In June 1851, Engels wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer, a former military officer and close friend who later that year emigrated to the United States, explaining that he needed the “elementary knowledge … necessary to enable me to understand and correctly evaluate historical facts of a military nature.” This included maps and manuals. He asked for an opinion of Clausewitz and also of “Monsieur Jomini, of whom the French make such a fuss?”22 He read Clausewitz but found Jomini more reliable. In 1853, again writing to Weydemeyer, Engels described Prussian military literature as “positively the worst there is,” noting in particular that “despite many fine things, I can’t really bring myself to like that natural genius, Clausewitz.”23 By 1857, he had warmed to Clausewitz despite his “strange way of philosophizing,” noting with approval Clausewitz’s suggestion that fighting is to war what cash payment is to trade.24
The interest in military matters also reflected the split which ended the short life of the Communist League. This came in 1850 as a result of Marx’s doubts about the imminence of revolution. The opposition was led by August von Willich, a former military officer described by Engels as a “brave, cold-blooded, skilful soldier” though a “boring ideologist.”25 In London, where the émigrés now congregated, Willich was more popular among exiles, sharing tavern life and optimistic talk of returning to liberate Germany. He presented himself as an impatient man of action compared to the elitist and patronizing “literary characters” like Marx and Engels. Whereas they seemed more interested in reading than revolution, confining their work to education and propaganda, and were prepared to support a democratic push, Willich’s followers had no interest in supporting bourgeois elements to power but aimed immediately for supreme power. Preparations for revolutionary war began, with drills, shooting practice, and a hierarchical, military-style organization.
Marx was always hostile to the view, most associated with Blanqui, that revolution was a matter of will and military skill as much as material conditions. There was no point urging people to fight against hopeless odds.26 “While we say to the workers, you have fifteen or twenty of fifty years of civil and national wars to go through, not just to alter conditions but to alter yourselves and qualify for political power,” Marx explained to Willich, “you on the contrary say: we must obtain power at once or we might as well lay ourselves down to sleep.”27 In September 1851, Marx wrote to Engels, reporting comments by Willich’s colleague Gustav Techow on the lessons of the events of 1849.28 According to Techow, revolution could not work if confined to a single faction or even nation. It had to become general. Barricades could only signal popular resistance and test a government. Far more important was organization for proper war, which required a disciplined army: “This alone makes an offensive possible and it is only in the offensive that victory lies.” National constituent assemblies could not take responsibility because of their internal divisions, arguing about matters that could only be truly decided after victory and foolishly expecting an army to be democratic. Enthusiastic volunteers would stand little chance against disciplined and well-fed soldiers. The revolutionary army would need compulsion, “Iron rigor of discipline.” In Engels’s dismissive assessment, Techow was postponing the struggle between different classes and perspectives until after the war. A military dictator would suppress internal politics. Yet Techow had no idea about how to recruit such a large army.29 A revolution in 1852 would be stuck on the defensive, confined to “empty proclamations” or doomed military expeditions.
In September 1952, Engels looked back to the Frankfurt-based German National Assembly from May 1849, which—with leftists and democrats largely in charge—had effectively challenged the three largest states of Austria, Prussia, and Bavaria. There was a strong movement for mass action, including insurrections in Dresden and Baden (in which Engels and Willich participated). The National Assembly might have called upon people to take up arms in its support. Instead it allowed the insurrections to be suppressed. These events prompted Engels to observe:
Now, insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them…. Firstly, never play with insurrection unless you are fully prepared to face the consequences of your play. Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magnitudes, the value of which may change every day; the forces opposed to you have all the advantage of organization, discipline, and habitual authority: unless you bring strong odds against them you are defeated and ruined. Secondly, the insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive. The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the first successful rising has given to you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, DE L’AUDACE, DE L’AUDACE, ENCORE DE L’AUDACE!30
The message was that once a revolutionary process had begun, it had to be sustained. It needed momentum and to stay on the offensive. Hesitate and all would be lost. The initial uprising would not be sufficient. The fight would have to be seen through to the complete defeat of the counterrevolution, which, of course, could require full-scale war with reactionary countries. Engels accepted the full logic of the war of annihilation, should the military course be chosen.
The question this raised, however, was what to do if this course led to certain defeat. If revolutionary strategy was a matter for cool calculation, this would argue for prudence and patience. But if revolutionary strategy was a matter of temperament, reflecting a deep commitment to transformational change as a matter of urgency, restraint could feel unbearable. Either way, as we shall see in the next chapter, radical politics could be intensely frustrating, either living with injustice while waiting for a moment when change might become possible, or else striking out against injustice even when the cause was hopeless.
CHAPTER 19 Herzen and Bakunin
People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History proceeds by zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille.
