Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  Marx’s pro-Tory tendencies had already been apparent in the 1850s, but they were magnified by the IWMA British trade unionists’ refusal to abandon the Liberals for a workers’ party. His stand against Russia in the 1870s was also a continuation of long-term attitudes, but there was a distinct new twist to them, Marx’s increasing enthusiasm about the prospects for revolution in that country. Encouraged by the growth of opposition to the czar’s regime, and his own personal contacts with Russian radicals, Marx hoped that either a military defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 or a humiliating retreat before the opposition of other great powers would lead to an inflammatory situation in the realm of the czar. Even after the end of the war and the resolution of the ensuing diplomatic crisis—which did bring a humiliating Russian retreat, as a result of Disraeli’s policies—Marx continued to see a Russian revolution on the horizon.

  Such revolutions would take place in Russia as a result of wartime defeats, by the Japanese in 1905 and the Germans in 1917, the latter bringing to power the Bolsheviks, a political party endorsing Marx’s ideas. The revolution Marx was expecting around 1880 was a different one, a rerun, in the czar’s realm of what had happened in France a century earlier. As Engels said about what he and Marx expected in Russia, “First from the court out and constitutional, but that is 1789 before 1793.” Marx did have high hopes for the broader European ramifications of a revolution in Russia. “This time the revolution begins in the east,” he wrote enthusiastically to Friedrich Sorge in October 1877, “the hitherto intact bulwark and reserve army of counterrevolution.” The results of a Russian revolution would be particularly apparent in central Europe: “Defeat of Russia, revolution in Russia—would sound the death-knell of Prussia.” Here, Marx was still thinking of the politics of the 1850s, when the Prussian kingdom, the smallest and militarily weakest of the great powers, had been dependent on the czar, whose defeat in the Crimean War heralded the beginning of the end of the era of reaction. After Prussia’s victory over France in 1870–71, and the subsequent merger of all the German states into the militarily and diplomatically powerful, Prussian-dominated German Empire, authoritarian German rulers like Bismarck no longer needed the patronage of the czar. If anything, it was the other way around.33

  Marx’s views on the latest economic developments also reflected the influences of the 1850s, particularly his disappointment over the outcome of the global recession of 1857. The decade of the 1870s saw the re-emergence of large-scale economic crises throughout Europe and North America: abrupt stock exchange crashes, followed by deep and severe recessions with very high unemployment and growing labor unrest, such as the 1877 nationwide rail strikes and riots of the unemployed in the United States, which Marx observed with interest. These sharp downturns were the prelude to a twenty- to twenty-five-year period of frequent and more severe recessions, deflationary price declines, and slower economic growth, which economists and historians used to call (the term has gone out of fashion in recent years) the Great Depression of the nineteenth century.34

  Surprisingly, Marx did not see this chain of economic crises as the crisis of capitalism he had so often predicted. Rather, he saw them as “partial” crises, with the terminal crisis still a ways off in the future, presumably after the end of his own life. Marx even hoped that the economic crisis of the 1870s would not be too severe, because he feared that a “premature” crisis would grant capitalism a new lease on life. Instead, he focused his attention on the effects of deflation for agriculture. Collapsing farm prices, he thought, would lead to increasingly vehement class struggles among landlords, capitalist tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers in Great Britain, undermining a central pillar of British society and politics. This focus on British agricultural society and its place in a potential upheaval of the capitalist world was one Marx had already adopted in the more prosperous years of the late 1860s.35

  The difficult economic environment of the last quarter of the nineteenth century coincided with and encouraged a great expansion of colonial empires. The 1880s saw the “scramble for Africa,” as contemporaries put it. Later disciples of Marx, including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Kautsky, would put imperialism at the center of their analyses of capitalism; but Marx himself, as had been the case with his writings on imperialism in the 1850s, did not perceive the connection. He lived to see the British occupation of Egypt (then an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire) in 1882, one of the first steps in the scramble for Africa. The very last written comment he made on public affairs, in a letter to Eleanor just two months before his death, concerned this imperialist move. Ignoring financial concerns, such as the money the Egyptian government owed foreign bondholders, the economic and strategic issues connected with the Suez Canal, or even visions of a great British Empire in Africa—which Marx described, sardonically, as daydreams—he focused instead on Russia. There were no British interests involved, Marx insisted: the policy of Gladstone’s Liberal government was “just the tool of other, non-British clever schemers,” the Russians, who wanted a British occupation of Egypt as a pretext to allow them to seize another Ottoman province, Armenia. This evaluation, shared by Engels, was part of Marx’s long-term suspicion of Russian policy, and his equally long-term denunciation of the Liberal Party as a tool of the czar, but very different from future Marxists’ understanding of imperialist ventures.36

  UNTIL SHORTLY BEFORE HIS death, Marx continued to be involved with existing revolutionary movements and nascent socialist parties on the Continent. His interactions with German, French, and Russian socialists reveal the way he took his own lifetime of political experiences—anchored, more than anything else, by the revolutions of 1848–49—and applied them to the political circumstances coming into existence in Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

