation, in order to be the first to receive him, old granny out in front.”54