Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  Marx’s growing public visibility enabled him to take positions on wider issues of European politics, beyond the narrow confines of the IWA, and thus become, albeit in a modest way, part of the general public discourse in Britain.

  One of the themes Marx addressed repeatedly was the role of Russia in European politics, and some of his writings in the 1860s discussed this issue. The immediate cause was Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War against Russia; but for Marx there was a more fundamental reason for his wary attitude toward Russia, which later also drove him to speculate on the possibilities for a radical social revolution in Russia.

  Marx’s point of departure was his realization of the role Russia had played, since its involvement in the defeat of Napoleon, in international politics as the so-called “gendarme of Europe.” This was greatly enhanced by Russia’s role as a European power due to its control of most of the historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the three partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, which was reconfirmed at the Congress of Vienna. That was the cause for Marx’s support for Polish independence, which would both weaken Russia and put a distance between it and Europe proper. To Marx, each of Russia’s interventions in European politics helped to defeat revolutionary movements and strengthened Europe’s reactionary governments.

  Marx was always ambivalent about the role of Napoleon in European politics and history: on one hand, his authoritarian imperial regime had put an end to the emancipatory vision of the French Revolution. Yet by bringing down the old absolutist and feudal order in many European countries—for Marx the memory of the liberating impact of French rule on the Rhineland was always present—Napoleon helped institutionalize some of the modernizing and even liberalizing legacies of the French Enlightenment. The defeat of Napoleon with the active help of Russia not only brought back the Bourbons to the French throne, but opened the door to the Restoration and the reactionary, counterrevolutionary coalitions of the so-called Holy Alliance headed by Metternich.

  Similarly, Russia’s intervention in the revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg empire helped suppress the revolutionary movements in Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, and its repeated suppression of Polish insurrections also solidified the conservative monarchies of Prussia and Austria-Hungary. Marx’s concern was that this might not augur well for future European revolutions: Russia could always side with reactionary European governments again, and thus stymie the revolutionary potential in central and even western Europe. If Russian troops reached Paris in 1814 and helped set up the post-1815 conservative Concert of Europe, the same thing could happen again. Hence, in some of his writings Marx found himself somewhat uncomfortably siding with conservative British politicians who saw the containment of Russia as one of their major geopolitical aims.

  “THE MOST VILIFIED MAN IN LONDON”

  What ultimately sidetracked these apprehensions was the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in the summer of 1870 as part of Bismarck’s drive for the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony. The war thrust the IWA—and Marx—into a vortex of totally unpredicted turmoil. It was impossible not to take a position on the war, and this became a tough challenge as the two largest sections of the association were the German and French ones; hence its main goal was to try to prevent the breakup of the IWA over the enmity and national tensions created by the war.

  Two addresses issued by the General Council during the war—on 23rd July and 8th September 1870, were both drafted mainly by Marx, and bear witness to the challenges facing the IWA under the circumstances. The first address, written when the outcome of the war was still not clear, insisted that whatever happened, the most important goal for the IWA was to preserve the international solidarity of the working class and not allow chauvinism on either side to detract its national sections from the common aim of strengthening socialist parties and promoting the economic and social interests of the proletariat. Beyond this language of solidarity, however, it was clear that the IWA would welcome the downfall of the Second Empire of Napoleon III—not only because the emperor’s belligerent diplomatic stance had triggered the war, but also because it viewed what Marx had called the “faux empire,” with its attempt to gain popularity through its use of the Napoleonic myth, as a stumbling block toward a clear definition of class interests within French society that would greatly enhance the power of the working class.

  This was not an easy position to take, as it tacitly implied support for Bismarck’s drive for German unification under Prussia’s hegemony. But it was here that Marx’s historical analysis prevailed. As we have seen, after 1848, Marx viewed the creation of large nation-states as a precondition for intensive capitalist industrialization that would lead to the emergence of a strong working class crucial for eventual socialist transformation. So while not explicitly supporting a Prussian victory, the first address welcomed the downfall of Napoleon III. At the time, and subsequently, this caused some of Marx’s opponents in the IWA to brand him as a Prussian and a German nationalist.

  The IWA’s second address, released within a week of the French defeat at the Battle of Sedan on 1st–2nd September 1870 and Napoleon’s abdication, welcomed these developments, though without celebrating the German victory. It called upon the French workers to support the newly created republican provisional government and warned that “any attempt to upset the government of the French Republic in the present crisis will be a desperate folly.”

  Again, this was not an easy position to take, and developments moved in a completely different way. The ensuing emergence of the Paris Commune, which rebelled against the newly established bourgeois republican government, had a far-reaching impact on the IWA and to a large extent doomed it. Strangely and paradoxically, it also pushed the name of Marx into wide public visibility for the first time in an unprecedented and unforeseen way.

