Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  One of the French organizers, “a certain Le Lubez,” approached Marx and asked him if he could find a German worker in London to speak at the meeting. Marx suggested Johann Georg Eccarius, a tailor and a member of the German Workers’ Educational Association, who had taken Marx’s side in the past factional battles of the Communist League. Marx himself sat on the platform at the meeting, without speaking, as he had done at similar anti-Russian meetings organized by David Urquhart. It has never been entirely clear why Victor Le Lubez approached Marx, since Le Lubez was a follower of Proudhon, with whom Marx had clashed vigorously in the past. Perhaps it was Marx’s own long political history of anti-Russian and pro-Polish attitudes that made him an appropriate contact; or possibly it was his action a few years earlier in organizing financial assistance, with the help of the Countess, for the veteran French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui.55

  Whatever the reason for the invitation, it had far-reaching consequences, since at the meeting participants decided to found an organization, the International Working Men’s Association, that would sponsor an international labor congress in Brussels the following year. The organizing committee appointed a subcommittee to draw up statutes that co-opted Marx as a member. He attended meetings sporadically because of health problems, until Eccarius let him know that the proceedings were dominated by followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, the democratic but very anti-communist Italian nationalist, whom Marx regarded with contempt. The feeling was mutual.

  Marx invited committee members to his new house to work on the statutes. The meeting on Maitland Park Road went on until 1 a.m., and adjourned in exhaustion. Marx then drafted his own version of the statutes and an “Address to the Working Class,” later known as the “Inaugural Address,” a manifesto for the new organization—measures which the organizing committee approved unanimously on November 1, 1864.56

  By the end of that year, Marx had found the focus for political activism he had been seeking since 1859. It did mean a departure from his previous activity as a newspaper editor, a change of which Marx was very much aware. Writing to Joseph Weydemeyer, his old friend now living in St. Louis, he remarked, “Although I have systematically refused, for years to participate in all ‘organizations,’ this time I accepted, because it involves a matter where it is possible to have an important effect.”57 The center of the “International Association” was in London, so that Marx could guide the group’s development in person and seek to put its provisional organization on a permanent and secure footing. At the same time, he would try to get his friends and supporters in Germany to affiliate the nascent labor movement there with the association. This was a task buffeted by personal rivalries, factional quarrels, strong differences of political opinion, and, especially, by the rising tide of nationalism and great power warfare. With all its difficulties, it would absorb Marx’s energies and satisfy his desire for activism until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the Paris Commune of 1871 brought the entire post-1859 period of European history to an end.

  THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING MEN’S ASSOCIATION (IWMA for short) is generally known as the “First International,” a retrospective designation after the founding of the “Second” or Socialist International of 1889, which still exists today, and the “Third” or Communist International of 1919, officially dissolved in 1943. But understanding the IWMA in light of future developments obscures its contemporary context and especially Marx’s role in the organization. Unlike the two later groups, which were international leagues of Socialist or Communist parties, the IWMA was a loose federation of affiliated workers’ societies. Twenty-three English trade unions, with upward of 25,000 members, were the backbone of the group. On the Continent, trade unions were either illegal or barely organized; Continental affiliates were primarily workers’ mutual benefit and educational societies, as well as ill-defined, often semi-conspiratorial groups. The Continental affiliated societies, to the extent legally possible, were grouped together into national sections that would correspond with a central office in London, known as the General Council.58

  Unlike its two successors, the IWMA did not have an “internationalist” political orientation as opposed to a “nationalist” one. Quite the opposite, it was formed at a meeting in support of a popular nationalist cause, Polish independence from Russia. Marx himself did not understand the International Association as an anti-nationalist group. He specifically rejected the idea of turning the IWMA into a “central government . . . of the European working class,” a plan he attributed to his despised rival Mazzini. When some French members of the General Council proclaimed that nations no longer existed, Marx replied ironically, and to the considerable delight of the Englishmen in attendance, “that our friend Lafargue etc., who has abolished nationalities, spoke to us in French, i.e., a language that [of] the auditorium did not understand.”59

