Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The Congress itself was quite the spectacle. Journalists, reporting on the proceedings, packed the spectators’ galleries. IWMA delegates were unsure whether to be pleased about the public attention or to suspect the newspapermen as spies for the bourgeoisie. The Dutch government, fearing the gathering of revolutionaries would lead to disturbances of public order, stationed soldiers seemingly on every street corner of its capital city. In spite of these apprehensions, there was no repetition of the Commune. Everything proceeded in good-natured and orderly fashion, as one might expect in the Netherlands. The delegates were followed everywhere by crowds of spectators. Since The Hague had the reputation of being a very conservative and religious city, there was no surprise that some were openly hostile; others were simply curious; to the delegates’ astonishment, some were very friendly, singing the Marseillaise.18

  Supporters of Marx caucused before and during the sessions at the Hôtel Picot; those of Bakunin, lacking their leader, who did not appear for the Congress, at the Café National. At the very first sessions on September 2–3, credentials fights all went Marx’s way, although the anarchists were “rushing wildly about, shrieking and howling interruptions. . . . One, Cyrille, presenting himself with his hat on before the President, gesticulated dramatically, and, shouting as if he would burst a blood vessel, rushed out.” Thomas Mottershead, an English silk weaver and trade union leader, a longtime ally of Marx on the General Council, who had recently broken with him, denounced one of the disputed delegates, the journalist Maltman Barry, as “not a recognized leader of British working men.” One might imagine Mottershead making this accusation rather unsteadily, since he was drunk throughout the entire Congress. Marx snapped right back at him that such an accusation was an honor, “for almost every recognized leader of English working men was sold to Gladstone, Morley, Dilke [i.e., the leaders of the Liberal Party] and the others.”

  Marx’s open insult of his old IWMA allies was a drastic step, but also evidence that he had the meeting well under control. His slate for the officers of the Congress handily beat out that of the Bakuninists. Votes on crucial issues—the reaffirmation of the right of the General Council to suspend the membership of affiliated societies, the condemnation of Bakunin’s International Alliance of Social Democracy, and the expulsion from the IWMA of Bakunin and his right-hand man, the Swiss anarchist James Guillaume—went Marx’s way, and by substantial majorities.19

  Then, on September 7, the penultimate day of the Congress, Marx dropped a bombshell. Engels rose and proposed that the seat of the General Council be moved to New York. The delegates sat in startled silence: “It was some time before any one rose to speak. It was a coup d’état, and each one looked to his neighbor to break the spell.” This newspaper account, from the pro-Marx delegate Maltman Barry, captures well the enormous surprise at the seeming perversity of Marx’s proposal to send the central authority of the IWMA across the Atlantic Ocean. Such a move would leave it very far from the action of the group and its European affiliates, especially after Marx had triumphed over his anarchist opponents, and reinforced the Central Council’s leadership role within the IWMA. The transfer of the General Council away from London passed by a narrow margin of 26 ayes, 23 nays, and 9 abstentions. In a second vote, New York was chosen as the new site of the General Council with 30 votes, against 14 for London, and 13 abstaining.20

  Critics, like Eccarius, regarded the move as a sham: “the central box of the International may be hung up at the 10th Ward Hotel New York, and . . . the center of action may be in [Marx’s home in] Maitland-park, Haverstock-hill. . . .” He was certainly right about that. Marx and Engels sent detailed instructions to Friedrich Adolf Sorge, the leading figure of the New York General Council, about resolutions the Council was to pass. They refused to send him any of the records of the General Council that it would need to function; sending such documents, Engels stated, was just a “formality.”21

  Admittedly, the New York General Council did not have all that much to do. The Belgian, Spanish, English, Italian, and francophone Swiss federations all refused to correspond with it. Some of these groups remained within the IWMA, while others joined a Bakuninist organization. The French government had prohibited the International and arrested the delegates to a meeting of French affiliates held in the southern city of Toulouse. Followers of Lassalle were working against the IWMA within the German labor movement and among the German workers in London. Neither the official IWMA, now centered in New York, nor the various national and local groups rejecting the New York General Council’s authority, nor Bakunin’s counter-organization lasted more than a few years. By the late 1870s, all remnants of the IWMA had ceased to exist.22