  The most important and substantial of these political initiatives involved the German socialists. Marx and Engels purported to be internationalists, Engels stating that he and Marx were “representatives of international socialism,” who “belong to the German party barely more than to the French, American or Russian. . . .” Yet for all their internationalism, they could not deny a personal connection to the German labor movement: “We enjoy every victory won in Germany as much as elsewhere, and even more, because the German party has from the very beginning developed in dependence on our theoretical positions.”37

  The creation of a German nation-state in 1871, bringing together Prussia and formerly anti-Prussian kingdoms, such as Saxony and Bavaria, into a federalist German Empire, ended any reason for the separate existences of the pro-Prussian Lassalleans of the General German Workers’ Association, and the anti-Prussian Social Democratic Labor Party led by Liebknecht and Bebel. Increasing persecution of both socialist parties by the German government authorities, who no longer saw them as tools in the politics of national unification, made the idea of a merger seem steadily more plausible, an idea strongly endorsed by Marx’s close ally Wilhelm Liebknecht.

  Representatives of the two groups met and drew up a common program as a precursor to the unity congress, scheduled for the Thuringian city of Gotha in late May 1875. Marx and Engels only learned about this decision, made without any input from them, through the newspapers. It was bad enough that their supporters were agreeing to a merger with the followers of Lassalle, on terms that Marx and Engels regarded as favorable to the latter, but to do so on the basis of a “pernicious and demoralizing . . . program,” one “good for nothing but canonizing Lassalle’s articles of faith”—that was unbearable. After a detailed discussion with Engels, Marx drew up extensive criticisms, and sent them off to Germany to be circulated among the party leadership. The critique was coupled with an ultimatum: if the merger congress went ahead, on the basis of the draft program, “Engels and I will publish a short declaration, whose content is that we will distance ourselves from this program and have nothing to do with it.”38

  Marx’s criticisms, “Marginal Notes on the Program of the German Workers’ P
arty,” or “Critique of the Gotha Program,” as they are now known, were a savage condemnation of the elements of Lassalle’s ideas contained in the draft document. Oddly, one of the major aspects of Marx’s anger sounded a lot like the Communist Manifesto, the program’s assertions that the means of production were a “monopoly of the capitalist class,” and that, compared to the workers, the other classes formed “one reactionary mass.” Marx’s own thinking had changed in the quarter century since the Manifesto, and he had come to regard the class of landowners as increasingly important to capitalist society. “In England,” Marx noted in his critique, “the capitalist is usually not even the owner of the land on which his factory stands.” But these criticisms also had a political point. Marx saw the proposed program as continuing Lassalle’s efforts at a political “alliance with the absolutist and feudal enemies of the bourgeoisie,” his attempts to cozy up to Bismarck and the authoritarian Prussian government.

  The program’s endorsement of Lassalle’s opposition to trade unions, and support for state-sponsored producers’ cooperatives, was also anathema to Marx. Unions were the means for the workers to seize back from the capitalists part of the surplus value they had produced for them. Marx’s skepticism of cooperatives was only deepened if they were to be sponsored by Bismarck’s authoritarian regime. His dislike of Bismarck was closely linked to the attack on the Gotha Program’s rejection of internationalism, its insistence that the working class should strive for its liberation “within the context of the contemporary nation-state.” Coming from the man who had recently dissolved the IWMA and opposed efforts at its revival, this might sound odd, but Marx regarded the assertion as yet another concession to Bismarck, who had brought nationalism under his political control.

  If the critique dealt first and foremost with Lassallean elements in the Gotha Program, Marx by no means spared the ideas of his own followers, Bebel and Liebknecht. He had little good to say about the program’s political demands: the “free state”—a circumlocution for a democratic republic, a demand that could not legally be uttered in Bismarck’s Germany—was “nothing but the universally known democratic litany, universal suffrage, direct legislation [by popular initiative], civil liberties, popular militia etc. They are a mere echo of the bourgeois People’s Party. . . .” Marx was unhappy with the call for state-sponsored free and equal public education, which he saw as yet another concession to authoritarianism. And the demands for academic freedom and freedom of conscience were just “old slogans of liberalism,” and even in the Prussian constitution—not exactly stuff for the program of a revolutionary labor party.

  The “Critique of the Gotha Program” was the latest in a series of assertions of Marx’s revolutionary strategy that had begun three decades earlier with his essay “On the Jewish Question.” A central European revolution would involve a double recurrence of the French Revolution of 1789, both overthrowing the authoritarian Prussian state and organizing the workers to demand a communist regime. Marx had always denounced radical movements that would perform one, but not both, of these revolutionary tasks. In the 1860s, he had lashed out against the anti-capitalist but pro-Prussian Lassalleans, and the anti-Prussian but insufficiently anti-capitalist followers of Liebknecht and Bebel. The merger was bringing the worst features of the two approaches together, “a compromise between these two versions of belief in miracles, equally far from socialism.”

