Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The 1870 Congress of the IWMA seemed likely to bring a major clash with Bakunin and his followers, so Marx arranged to hold the meeting in Mainz, where Bakunin had little influence.93 But the congress was never held, overtaken by the military confrontation between Prussia and France that had been widely expected ever since Prussia’s victory over Austria in 1866. Marx and Engels had observed closely the rumors and expectations of war, as they did military and diplomatic matters more generally, and their speculations followed familiar channels: positively, the way that war might lead to revolution; negatively, the way it would increase the czar’s power. By 1868–69, though, they decided that a war between France and Prussia was not in the offing.94

  As a result, the actual outbreak of war in July 1870 was both unexpected and deplorable. Marx’s daughter Jenny, writing to Dr. Kugelmann, described the family’s “surprise and indignation at the turn affairs have taken. . . . The revival of chauvinism in the 19th century is indeed a hideous farce!”95 As Jenny’s comment suggests, she, like her father, saw the war as a case of French aggression. This viewpoint was common at the time, for contemporaries were unaware of the wily Bismarck’s diplomatic strategies for pushing France into declaring war so that Prussia could fight it on the most favorable terms.

  Bismarck hoped that Napoleon III’s declaration of war would be met by a wave of nationalist indignation in Germany, rallying the entire nation behind the Prussian monarchy. His expectations were fully justified: in demonstrations, parades, sermons, newspaper editorials; in bars and taverns, on the streets, in the fields, and just about everywhere else, Germans rallied to Prussia’s cause, even those defeated and occupied by Prussia a few years earlier. In a sign of just how well Bismarck had calculated, Marx and Engels joined the German nationalist ranks. “The French need a thrashing,” Marx wrote to Engels at the outbreak of the war. Note it was the French who needed a thrashing, not just their emperor. Jenny von Westphalen, expressing her husband’s views in starker and less sophisticated form, stated: “How they all deserve the Prussians’ thrashing; for all the French, even the tiny little clump of the better ones, still have chauvinism stuck to the most distant corner of their hearts. Now, for once, it will be beaten out of them.”

  If Karl and Jenny’s sentiments were expressed in private correspondence, Engels went public with his nationalist views. He took the lead in establishing a patriotic committee of Germans in Manchester that would raise funds to provide aid for wounded soldiers and became its secretary-treasurer. In his keynote address at the founding meeting, he proclaimed, in front of four hundred Manchester Germans, that the conflict was “in France a war of the government, in Germany a war of the people.” It was not, he continued, “the first time that Germany had fought against her will for the sake of honour and independence.” The Elberfeld News published a report on the unexpected patriotism of its subversive native son, to the utter astonishment and dismay of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who was trying to lead the Social Democratic Labor Party to condemn both the Prussians and the French as aggressors—that is, to take the viewpoint Marx and Engels had always adopted, until they were swept away in the wave of nationalism.96

  Engels persisted in this view for weeks. His appreciation of the brilliant military strategy of Helmut von Moltke, the chief of the Prussian General Staff, or the daring of German soldiers—“prize lads”—in their bayonet charges against entrenched French positions, only reinforced his nationalism. Marx, though, was already beginning to have second thoughts. The nationalist war of 1870, he thought, like the nationalist uprising against Napoleon’s rule in 1813, was taking on a distinctly reactionary political tone:

  “Jesus My Certainty” sung by Wilhelm I, with Bismarck on his right hand and Stieber [Marx’s nemesis from the Cologne Communist Trial was chief of German military intelligence] on his left is the German Marseillaise! Just like 1812 and afterwards. The German Philistine seems to be positively enchanted by the chance to ventilate his inherent servility without embarrassment. Who would have imagined it possible that 22 years after 1848 a national war in German would possess such a theoretical expression!97

  FERDINAND LASSALLE’S WARNING LETTERS from 1859 about the pernicious political effects of a war against France had long been forgotten, and were lying somewhere in a pile of papers in Marx’s cluttered study.

  The statement of the IWMA on the war, written by Marx himself, shows something of this altered mood. It condemned Napoleon III for beginning the conflict, and described it as a defensive war on the part of the Germans, a point Marx insisted that Liebknecht, Bebel, and their followers endorse. But the statement also denounced the idea of a German war of conquest, pointed out that the Prussian government had cooperated closely with Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in the past, and warned, as might be expected from Marx, of the intrigues of the czar, lurking in the background.98 These qualifications were only borne out by the further progress of the war.