  Sending the General Council to New York was no spur-of-the-moment decision. Marx had already been toying with the idea of moving the General Council out of London in the late 1860s. In the run-up to the Hague Congress he made no secret of his plans to resign from the General Council and devote himself to completing his economics treatise. Marx saw himself as the central figure in the IWMA, a viewpoint shared by contemporaries both friendly and hostile. Without his guidance, he feared that the organization would fall into the hands of advocates of a secret society politics he despised, so that his planned resignation could only be accompanied by dismantling or at least downgrading the International. Although repeatedly denying this interpretation in public, Marx’s intentions were quite clear to observers at the Congress, and he himself even admitted them in a private conversation with a Paris Commune refugee, who was secretly a French police spy.

  Historians sometimes compare the decision to the one Marx made in 1850, when he dispatched the Central Authority of the Communist League from London to Cologne, also a move leading to the organization’s demise. Marx had done that because his opponents, led by Willich and Schapper, had gained control of the Communist League in London. By contrast, Marx had been quite successful in retaining control of the IWMA at the 1872 Hague Congress. Admittedly, he had done so by questionable machinations and by forming an alliance with the French Blanquists, a group of secret society supporters whose ideas of politics were fundamentally opposed to those of Marx. The transfer of the General Council to New York, in this line of argument, was a pre-emptive strike, to destroy the IWMA while Marx controlled it, before the anarchists, aggressively organizing in southern Europe, and the secret society revolutionary Blanquists could take it over.23

  This viewpoint has a lot to say for it, but it is in some ways incomplete, as can be seen in Marx and Engels’s relationship with the IWMA following the transfer of the General Council to New York. They did continue to try to get the organization to make decisions, to carry out correspondence with the few loyal sections, and even prepared to attend a planned 1873 IWMA congress in Geneva—at least until it became clear that the sole attendees would be groups from Switzerland, so that the Congress would not be international at all. Why do all this if the point of the transfer to New York was to terminate the IWMA?

  An answer lies in Engels’s letter to Sorge, refusing to send the records of the General Council. Those records, he wrote, “are absolutely indispensable in the struggle with the Secessionists [i.e., the supporters of Bakunin], in order to be able to answer their lies and slander.” After the Hague Congress, Marx worked feverishly on a lengthy pamphlet, officially commissioned by the Congress, detailing the relationship of Bakunin’s International Alliance of Social Democracy with the IWMA. The writing culminated in a fulminant attack on Bakunin, describing in lurid detail his connections with Nechayev, his Pan-Slavist ideas, and his secret affiliations with the czar.

  Marx, as he looked at Europe following the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War and the suppression of the Paris Commune, saw the beginning of a new era of reaction not unlike the one that had overtaken the Continent in the 1850s. The IWMA would be unable to function effectively, much as had been the case with the 1848 revolutionaries in the subsequent decade. Under these circumstances, he wrote to Sorge, at the end of
September 1873, “it is quite useful for the formal organization of the International to move to the background for the moment . . . so that no idiots . . . or adventurers . . . seize the leadership and compromise the cause.” This continued to be the viewpoint Marx and Engels articulated throughout the entire decade of the 1870s and into the early 1880s; they always opposed any revival of the International as inopportune under the prevailing political circumstances and likely to do more harm than good.24

  Starting with the suppression of the Paris Commune and moving onward for the next three years, Marx’s policies were aimed at creating a legacy: identifying the Commune with his ideas of communist revolution; linking the IWMA to the Commune; and aligning the International with his version of working-class revolutionary politics. Marx took into account that such policies might well lead to the destruction of the IWMA, but he saw the primary value of the group in its image for future revolutionaries, not in its increasingly compromised possibilities of action with present ones. This stance went along with his own advancing age and failing health, making it steadily more difficult for him to carry out all his demanding political and scholarly tasks. Public plans and private concerns converged in a tacit admission that the communist revolution Marx had spent the previous three decades planning and striving toward would not occur in his lifetime. Like the organization he had been instrumental in building and dismantling, the value of Marx’s life and work would be in its legacy for the future.