  Marx’s plans for the association appeared in his agenda for the First Congress of the IWMA, held in Geneva in the summer of 1866, after the Belgian government blocked the original plans for a congress in its country. The items for action included the advocacy of social reform—a shorter workday, limitations on women and children’s labor, the replacement of indirect with direct taxation, an international inquiry into workplace conditions—and the endorsement of producers’ cooperatives and trade unions. There were just two expressly political points, both taken from the arsenal of nineteenth-century radicalism: the replacement of standing armies with militias; and “the necessity of annihilating the Muscovite influence on Europe . . . [via] the reconstitution of Poland on a social and democratic basis.”60

  The most effective actions of the IWMA, with the greatest public resonance and working-class support, centered on labor disputes. The International raised funds from unionists across Europe to support the strike of Berlin printers and typesetters in 1865, Paris bronze workers in 1867, and Geneva construction workers in 1868. In a particularly well known action, its members convinced German artisans not to be recruited as strikebreakers during the London tailors’ strike of 1866. This intervention to prevent workers of one nationality from breaking strikes in another country was repeated on a large number of occasions and may well have been the most popular of the IWMA’s actions, and the chief source of its working-class support.61 Marx personally emphasized the effectiveness of union action against skeptics who advocated the formation of producers’ cooperatives, and asserted that unions could not succeed in increasing workers’ wages. His essay “Value, Price and Profit,” a popular exposition of economic ideas he was preparing for publication in Capital, was read to the General Council in June 1865, precisely in order to refute these socialist but anti-union positions.62

  Unions, or any other kind of working-class organization, could only succeed in a favorable political environment, all too often lacking in 1860s Europe. Marx vigorously endorsed campaigns for a more democratic franchise, in the hopes of increasing workers’ parliamentary representation. He was particularly proud of the prominent role of the English leaders of the IWMA in the newly founded Reform League that advocated universal manhood suffrage for Great Britain. The League’s agitation and the general turmoil and upheaval in British political life of the mid-1860s were enormously encouraging to Marx, who at times saw the emergence of a revolutionary situation. The actual upshot of this political contention, the expansion of the franchise in the Second Reform Bill of 1867, was rather a disappointment, but he still hoped for the outbreak of a revolution, perhaps beginning in Ireland.63

  For all Marx’s revolutionary aspirations, the chief political opposition in the IWMA came precisely from revolutionaries within its ranks, members of secret societies, who saw infiltrating the IWMA as a step toward fomenting European-wide insurrections. French secret society revolutionaries repeatedly denounced the working-class activists who had helped create the International Association as paid agents of Napoleon III, or, at least, as being unwilling to challenge the emperor’s authoritarian rule and openly advocate a republic. Marx’
s efforts to mediate between the two groups, via his friend Viktor Schily, the German political émigré living in Paris, were rejected by both sides. When the two French factions argued their differences before the General Council, its English members concluded that the French really needed an authoritarian ruler like Napoleon III to keep them in line! Ultimately, most of the secret society members left the IWMA, although they maintained a foothold in an affiliated society of French émigrés in London, repeatedly attacking Marx and his political positions. They presented themselves as internationalists, and denounced Marx’s support of anti-Russian and Polish nationalism as reactionary and containing a suspicious hint of German nationalism.64

  By contrast, Marx’s chief supporters and loyal allies in the IWMA were the English trade unionists, who were in no sense revolutionaries or socialists. In view of this alliance, one must wonder whether Marx was guiding the International in the direction of revolution or reform. Marx felt that supporting union organization, and pressing for more democratic governments and greater social reforms, would spur on the clash between workers and capitalists, leading, as the Communist Manifesto suggested, to a revolutionary outcome. This connection between reform and revolution came into question in the socialist movement at the very end of the nineteenth century. Adherents of reform of capitalism as an end in itself clashed bitterly with proponents of revolutionary action leading to a socialist regime. The reformists were dubbed “revisionists,” people who were revising Marx’s doctrines of revolution. But the question of reform versus revolution was inherent in Marx’s own political strategy of the 1860s; the IWMA and the political situation of the era did not last long enough to bring this dilemma to the fore.

