Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  Yet inside the Hôtel de Ville, the class imperative was never quite so pure since the Commune's conscious proletarian element was balanced by a strong contingent of skilled manual and white-collar workers. To add to the mongrel make-up of 1871, there was also a range of deviant political philosophies at play on the ground. Proudhonist sentiments had always found a warm reception amongst the artisans and petty-tradesmen of Paris, and the Commune's plan for worker co-operatives was obviously indebted to this socialist lineage. At the same time, the Commune's most militant revolutionaries were Jacobins and Blanquists rather than Marxists – although many were simultaneously members of the International. In addition, there was a strongly civic republican edge to the Communards’ thinking: an organic commitment to building a ‘democratic and social’ republic for Paris by Parisians without interference from those external, political powers which had historically corrupted their city.

  In fact, this promiscuity of thought proved a relief for Marx and Engels: when it all went wrong, there was someone else to blame. Thanks to the absence of a properly organized revolutionary workers’ party, they later claimed, the Communards failed to launch an assault on the reactionary government forces at Versailles and were hopelessly reticent about seizing the Bank of France. Instead, they bunkered down for another siege, which in the event lasted barely a month before government troops bludgeoned their way into the capital. Against this 120,000-strong force, the Communards – even with their barricades and guerrilla tactics – never stood a chance, and so, on 21 May 1871, began the semaine sanglante which saw an estimated 10,000 Communards liquidated. ‘The breechloaders could no longer kill fast enough; the vanquished were shot down in hundreds by mitrailleuse fire,’ in Engels's dramatic account. ‘The “Wall of the Fédérés” at the Pére Lachaise cemetery, where the final mass murder was consummated, is still standing today, a mute but eloquent testimony to the frenzy of which the ruling class is capable as soon as the working-class dares to stand up for its rights.’17 One of the more unpredictable consequences of this bloodbath was a rare falling out between Engels and his conservative mother, who naturally took the side of the National Government when it came to crushing the Commune. ‘If I have not written to you for so very long, it was because I wanted to answer your latest comments on my political activity in a way that would not give you offence,’ Engels replied gingerly before accusing his mother of forgetting ‘the 40,000 men, women and children whom the Versailles troops massacred with machinery after people disarmed’. Beyond Engels's exaggeration of the casualty figures, what is historically noteworthy is that Mrs Engels clearly thought Marx himself responsible for the entire dreadful episode and was furious that he had dragged her beautiful, innocent son into it. Engels, who always put friend before family, cleared Marx of any responsibility for the atrocities (if not the Commune itself). ‘If Marx were not here or did not even exist, nothing about the situation would have altered. Hence it is very unjust to blame him for this, and I cheerfully recall that a long time ago Marx's relations maintained that I had corrupted him.’18 Yet by the end of the letter, Engels had reverted to his loving, filial self, recounting for Elise tales of his Ramsgate holiday, trips to the Viennese beer hall in the Strand, and offering supportive words to her in her ongoing struggle to unite him with his warring brothers. It was one of his final letters to his mother who, without much warning, died in the autumn of 1873 and, in the process, extinguished Engels's last truly affectionate connection to his family on the continent.

  Elise Engels had not been alone in blaming Karl Marx for the bloody events of 1871. Despite his lack of practical influence over the Communards and the relatively minor role played by the International in the struggle, Marx became intimately connected with the Commune thanks to his polemical defence of 1871, The Civil War in France. Translated and sold in multiple editions across the continent, the pamphlet cemented the idea that the sinister, shady, illusive International was directing the worldwide working-class movement. ‘Little as we saw or heard openly of the influence of the “International”, it was in fact the real motive force whose hidden hand guided, with a mysterious and dreaded power, the whole machine of the Revolution,’ was the judgement of the conservative Fraser's Magazine. The Catholic weekly The Tablet branded it ‘a society whose behests are obeyed by countless thousands from Moscow to Madrid, and in the New World as in the Old, whose disciples have already waged desperate war against one government, and whose proclamations pledge it to wage war against every government’.19 Needless to say, Marx was delighted by this belated celebrity. ‘I have the honour to be at this moment the most calumniated and the most menaced man in London,’ he wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann. ‘That really does one good after a tedious twenty years' idyll in the backwoods.’20

  So what was the International, this terrifying subterranean force able to tumble governments? Marx generally played down its conspiratorial aura, describing it as ‘nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilised world’.21 Established in 1864 at St Martin's Hall, in central London, on the back of the Polish insurrection and a growing feeling of international solidarity amongst the British labour aristocracy, the International Working Men's Association was a predominantly European workers’ movement uniting Proudhonists, trade unionists, revolutionary Blanquists, Utopian socialists and a few Marxist adherents in the broader class struggle. In London, the body was initially closely associated with the Italian nationalist leader Mazzini as well as with workers in the London building trade. Marx had reluctantly gone along to the first meeting as an observer but ended the evening with a seat on the General Council and responsibility for composing the inaugural address. Engels was sceptical of this new talking shop from the outset, thinking the International both an unwanted distraction from Marx's work on Das Kapital and highly susceptible to the fruitless, faction fighting so endemic on the Left. ‘I suspect that there will very soon be a split in this new association between those who are bourgeois in their thinking and those who are proletarian, the moment the issues become a little more specifi.’ And he was downright frosty about starting up a chapter in Manchester. ‘As for the suggestion that I should form a branch of the International Association here, it's quite out of the question.’22 Co-ordinating political activities with local radicals would seriously imperil his position at Ermen & Engels, not to mention at the next meet of the Cheshire Hounds.