  After the brutal defeat and suppression of the Commune, Marx’s account of it—The Civil War in France, published in May 1871—became one of the classics of socialist and communist thought, and contributed to identifying him publicly with the movement, even though he had never advocated in favor of the insurrection.

  A terminological serendipity was also involved. For historical reasons, the official name of the municipal government of the City of Paris was Commune de Paris (a similar echo of such medieval nomenclature is still evident in the name of the British House of Commons). This has nothing to do with communism, nor did the Commune carry out a communist or socialist platform. But its very name enabled later generations of Marxists—especially in the Soviet Union—to link Marx with an event that was very different in its historical context from the way it was later presented in left-wing ideology and propaganda.

  As noted, Marx was instrumental in drafting the 8th September second address of the IWA, welcoming the abdication of Napoleon III, expressing support for the new republic, and warning against undermining it through radical acts. Yet not all members of the French section of the IWA, in exile in London, went along with this approach. These divisions between the IWA leadership and some of the French radicals are echoed in a letter Marx wrote to Engels on 6th September, reporting about the travel of an IWA official emissary, Auguste Serailler, to Paris:

  Serailler just comes in and informs me that he is leaving London for Paris tomorrow … to settle the affairs of the International. … This is now even more necessary, since the whole French Branch [of the IWA in London] escapes now to Paris in order to do there all kinds of follies in the name of the International. They wish to bring down the Provisional Government, to establish a Commune de Paris, nominate Pyat French ambassador to London etc.

  The people Marx was referring to were the followers of Auguste Blanqui—the same radical group Marx had opposed during the last days of the League of Communists after 1848. He viewed them as irresponsible putschists, as he had judged them to be in the early 1850s. Felix Pyat, a journalist and dramatist, was a veteran of the revolutionary phase of the 1848 French revolution, who on returni
ng to France joined the Paris Commune and took up a military command under its authority; having no military experience, he led his unit to a disastrous defeat. He was exactly the kind of “alchemist of the revolution” Marx had warned against in the 1850s.

  Yet developments in Paris were well beyond the ability of the IWA in London to control, and the emergence of the Paris Commune and its insurrection against the republican government became one of those romantic, hopeless historical aberrations that nevertheless turned into historical icons—not least because of Marx’s lengthy essay following its defeat.

  With the Prussian victory over the French imperial forces and Napoleon III’s dramatic abdication, France was thrown into an almost unprecedented turmoil: a provisional government under the veteran conservative politician Adolphe Thiers was set up, seeking to reach an accommodation with the Prussians; radical forces in the capital proclaimed themselves the Paris Commune, refusing to accept the authority of the newly established republic; they were supported by a quickly assembled municipal National Guard, which intended to continue to fight the German invaders. Tragically they found themselves fighting not the Germans but the provisional government, with its seat in Bordeaux and later in Versailles. Between 18th March and 28th May 1871 the Paris Commune defended itself fiercely, but what had started as a patriotic defense of the homeland ended as a bloody and hopeless civil war. At the end the besieged Commune was defeated by the provisional government, with the tacit support of the victorious Germans. In order to further humiliate France, Bismarck orchestrated the crowning of the king of Prussia as German emperor on 18th January 1871 in the Versailles Palace Hall of Mirrors.

  The suppression of the Commune was horribly cruel. After the government army succeeded in occupying Paris, more than 6,500 Communards were buried in mass graves, tens of thousands were taken prisoner, many of whom were jailed and deported. The wounds left by the Commune and its suppressions continued to haunt French politics for decades.

  From London, Marx followed the agonizing developments, and even though he thought the insurrection was folly, he obviously could not support its brutal suppression. During the late winter and spring months of 1871 he prepared a number of drafts about the composition and history of the Commune, which served him when he wrote The Civil War in France following the Commune’s defeat.

  Yet there is a fundamental difference between the drafts and the final published essay. In the drafts Marx tries to identify the social structure of the Commune and its political aims, and concludes that it was basically a lower-middle-class affair, with scant proletarian input. In the published version, which heroically praises the Commune after its defeat, nothing of this appears. Furthermore, while the drafts are Marx’s own conclusions about the Commune’s social structure and represent his personal views, the text of The Civil War in France was issued and distributed as an official address of the General Council of the IWA and reflected its position in view of the brutal repression of the Commune by the conservative provisional government. The drafts were first published in the 1930s in an obscure Soviet journal and have been largely overlooked until now, while The Civil War in France has appeared for decades in all editions of Marx’s Selected Works as part of his canon. Engels’s republication of it in 1891 as part of Marx’s theoretical legacy was accompanied by his own introduction, which totally ignored Marx’s rather ambivalent approach to the Commune as expressed in the drafts.