  Marx himself had a modest role in the IWMA. He was one of twenty to twenty-five members of the General Council and the corresponding secretary for Germany. When offered the presidency of the General Council in 1866, he rejected it, stating that the position should be filled by a worker. Shortly thereafter he proposed, successfully, to abolish the office of president of the General Council altogether. Yet for all Marx’s reticence, he was, as he himself asserted, “in fact the head of the whole business.”65 He preferred to exert his “influence behind the curtains,” drafting documents, making proposals at sessions of the General Council, and holding formal and informal meetings in his London house.66 It was through such meetings that Marx’s second daughter Laura met and became engaged to a member of the General Council, Paul Lafargue (the same Lafargue whom Marx had rebuked for believing nationalities did not exist), a French student activist who had to flee the country for his opposition to Napoleon III’s rule.67

  Since Marx was at his best in small groups, working behind the scenes was the most effective way to exert his influence. It was also compatible with the weeks and months when repeated outbreaks of his skin disease kept him out of action altogether. The primary problem Marx saw during his guidance of the IWMA was the organization’s annual general congresses: Geneva in 1866, Lausanne in 1867, Brussels in 1868, and Basel in 1869. Given the informal procedures for affiliation with the IWMA, pretty much anyone could show up; since the congresses were held on the Continent, Marx’s English supporters often did not attend, as was the case with Marx himself, who only attended one general congress in 1872. Voting arrangements for the delegates were ad hoc and decided at the individual congresses. Outcomes were unpredictable, and Marx tended to fear the worst. He always heaved a sigh of relief when the congresses were over.68

  TRYING TO GUIDE A post-Lassalle German labor movement from a remote location proved considerably more difficult than guiding the policies of the IWMA. The problems began with the legacy of Lassalle himself. In public, Marx was very generous to the memory of his friend. He wrote the Countess that Lassalle had “died young in triumph, like Achilles,” a remark she promptly publicized. Marx also issued public statements attacking anti-communist democrats—“these petit-bourgeois canaille” and the “cowardly impudence of the bourgeois newspapers”—who were denouncing Lassalle as overly pro-Prussian. Even in private, both Marx and Engels praised Lassalle as one of their old comrades from 1848, who had the courage to act on behalf of the working class.69

  No verbal blandishment, however fulsome, could suppress the legacy of Lassalle’s passion for Prussia. After his death, reports surfaced that Lassalle had been planning a bizarre political coup. He intended to travel to Hamburg to proclaim the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein annexed to Prussia in the name of the labor movement, once more aligning himself with the policies of Prime Minister Bismarck. To the extent that Lassalle’s successors continued and endorsed his policies in favor of Prussia, Marx would find it hard to work with them.70

  The sticking point was the refusal of the competing leaders of the General German Workers’ Association to affiliate with the International. This difficulty is often interpreted as a conflict between nationalism and internationalism. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in an often-cited but not very accurate biography of Marx, even described Lassalle as a precursor of the Fascists.71 Such a description of the difficulties that Marx had with Lassalle is a fundamental misrepresentation of the situation in the 1860s. Marx himself was not totally opposed to German nationalism. Rather, his particular version of nationalism was, as it had been since the 1840s, strongly anti-Prussian. The Prussian monarchy, for Marx, was a lackey of the czar, an ally of the French emperor Napoleon III, and an enemy of the creation of a united German nation-state.

  As late as 1869, Marx let the French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui know that German national unity “could only be achieved by a German revolution that would sweep away the Prussian dynasty, which was a servant of the Muscovite, still is and always will be.”72 This version of nationalism contrasted with the one endorsed by Lassalle and his followers, who perceived the Prussian monarchy as the vehicle for German national unity—a difference of opinion that had been debated in Germany at least since the Northern Italian War of 1859. In the end, when the German nation-state was created under Bismarck’s guidance by the Prussian monarchy, the anti-Prussian version of German nationalism became obsolete; but in the mid-1860s such an outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion.