  In spite of Marx and Engels’s ultimatum, the unity congress duly met in Gotha, founding the Socialist Labor Party of Germany, and adopting the draft program. Marx and Engels did not go through with their threat to disavow the newly unified party, ostensibly because the bourgeois press and the workers had misinterpreted the character of the program, seeing it as socialist and revolutionary rather than confused and backward, but this contention was evidently a pretext. Marx was not prepared to denounce the party he saw as his legacy, although in future criticisms he would always blame Liebknecht for having compromised with the Lassalleans and allowed dubious elements into the socialists’ ranks.39

  Marx was very impressed by the united party’s performance at the 1877 national elections, when it doubled the socialists’ previous vote totals and emerged as a significant political voice against Bismarck. The Iron Chancellor was more than ready for the socialists’ challenge. Exploiting two failed attempts in 1877–78 to assassinate the elderly German emperor Wilhelm I, and blaming them on socialist terrorists (in reality, both assassins were mentally ill lone assailants), Bismarck intimidated the liberals and Catholics in the Reichstag into passing a law prohibiting the Socialist Labor Party and public advocacy of its doctrines. This was not the Nazi era, when workers’ parties were outlawed and their leaders thrown into concentration camps. In the more gentlemanly nineteenth century, the Socialist Labor Party was prohibited, but running socialist candidates for parliament was not, and otherwise illegal socialist propaganda could be spread with impunity if it was part of an election campaign.40

  While historians may be consoled by the fact that Hitler’s persecution of Germany’s socialists was much worse than Bismarck’s, nineteenth-century German socialists could not share that attitude. They sought ways to respond to the new unfavorable situation. One party leader, Johann Most, fled the country, and from English exile, with the support of the London Communist Workers’ Educational Association, advocated the immediate violent overthrow of the German government. Marx and Engels regarded these appeals as an invitation to the workers to be massacred by the army, but merely reacted with a display of condescension toward the German artisans in London for supporting such stupid notions.41

  Marx took much more seriously the proposal of the party leadership to start a daily newspaper in Switzerland, but found less amenable its proposed editorial policy, a strong criticism of the socialists’ revolutionary aspirations. By praising the violence of the Paris Commune and demanding a showdown with the capitalists, members of the Zurich editorial board asserted, the socialists had driven the liberal middle class into the arms of Bismarck and his reactionary politics. The editors advocated a renunciation of violent revolution, reforming capitalism rather than introducing socialism, class cooperation in place of class struggle, and gaining support across society instead of appealing solely to the working class. This program strongly resembled what would later be dubbed “revisionism,” the revision of Marx’s doctrines of class struggle and socialist revolution. Eduard Bernstein, author of Evolutionary Socialism, the bible of the early twentieth-century revisionists, was one of the members of the exile newspaper editorial board two decades earlier.

  Lenin cut his political teeth on the denunciation of revisionism, so it has become a familiar point of Marxism. To Marx in 1879, the idea of a reform-oriented labor party was an unfamiliar political stance, quite unlike the previous forms of socialism, labor organization, and radical politics he had opposed. Lassalle had proposed to organize workers, quite militantly, against the bourgeoisie, although he was willing to take the assistance of the reactionary Prussian government in doing so. English trade unionists had no interest in an independent labor party, but were affiliated with the Liberals. The anti-socialist democrats and republicans of the 1840s were also no adherents of a labor party.

  Marx found the proposals as pernicious as they were novel; in the fall of 1879, he and Engels sent a circular letter denouncing them to the leaders of the German Socialist Labor Party. In the circular, the two London veterans used their experiences from 1848 to characterize the new policies: they were the same as those proposed in the midcentury revolution by the petit-bourgeois democrats, the bourgeois democrats, and the True Socialists—three groups that did not get along. This effort to dispose of a new phenomenon by dismissing it as a recurrence of discredited old ones was a sign of the intellectual difficulty Marx and Engels had in dealing with the proposal, but it did not stop them from making a threat:

  As far as we are concerned there is only one way open. For almost forty years now, we have emphasized the class s
truggle as the fundamental driving force of history, and especially the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of modern social upheaval; it is impossible for us to go together with people who wish to strike this class struggle from the movement. . . . If the new party organ takes a stance corresponding to the bourgeois and not proletarian sentiments of these gentlemen [the members of the editorial board], there will be nothing we can do, as sorry as we will be, but to protest against it publicly, and to dissolve the solidarity, with which we have hitherto shown the German party vis-à-vis foreigners.

  The party leadership took this warning more seriously than it had the ones connected with the Gotha Program, dispatching August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein to London in 1880 to convince the revolutionary veterans that the Zurich newspaper was not neglecting the class struggle. The emissaries were successful in their efforts, and Engels went on to write for the newspaper; by that time, the health problems of Marx and his wife made his participation impossible.42

  What this episode suggested was a gradually developing new revolutionary formulation. For decades, Marx had tried, often with considerable difficulty, to guide German radicals between exclusively opposing Prussian authoritarianism and exclusively opposing capitalism. By the end of the 1870s, he was trying to guide the social democrats between Most’s demands for immediate revolution and Bernstein’s ideas of a fundamentally reformist workers’ movement. This, too, would prove a difficult tightrope for socialist leaders to walk, although most of the tightrope walking would be done by a later generation, fifteen to thirty years after Marx’s own death.