  The battles were one disaster after another until the defeat of the main French army at Sedan in September 1870, and the capture of the French emperor—making it crystal clear that he was no Napoleon, as his uncle had been. The sole alternative in France to despair was revolution: the republic was proclaimed in Paris, and the new government of national defense began a revolutionary war. Its leaders fled besieged Paris for the South of France to raise new armies; among those involved in the effort was Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who settled, along with Laura and their child, in Bordeaux, to the evident relief of Laura’s parents. As the French government became politically more acceptable to Marx, Bismarck adopted precisely the policy Marx had condemned, demanding the cession of Alsace and Lorraine.99

  That same September, the retired Engels moved to London to join his friend, bringing to an end the extensive correspondence the two had maintained for the previous twenty years. Without the evidence of their letters, the change in their opinions toward the war is harder to track. At first, the proclamation of the republic made little difference: Marx suggested that the French members of the IWMA should remain passive and wait for a peace treaty before resuming political and social action. He denounced as “nonsense” the idea advocated by his French secret society opponents of proclaiming a revolutionary government or “Commune” in Paris. But even as early as mid-September, Marx and Engels were becoming uneasy about the war, provoked by the news that the Prussian government had arrested the leaders of the Social Democratic Labor Party. By the end of the year, they had renounced their previous nationalism and become partisans of the French Republic, asserting that if its new armies could only hold out long enough, British and Russian pressure would force the Prussians to conclude a compromise peace.100

  This was also the calculation of the French government, but neither military successes nor the intervention of the other great powers (officially neutral, but sympathetic to the Prussians) was forthcoming, so it agreed to an armistice in January 1871. There remained the peculiar matter of a permanent peace treaty. With whom would Bismarck sign such a treaty? Neither the emperor, now a prisoner of war, nor the provisional government of the French Republic could claim the political legitimacy to do so. On Bismarck’s insistence, during the armistice, elections were held for a French National Assembly that would have the sovereign authority to end the war. Duly held in February 1871, the elections resulted in a victory for the conservative monarchists, who favored making peace, even a peace of defeat. It was above all in Paris that pro-war radicals were victorious.

  A majority of the inhabitants of the French capital were opposed to the newly elected National Assembly, even before it began meeting nearby in Versailles. On March 18, 1871, radicals proclaimed a new, revolutionary government in Paris, a “Commune,” whose supporters were a broad political mixture of Jacobins in the mold of Robespierre, social democrats of the Revolution of 1848, socialists of various sorts, including activists of the IWMA, as well as a large group of patriots and supporters of the republic. Facing a hostile national government, surrounded by G
erman troops, the Paris Commune, from the moment of its inception, was in a precarious position. It looked for allies where it could find them, including repeated appeals for support to the International Working Men’s Association.101

  Marx was personally in touch with the leaders of the Commune, mostly via a German merchant who made periodic business trips from London to Paris. The existing correspondence is sparse: just two letters, one of which is largely taken up with denouncing Marx’s enemies in the IWMA, the secret society revolutionaries of the “French section” in London, who had rushed to Paris to participate in the revolution. In the other, written in mid-May 1871, toward the end of the Commune’s existence as the national government in Versailles was getting ready to invade Paris, Marx suggested that his Parisian supporters send crucial documents to a “secure place,” that is, London.

  None of this implies a powerful commitment to the insurgent regime. In letters to Liebknecht and Kugelmann of April 1871, and retrospective ones to the English member of the General Council Edward Beesley in June 1871, and to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhius, a Dutch socialist, a decade later, Marx asserted that the Commune’s leadership had, from the very beginning, missed the opportunity to take vigorous action. The Commune could have seized the assets of the Banque de France, sent the Paris National Guard to march on Versailles, or at least fortified the heights of Montmartre against an incursion of troops loyal to the national government. Such actions would have changed the balance of power between the Parisian insurgents and the national government, and promoted a negotiated settlement between them.102

  Marx’s cautious attitude toward the revolutionary regime in Paris also reflected differences within the IWMA itself. A number of the British trade unionists on the General Council, as was true with most left-wing opinion in England more generally, supported the government of the new French Republic, not the insurgent Commune in Paris. Ten days after the proclamation of the Commune, Marx volunteered in the General Council meeting to write an address on the topic for the IWMA; but he had nothing ready for the next two and a half months.

  In the interval, while Marx was hesitating, the Commune’s enemies were increasingly identifying it with the International in general and with Marx in particular. The Versailles government attributed the Commune to the subversive machinations of the International and its chef, Marx. Crudely forged documents, ostensibly demonstrating Marx’s and the IWMA’s role, were produced. Odd rumors, such as the claim that Marx was Bismarck’s private secretary and was secretly manipulating the Commune in the interests of Prussia, were widely circulated in the French press, and made their way across the Channel. The denunciation of Marx and the IWMA reached a high point in June 1871, when the Versailles government sent troops to Paris to destroy its revolutionary opponent. Public opinion in England and the entire Western world was horrified by the actions of the beleaguered insurgents: sending armed women into battle against the French army, shooting the archbishop of Paris as a hostage, and burning buildings as a measure of military defense. All of these actions were attributed to communism, to the IWMA, and to Marx, “head of a vast conspiracy,” according to the Pall Mall Gazette. Marx and Engels fired off letter after letter to the press, mostly to English and French newspapers, but also Italian, Austrian, and American ones, denouncing their coverage. Marx even threatened the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette with a duel if he did not retract his charges. In spite of this indignation, Marx enjoyed his notoriety, writing to Dr. Kugelmann that he was “the best calumniated and the most menaced man of London,” and adding, “it truly does one good after a boring twenty-year-long swamp idyll.”103

  It was in this spirit that Marx finally produced his statement on the Commune for the IWMA, The Civil War in France. The piece is one of Marx’s classic political polemics, beginning with a savage personal denunciation of the Versailles government: its head, the veteran liberal politician Adolphe Thiers, was “that monstrous gnome”; its foreign minister, Jules Favre, was “living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken resident in Algiers.” It was not just the personal and moral failings of the Versailles government Marx denounced, but the combination of corruption and lack of patriotism: its members had acted in the fall of 1870 to sabotage the continued war against the Germans and later schemed to get a commission on the loan floated to pay the German war indemnity, but their commission could only be paid after the revolutionary government in Paris was suppressed.