  It was these differences of opinion and the related question of whether to work with Bismarck’s conservative Prussian government against the liberal and bourgeois opposition that made cooperation between Marx and the German labor party so difficult. “Red Becker,” Marx’s old Cologne ally and rival, by the 1860s a member of the Party of Progress, posed the point openly in the press: how could Marx and Engels, two men known for their anti-Prussian revolutionary past, continue to support a group that was so solicitous of Bismarck’s authoritarian regime? Mixed in with these political differences were personal antagonisms. The contenders for the role of Lassalle’s successor—including the Countess; Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, editor of the Berlin socialist newspaper; and Bernhard Becker, Lassalle’s former assistant and Lassalle’s own choice—suspected that Marx was trying to use affiliation with the IWMA to gain control of the General German Workers’ Association. Such suspicions were encouraged by old rivals of Marx, like Moses Hess, who had been a follower of Lassalle. As Paris correspondent for the Social Democrat, Hess sent in anti-Marx articles, or at least pieces Marx interpreted as attacks on him. Bernhard Becker, during a speech given in Hamburg in March 1865, asserted that Marx’s party consisted of all of three people: the “Master,” Marx; his “secretary,” Engels; and his “agent,” Wilhelm Liebknecht.73 The contrast between someone leading an organization with thousands of members and an exiled theorist with dubious claims to political leadership was evident in this insult.

  In view of these cross-currents, it is remarkable that Marx even briefly agreed to cooperate with Schweitzer, who was, in Marx’s perceptive estimate, the most intelligent and best qualified of Lassalle’s potential successors. Marx and Engels wrote a few articles for the Social Democrat, and Schweitzer, who had a high opinion of Marx, repeatedly attempted to mollif
y him about articles in the newspaper that Marx found objectionable. Schweitzer’s efforts, running from the end of 1864 through February 1865, seem to have paid off, and Marx continued to agree to work with him. It was not Marx who broke off the connection, but his political representative on the spot in Berlin, Wilhelm Liebknecht, who did so, denouncing Schweitzer to Marx as just a tool of Bismarck.74

  By the end of February 1865, far from getting the labor movement in Germany to affiliate with the International, Marx had terminated his ties with it, leaving him with two alternatives. One was his associate Liebknecht, expelled from Berlin by the Prussian authorities for encouraging the labor movement to oppose Bismarck’s conservative government. Liebknecht moved to Leipzig, in the Kingdom of Saxony, where officials of the conservative but pro-Austrian Saxon government welcomed him, and granted him a residence permit. Liebknecht set out to organize an anti-Prussian labor movement. Marx could also rely on one of the friends he had gained in his campaign against Karl Vogt, the veteran revolutionary Johann Philipp Becker. A thorough enthusiast for the IWMA, Becker, from his residence in Geneva, organized a section of German-speaking Swiss; workers’ associations in the German states could affiliate with the International through his Swiss group. Initiated into left-wing politics in the age of secret societies, Becker never lost his enthusiasm for revolutionary conspiracy, which made him an awkward ally for Marx, given the latter’s opposition to conspiratorial groups in the IWMA. Still, Becker and his organization were, for the next three years, the only way for German workers’ societies to affiliate with the International, giving Marx, as the corresponding secretary for Germany, someone with whom he could correspond.75

  ALL THESE ORGANIZATIONAL ARRANGEMENTS Marx had painfully devised were for him ultimately the means to revolutionary upheaval. The five turbulent years of 1866–71 were an age of upheaval, the climax of the era of European history begun with the Northern Italian War of 1859. Mass politics and political confrontations took on a dimension they had not reached since the Revolution of 1848. Even in the relatively peaceful United Kingdom, enormous demonstrations for a more democratic franchise in England led to the Second Reform Act, while anti-English nationalist agitation in Ireland mounted steadily. Things were still more turbulent on the Continent: a rising tide of anti-Napoleonic, pro-republican meetings and demonstrations in France, a coup and new nationalist government in Romania, a revolution in Spain, uprisings in southern Italy, nationalist mass meetings in the Austrian Empire. A wave of strikes across the Continent accompanied this political turmoil, creating an atmosphere in which the International could advance its cause. The period was also marked by two shattering wars, between Prussia and Austria in 1866, and between Prussia and France four years later. These wars unleashed nationalist furies; revolutionized, in a peculiarly Bismarckian way, the German states; upended the balance of power; and led to the proclamation of a republic in France and a short-lived revolutionary regime in Paris. Navigating these waters proved far more treacherous for the International, eventually calling into question the underlying basis of Marx’s activism.