  AT THE END OF June 1872, Jenny Marx described the demands on her father’s time as he prepared for the Hague Congress of the IWMA. A special meeting (besides the time-consuming regular ones) of the General Council lasted from four in the afternoon until one in the morning. Moments free of IWMA business were taken up with going over the proofs for the second German edition of Capital and revising the translation for the French edition. Even after the meeting in the Netherlands, and the transfer of the General Council to New York, Marx found himself still very busy denouncing Bakunin and the anarchists, and working on the French edition of Capital.25

  His health began to deteriorate visibly. He suffered from persistent insomnia; at the Hague Congress, he hardly slept at all. To Adolf Hepner, a German Congress delegate, he looked aged, visibly older than Engels. Following the Congress, new symptoms began to appear: persistent episodes of dizziness and repeated, agonizing headaches. Wilhelm Wolff had shown similar symptoms before suffering a fatal stroke in 1864, and Engels feared that Marx would meet the same fate. Marx’s complaints are clinical evidence of an advanced case of hypertension, so Engels’s suspicions were probably correct. Engels insisted that Marx consult his former Manchester physician, Eduard Gumpert, whose medical knowledge Marx deeply respected. The doctor’s orders were that Marx could write at most four hours a day. For a full restoration of his health he would need an extended stay at a spa, drinking its mineral waters, a nineteenth-century medical treatment enormously popular among the middle and upper classes.26

  Marx followed this advice, as usual with financial assistance from Engels. In September 1874, he traveled, accompanied by Eleanor, who was having her own health problems, to Karlsbad in the Austrian province of Bohemia, today’s Karlovy Varý in the Czech Republic. Marx went slightly incognito, to avoid the attention of the Austrian authorities. He registered at the hotel as Charles Marx, rentier of London, rather than as Dr. Karl Marx, which would have brought a discount on the daily fee the spa guests had to pay. The therapeutic value of drinking the spa’s sulfurous thermal waters may be doubted, but the extended rest, complete with daily long walks through the town and the surrounding woods and hills, were a beneficial break from the political controversies and long nights of writing in London, to say nothing of that city’s choking, coal-dust-laden air. Marx went back to Karlsbad in 1875 and returned to London, as Engels noted, “completely changed . . . powerful, fresh, cheerful and healthy.” The trip was repeated in 1876; in 1877, Marx, accompanied by his wife and Eleanor, chose a smaller spa, Bad Neuenahr, in the Rhineland.27

  FOR ALL THE IMPROVEMENT in his health, Marx did not return to his previous life of political activism and immense intellectual effort, but became more of an adviser and observer. His suggestions showed both new elements in his view of the world late in his life, and also long-term continuities in his political thought and vision of the future. Evidence of Marx’s views at this time is slimmer than previously, because, unlike the 1850s and 1860s, he was no longer engaging in political polemics or writing regular journalism. Engels lived in London just a short walk away, so their extensive correspondence, a very rich source of Marx’s opinions, had been replaced by a daily conversation in Marx’s study, or, in nice weather, strolling on Hampstead Heath.

  There were some issues that concerned Marx deeply and for which a fair amount of evidence is available. One was the prospect of a new war between the great powers—a possibility that haunted the Continent from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 onward, although it did take forty-three years before it finally broke out. During the 1848 Revolution and in the following two decades, Marx had been bellicose, seeing a great European war as a spur to revolution and a necessary process for radicalizing revolutions. In the 1870s, he became more skeptical of the prospect, fearing that such a war would have reactionary political consequences, “for a longer or shorter period a useless exhaustion of forces” was how he put it. Engels was more drastic, stating that such a war “would be our greatest misfortune; it could set back the [socialist] movement [in Germany] for twenty years.”28

  There was one exception to this skepticism, involving Marx’s long-term bête noire, Russia. Just as the Crimean War of 1853–56, pitting the Western powers against Russia over the future of the Ottoman Empire, had been the major political event of the era of reaction, so a new war over the fate of the Ottoman Empire in Europe at the end of the 1870s drew Marx’s attention. This war began with uprisings of the Slavic peoples of the Balkans against Turkish rule, particularly violent and dramatic in Ottoman Bulgaria. European leftists in general, and veterans of the Revolution of 1848 in particular, were very excited about the Bulgarian Revolution of 1877, which was the first uprising on the Continent after the suppression of the Paris Commune.