  Marx’s drafts clearly and unequivocally identify the rising of the Commune with its petty-bourgeois leadership, and note in great detail the immediate circumstances of the insurrection. During the growing tension between the provisional government in Versailles and the Commune, which controlled Paris, Versailles proclaimed a provisional moratorium on all outstanding bills of payments and rents. The aim of this moratorium was obvious—to get the support of the lower middle class, mainly in Paris, for Versailles, and for a time it worked. The moratorium was to expire on 13th March 1871, and representatives of Paris middle-class associations tried to press for its extension, but the provisional government in Versailles under Thiers refused. Marx recounts that between 13th and 18th March more than 150,000 demands for payment of bills and rents were reactivated, and then on 18th March the insurrection of the Commune broke out. Marx goes on to note that the demand for a further, or definite, extension of the moratorium—obviously an interest of lower-middle-class groups—continued to figure as a major plank of the Commune. The drafts also contain further analysis of the social structure of the Commune leadership, pointing to its petty-middle-class composition.

  Nothing of this appears in the published text of The Civil War in France, which focused on the brutality of the Commune’s suppression and on criticizing the policies of the Thiers government. Obviously the initial support of the IWA for the provisional government could not be maintained after the insurrection of the Commune took place, and hence the IWA—and Marx—found themselves praising the idea of the Commune, even though they had initially opposed its very creation and its refusal to accept the legitimacy of the provisional government. The text of The Civil War in France thus became both a testimony to the heroism of the Commune against the forces of reaction and a possible nonstate model for the structure of a socialist society of the future. Lenin used it repeatedly in his writings after 1917 to legitimate Soviet power as part of the legacy of Marx’s teaching.

  Yet a careful perusal of the text of The Civil War in France does reveal Marx’s ambivalence. Although none of his views that the Commune was a lower-middle-class and not a proletarian affair appear in the published text, he nevertheless refrains from stating that it was a proletarian uprising. But when discussing the institutional arrangements envisaged by the Commune—which were never carried out in reality due to its short time of existence and eventual downfall—Marx sees in them a potential for a possible future society, despite the fact that they were never carried out. The text as published is in English, and one should note how Marx uses the conditional and subjunctive to describe what these institutions could mean. Had the Commune survived (which Marx never believed it would or could, yet obviously did not say so publicly), its arrangements—mainly the devolution of power from the highly centralized French state to the communal, municipal level, would be “a model for all the great industrial centers of France.” He then goes on to give a few examples (italics are added to highlight the conditional):

  The communal regime once established in Paris and secondary cities, the old centralized Government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers. In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperative (formal instruction) of his constituents. The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis-stated but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefor strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality.

  These are moving and powerful words of consolation and hope at the moment of defeat. They refer, however, not to what the Commune was, but only to what it could have been had it survived.

  Marx’s conviction that the Paris Commune was not a working-class insurrection and his general skepticism about its chances can also be gleaned from his correspondence with Leo Fränckel, the only member of the IWA in the leadership of the Commune. Fränckel was a Hungarian Jewish socialist who had spent years in Germany and later in Fran
ce and was involved in Lassalle’s movement. He was appointed public works commissioner by the Commune, and on 27th April 1871 asked Marx in a letter what steps he would suggest he should undertake. Marx responded on 17th May in the waning days of the Commune, and his letter shows once more how ambivalent he was about the Commune. While expressing support for its valiant resistance to the forces of Versailles, he totally disregards Fränckel’s request for advice about public works and employment policies, and instead warns his correspondent against the danger to the Commune from the non-working-class elements determining its course.

  All of this did not spare the IWA—and Marx personally—from being publicly accused of having instigated the uprising of the Commune. The publication of The Civil War in France and the public campaign of the IWA after the defeat of the Commune to help the persecuted Communards to escape the brutalities of the provisional government’s persecution of the revolt’s survivors certainly helped to identify the IWA with the Commune—a position paradoxically embraced both by the European right wing at that time as well as later by the socialist and communist movements.

  Identifying the IWA and Marx personally with the Commune was a convenient propaganda tool of the German and French conservative forces, for whom presenting the Commune not as a desperate—and ill-conceived—revolt of Paris radicals but as an international conspiracy concocted by a cabal of revolutionaries in London was politically expedient. Marx’s modest public visibility as writer, journalist, and author of Das Kapital made his person a convenient target.

  It appears that Marx’s name became publicly associated with the Commune for the first time in an article published on 19th March 1871 in the extreme right-wing newspaper Journal de Paris, which appeared in Versailles. It alleged that Marx had sent a letter to the IWA members in Paris instructing them in detail to start a revolt against the provisional government. The letter attributed to Marx was a blatant forgery, and it appears that the whole idea was inspired by a German adviser then stationed in Versailles, Wilhelm Stieber. Stieber was a Prussian police officer and the chief prosecutor in the Cologne trial against members of the League of Communists in 1852. Stieber was of course familiar with Marx’s name, which was mentioned at the trial, and Marx wrote about it from London; so for Stieber this was a sweet revenge for his inability to lock up Marx himself for his—modest—role in 1848–49.