—Alexander Herzen
ALEXANDER HERZEN WAS a rare combination of a commitment to radical change with a fear of the consequences of reckless action. He is the hero of playwright Tom Stoppard’s remarkable trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, in which Stoppard portrays the circle of mainly Russian radical émigrés who moved in and out of Herzen’s life during the middle of the nineteenth century. Herzen was born in 1812 in Moscow, just before Borodino. An illegitimate child of the aristocracy, he became a brilliant writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of the human condition, and—while in exile—an influential agitator for change in Russia.1 Stoppard’s plays were held together by the interaction between the personal and public dramas of Herzen’s life, including his wife’s tempestuous affair with a German revolutionary. The intellectual meat came from the constant question about how to stimulate and direct radical political change. In Stoppard’s plays the great revolutionary figures of this time look forward with enthusiasm and without qualms to a coming revolution that in reality filled Herzen with deep foreboding.
Stoppard draws on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, also a fan of Herzen, in portraying a man who “favored the individual over the collective, the actual over the theoretical,” and could not accept that “future bliss justified present sacrifice and bloodshed.” For Herzen, according to Stoppard, “there was no libretto or destination, and there was always as much in front as behind.”2 When a radical spoke of the “Spirit of History, the ceaseless March of Progress,” Herzen exclaimed, “A curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood—a
t least spare them the conceit that they are acting out the biography of an abstract noun.”3
With his liberal skepticism and general distrust of intellectuals on a mission, Stoppard did not do full justice to Herzen’s libertarian socialism.4 Until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Herzen was playing an important role in generating pressure for change in Russia. His paper, The Bell, was required reading among intellectual and elite circles in Russia. He produced this in conjunction with his close friend, the poet Nicholas Ogarev. Many readers, even from the elite, shared his sense of humiliation that Russia was the backward country of Europe, still mired in feudalism and unable to join in the economic, social, and political dynamism of the time. Herzen’s method was to expose scandals, mock censorship, and reveal abuses, concentrating on the reasons why reform was necessary and not on how it should be achieved. He was even prepared to invest hopes in Tsar Alexander, to whom he made direct appeals. At first this was politically astute, making it possible to condemn the government vigorously without appearing to call for revolution.
This stance led to disputes with revolutionaries who could see no reason to trust the Tsar and accused him of lacking a program. He particularly quarreled with the nihilists. This was a group described by another member of Herzen’s circle, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, in his 1862 book Fathers and Children. A nihilist “does not bow down before any authority, and accepts no principles on trust, however much respect they may enjoy.” The nihilists were resolutely materialist, refusing to believe anything that could not be shown to be true. All abstract thought and aesthetics were decried. Their sole interest was to create a new society. One of their intellectual leaders was Nicholas Chernyshevsky. His novel What Is to Be Done?, written while in prison in 1862 and escaping the censor only by mistake, was generally given low marks as literature. It nonetheless became a handbook for young zealots, demonstrating how revolutionaries should steel themselves for the struggles ahead. Whatever Herzen’s personal views, his press in London was responsible for the covert publication of many of the key nihilist texts.
Stoppard staged his version of a real encounter between Herzen and Chernyshevsky in 1859. Chernyshevsky had once been an admirer but now found Herzen an irritating “dilettanti of revolutionary ideas.” His wealth and social position allowed him a disengaged approach to the struggle and to embrace the delusion of reform, that authority might undermine itself. For Chernyshevsky, “only the axe will do.” Herzen considered such arguments divisive. He could not endorse a stance that would serve the government by driving the reformists into the arms of the conservatives. “[A]re we ridding the people of the yoke so that they can live under a dictatorship of the intellectuals?” Better to move forward by peaceful steps than have blood flowing in the gutters.5
The Tsar’s Emancipation of the Serfs of March 1861 was the turning point. Herzen made this an occasion for a big party at his London home, but the celebration was soon muted. Not only were the details of the declaration a deep disappointment, revealing it to be something of a fraud, but it was followed almost immediately by a massacre in Warsaw by Russian troops. Herzen’s sympathy was with the peasants and the Poles, and his anger ran deep. Having worked to hold together a reforming coalition, he could now no longer do so. The betrayal was too great. He broke with the liberals, who feared both restlessness at home and an uprising in Poland. He wrote in The Bell in November 1861 that “a moan is growing, a murmur rising—it is the first roar of the ocean waves, which seethe, fraught by storms, after the terrible wearisome calm. To the people! To the people!”6 This may have been more exasperation than a political program, but it was interpreted as a call to revolution. Momentarily Herzen did wonder about whether to support revolution, but he could not bring himself to back leaders who claimed to speak for a people they so evidently disdained. He refused to accept talk of the backwardness of the peasants and so moved toward populism, coming to trust more in the wisdom of ordinary people than that of the intelligentsia. “Manna does not fall from heaven,” he observed, “it grows from the soil.” Unable to abandon either his radical beliefs or his reluctance to back a self-appointed revolutionary elite, despised by both moderates and extremists, he saw with great clarity and poignancy the gap between ends and means:
Like knight-errants in the stories, who have lost their way, we were hesitating at the cross-roads. Go to the right, and you will lose your horse, but you will be safe yourself; go to the left and your horse will be safe but you will perish; go forward and everyone will abandon you; go back—that was impossible.7
Bakunin
In Stoppard’s trilogy, Marx made a cameo appearance as rude and boorish. In a dream sequence, Marx was shown delivering choice epithets for the other leading revolutionaries of 1853 (“flatulent bag of festering tripe,” less use than the “boil on my arse,” “unctuous jackass,” “impudent wind-bag”).8 Certainly at this time Marx and Engels had become disenchanted with many of their fellow revolutionaries. Late in his life Engels described how after a failed revolution, “party groups of various shades are formed, which accuse each other of having driven the cart into the mud, of treason and of all other possible mortal sins…. Naturally, disappointment follows disappointment … recriminations accumulate and result in general bickering.”9
Looming larger in Stoppard’s account, as in Herzen’s life, was Mikhail Bakunin, appearing as a lovable rogue, a poseur full of contradictions, always asking for money, in a fantasy world of his own yet of undoubted charisma. Having been an insurrectionary tourist in 1848, Bakunin was imprisoned in Russia and then sent to exile, from which he escaped. Thereafter he moved from one promising revolutionary setting to another, elaborating a distinctive anarchist doctrine as he did so. He shared much with Marx: rebels from comfortable backgrounds, drawn to Hegelian philosophy during their formative years, engaged with the stirrings of 1848, and enthusiasts for a working class neither knew well. They both studied philosophy in Berlin in 1840 but did not meet until 1844. Their paths crossed a number of times over the following years, including during the heady days of 1848.10 Bakunin distrusted German intellectuals and their tendency for pedantry, but not as much as Marx distrusted Russians, which is one reason he refused to have anything to do with Herzen.
Bakunin could be an original and penetrating theorist, but he was impatient, often left work unfinished, and was prone to contradictory statements. When it came to political economy, he was a disciple of Marx’s. He even contemplated (and received an advance for) a Russian translation of Capital. At times Marx appreciated Bakunin’s energy and commitment. Though Bakunin believed that Marx had denounced him in 1853 as a Russian agent, they patched over their differences. In the end their effective political careers concluded as they rowed furiously over the direction of the revolutionary movement. “He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right,” acknowledged Bakunin, “I called him vain, treacherous and cunning, and I too was right.”11
Herzen’s most quoted description of Bakunin conveys a formidable physical impression, how his “activity, his laziness, his appetite and everything else, like his gigantic stature and everlasting sweat he was in, everything, in fact, was on a superhuman scale … a giant with his leonine head and tousled mane.”12 In a telling description of the professional revolutionary of the time, Herzen refers to a “passion for propaganda, for agitation, for demagogy, if you like, to incessant activity in founding and organizing plots and conspiracies and establishing relations and in ascribing immense significance to them” but also to a “readiness to risk his life, and recklessness in accepting all the consequences.”13 His supporters objected, both then and now, to the idea that he was borderline deranged and attributed his wild destructive urges to his curious upbringing in an aristocratic idyll.14 Herzen, who liked and admired Bakunin, pointed to a different sort of tension, an intense version of one facing all revolutionaries caught between ambitious ends and meager means. The stage was far too small for the role Bakunin wanted to play, and he filled it too e
asily. “His nature was a heroic one,” observed Herzen, “left out of work by the course of history.” Bakunin “incubated the germ of a colossal activity for which there is no demand.” He admitted to “a love for the fantastic, for unusual, unheard-of-adventures, for undertakings that open up a boundless horizon and whose end no one can foresee.”15 Opposing all states, and believing in the wholesome spontaneity of the unfettered masses, he could still concoct plans for clandestine societies organized on hierarchical lines. In practice a poor conspirator, he could still imagine himself as a “secret director,” working upon the masses and then on post-revolutionary society as an “invisible force.”
The First International and the Paris Commune
Neither Marx nor Bakunin was responsible for the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), which eventually became known as the First International. It was set up in 1864 to encourage cooperation among workers’ associations with the aim of promoting “the protection, the rise, and the complete emancipation of the working class.” It was non-sectarian and broad-based, drawing in the numerous refugees based in London and the kaleidoscope of philosophies prevalent at the time, including democrats and anarchists, internationalists and nationalists, idealists and materialists, moderates and extremists.
For Marx this was an opportunity to return to actual politics. He approved of the international links and the focus on the proletariat. This created opportunities to develop a more acute class consciousness and meant that it was worth putting to one side misgivings about the IWA’s narrow popular base and ideologically suspect comrades. Marx soon became the International’s wordsmith, managing to stay sensitive to its diverse currents of opinion. He observed to Engels how he had “to phrase matters” so as to incorporate his opinion in a form “acceptable to the present point of view of the labor movement.” It would take time “before the re-awakened movement will be in a position to use the bold language of yore.” When drafting the association’s Address to the Working Classes, he even used phrases about “duty” and “right” or “truth, morality, and justice,” though they were “placed in such a way that they can do little harm.”16 The final product was therefore measured and cautious, quite different from the assertiveness of the Manifesto. His natural inclination to collectivism and centralization was toned down. Rather than lead from the front, for the moment he was pushing from behind.
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