  Marx contrasted this corrupt government, combining bourgeois liberals like Thiers and reactionary, aristocratic, royalist back-benchers, with the revolutionary Paris Commune. A “majority” of its members “were naturally working men . . . acknowledged representatives of the working class”; their government was dedicated to the “Emancipation of Labour,” to “the expropriation of the expropriators,” to “Communism.” Breaking with his long-term reluctance to speculate on a communist future, Marx described the regime as “the glorious harbinger of a new society.” The entire centralized state administration that had characterized France—with its bureaucracy, gendarmerie, standing army, judiciary, and established church—would be abolished. Sounding a lot like his anarchist rival Bakunin, Marx described a communist future of decentralization and direct democracy. Public life would be run by locally elected communes, federated across the territory of the nation. Elected officials would be bound by their voters’ will, and subject to immediate recall if their actions displeased their constituents. Members of the Commune would only receive a workman’s wages, so that government would be cheap and taxes low—a proposal of an older, pre-communist radicalism. In the first draft, Marx even used the phrase “economical government” to describe the Commune, a slogan of pro–free market English liberals and radicals. Separation of church and state would be a feature of the new communist regime, as would secular public education—two additional pre-communist radical ideas, and aspects of the Commune strongly emphasized by its non-communist English defenders.104 With this government, the workers could carry out the communist aim of “united co-operative societies . . . regulat[ing] national production upon a common plan. . . .”

  This representation of a communist future differed from Marx’s previous plans for communists to take over the existing state apparatus and deploy it for revolutionary purposes. Engels had once even speculated on staffing the revolutionary government with commercial clerks, who could do a more efficient job of governing than the legally educated state officials typical of the German bureaucracy.105 The polemic was certainly a break with attitudes Marx had held less than a year previously at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, when he had called for a French defeat and explicitly denounced revolutionary action by French socialists, even calling the idea of a Paris Commune “nonsense.” From the mid-1840s onward, Marx had seen a socialist uprising in Paris as the initial shot of a European and perhaps worldwide revolution, but by the late 1860s he no longer perceived Paris as the vanguard of socialism and the labor movement. His private skepticism about the Paris Commune seems more in line with the new attitude he had adopted than his public praise for the insurgent municipality.

  Marx knew quite well at the time what most historians have since discovered, that the Paris Commune was no socialist government. The unpublished first draft of The Civil War in France went over the measures of the Commune systematically, finding just one that perhaps could be considered socialist, and noting that measures for the benefit of the middle class were at least as frequent and significant as those reserved for the workers.106 It was the attacks on the Commune as a subversive communist regime, with the IWMA and Marx personally in the background pulling the strings, attacks begun by the Versailles government and spread by the press in England, across the Continent, and in the United States, that propelled Marx to identify the Commune with his communist future.

  Praising the Paris Commune as the forerunner of a future communist society terminated Marx’s patient seven-year-long effort at building up the IWMA. It meant breaking with the English
trade unionists, Marx’s allies and the basis of his authority in the General Council—allies Marx badly needed in his struggle against Bakunin and his followers, who had supported the republican national French government and rejected revolutionary insurrection. At best, Marx’s political future was uncertain; at worst, his dramatic association with the Parisian insurgents would bring his period of political activism to an end. And one has to wonder if Marx’s patience with his role in the International was wearing thin, if the pain and physical disability of his untreatable skin disease were making political action increasingly difficult for him. If so, the whole point of The Civil War in France was to preserve a glorious vision of communist revolution for a future in which he would no longer play a role. In that sense, the address on the Commune marked the beginning of the end of Marx’s activism, of his attempts, as a veteran of the 1848 Revolution, to play a role in European politics during the period of war and upheaval begun in 1859.

  PART III

  Legacy

  10

  The Theorist

  IN THE TWO DECADES between 1850 and 1870, Marx developed the mature version of his philosophical, social, and economic theories. When we think of such theories, we imagine a bearded scholar poring for hours over tomes in the British Museum; but usually Marx’s theoretical pursuits had to be crammed in beside far more time-consuming activities: émigré politics, journalism, the IWMA, evading creditors, and the serious or fatal illnesses that plagued his children and his wife, and, after the onset of his skin disease in 1863, Marx himself. All too often Marx’s theoretical labors were interrupted for months at a time or reserved for odd hours late at night.