  Marx was not. He and Engels saw the anti-Ottoman insurgents in the Balkans as tools of Pan-Slavists, trying to expand Russian influence. This attitude only intensified when the czar declared war on the Sultan, and sent his armies marching into the Balkans to liberate the Muslim ruler’s Christian subjects, and then to seize the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. This Russo-Turkish War unleashed a furious dispute in English politics. The Liberals, led by William Gladstone, took a distinctly anti-Turkish stance, publicizing the massacres of thousands of Christians by Islamic soldiers suppressing the uprising—the “Bulgarian horrors,” in contemporary parlance. Against them were the vigorously anti-Russian Conservatives, and their veteran leader Benjamin Disraeli, who emphasized, in crude form, nationalist hostility. The Tories’ efforts to gain popular support for their plans brought the phrase “jingoism” into the English language.29

  As had been the case during the Crimean War, Marx was vehemently against Russia. But a quarter century later, he lacked his 1850s public platforms: the New York Tribune and the newspapers, pamphlets, and public meetings of the followers of David Urquhart, who died in 1877. Still, Marx had other means of influencing the public. He was able to feed information to an Irish Nationalist MP, Keyes O’Cleary, who was out to derail the Liberals. O’Cleary stood up in the House of Commons and asked Gladstone, who was demanding that the Ottoman Empire carry out reforms, why Gladstone was not demanding the same of the Russian Empire—and then detailed a list of evils found in the realm of the czar, provided for him by Marx from Russian émigrés. Marx informed his followers in Germany that the “working class press is not paying enough attention to the Eastern Question”; he provided Wilhelm Liebknecht with a set of talking points for the debate in the Reichstag, enabling Liebknecht to attack Bisma
rck for what Marx saw as a perniciously pro-Russian slant to German policies.30

  Marx’s attitudes toward British politics in the 1870s were very much like those of twenty years previously. Although not denouncing Gladstone as a paid agent of the czar, he despised the Liberals as lackeys of Russia, people who “scream and howl to the greater glory of the Tsar, liberator of [oppressed] peoples.” By contrast, he greatly admired Disraeli’s stand against the Russian Empire, and only regretted that Conservative noblemen in Disraeli’s cabinet were taking a pro-czarist stance, and not letting him exercise his talents to the full. Marx was infuriated when the one working-class MP sitting for the Liberal Party, Thomas Burt, actually voted against Disraeli’s military appropriations to prepare for action against the Russians. Marx was appalled that a “direct representative of the mine-workers and himself a miner” could “leave their army in the lurch” while bourgeois leftists, such as John Bright, whom Marx had denounced in the 1850s for lack of martial spirit, avoided casting an anti-military vote by scurrying out of the House of Commons.31

  Inspired by the parties’ opinions about war with Russia, Marx developed a more broadly pro-Conservative attitude. He was a strong supporter of Irish nationalism, and a sworn enemy of English landlord rule in Ireland, two issues on which the Conservatives had absolutely contrary positions. Nonetheless, Marx denounced Gladstone’s efforts to improve the position of Irish tenant farmers and to reach a compromise with Irish Nationalists as at best halfhearted, and at worst completely fraudulent. Marx’s two main British acquaintances during his later years, the journalist Maltman Barry and the eccentric intellectual Henry Hyndman, were both close to the Tories. One of Marx’s last written comments on British politics, from a letter to his daughter Jenny in April 1881, less than two years before his death, was full of praise for the brilliant Conservative speakers in Parliament, including Lord Randolph Churchill, whose son, Winston, was then seven years old. The future vehement anti-communist would no doubt have been amused had he known of the communist patriarch’s admiration for his father.32