  As the International grew in stature – with an estimated 800,000 regular members by the end of the 1860s and strategic alliances across a range of trade unions – Engels's hostility eased, not least because he had always believed passionately in the internationalism of the proletarian cause. ‘No working man in England – nor in France either, by-the-bye – ever treated me as a foreigner,’ he wrote pointedly in his introduction to The Condition of the Working Class. ‘With the greatest pleasure I observed you [the working men of England] to be free from that blasting curse, national prejudice and national pride, which after all means nothing but wholesale selfishness…’23 More importantly, Marx desperately needed some political assistance: through the late 1860s he had fought an exhaustive turf war against a powerful Proudhonist faction in an attempt to make Marxism the International's official creed. But Marx was now facing an altogether more tenacious opponent.

  It was as if Michael Bakunin had been genetically engineered to infuriate Marx and Engels: of high birth, raffishly charismatic, romantic, impetuous and, worst of all, Russian, he was an intellectual heavyweight with sharp organizational abilities. Unsurprisingly, he has earned the affection of twentieth-century historians and intellectuals – from E. H. Carr to Isaiah Berlin to Tom Stoppard (who is notably generous towards him and fellow Russian exile Alexander Herzen in The Coast of Utopia trilogy) – all bewitched by his fairy-tale life story. Engels had last met Bakunin in the lecture halls of 1840 Berlin where they both sat, with the other Young Hegelians, hectoring poor old Schelling. He was in Paris in 1848 and t
hen Dresden in 1849, manning the barricades alongside Richard Wagner as they attempted to install a revolutionary government. However, Bakunin failed to flee in time when the Saxon troops turned up: arrested in Chemnitz, he was held in jail before being handed over to the Austrian authorities (who wanted him for inciting the Czechs) who chained him to the wall of Olmütz fortress before handing him on to the Russians. His next place of rest was St Petersburg's notoriously barbaric Peter and Paul fortress – where his health deteriorated sharply – until a change of Tsar and entreaties from his well-connected family secured him exile for life in Siberia. But the dozy officialdom of northern Siberia was no match for Bakunin: by the spring of 1861 he was away to the mouth of the Amur River and thence, from ship to ship, to Yokohama and San Francisco. Having diddled an English clergyman out of $300, Bakunin made swift passage across America and, by December 1861, he was back in London knocking on Herzen's door.24

  Bakunin's extended incarceration meant that he had avoided all the reactionary fervour of post-1848 politics and returned to political life with his revolutionary zeal undimmed. However, he was now more sceptical of the national bourgeois revolutions which had characterized 1848–9 and, like many in communist circles, concluded that the next stage of the struggle would have to be international in character. He established, first of all, a League of Peace and Freedom and then his own International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, but his mind's eye was always set on infiltrating the International Working Men's Association itself. If Bakunin had been nothing more than a magnetic personality, he could have been swiftly despatched; what was lethal was the strength of his ideas. His doctrine of anarchism was oriented around a highly attractive notion of total individual freedom (but not Stirner-like egoism): ‘ life”, in Bakunin's sense, is an endless, indefatigable, endeavour towards freedom for every individual, every community, and the whole human race’.25 He predicted in Marx and Engels's communism the prospect of a state authoritarianism as suffocating and dictatorial as the existing bourgeois iniquities. ‘I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society,’ Bakunin wrote, ‘because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of authority and patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men, has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted, exploited, and corrupted them.’26 His constituency was the industrial age's social residuum – the paupers, peasantry and lumpenproletariat – who would never be served well by the centralized logic of scientific socialism. Instead, Bakunin's anarchist vision was of a society organized into small autonomous communes with absolute freedom amongst the members. What that signified, in transitional terms, was a commitment immediately to abolishing the authority of the capitalist state – whereas Marx and Engels thought the state would dissolve of itself (‘wither away’) following the social revolution and temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. With typically Russian bravado, Bakunin was making the putschist mistake of wanting impractical political change when the material, socio-economic preconditions were not yet ripe.

  Nevertheless, his dreamy promise of human freedom – which, just to add to Engels's fury, also encompassed the pan-Slav peoples – had its admirers. As his Alliance of Socialist Democracy picked up followers in Switzerland, Spain and Italy, he grandiosely proposed a merger with the far more powerful International. Engels the party organizer instantly spied the scam: ‘It is clear as daylight that the International cannot get involved in this fraud. There would be two General Councils and even two Congresses: this would be a state within the state and right from the start, conflict would break out…’ But he warned Marx to play his hand carefully, since ‘if you violently oppose this Russian intrigue, you will unnecessarily arouse the very numerous – particularly in Switzerland – political philistines among the journeymen, and harm the International. With a Russian… one must never lose one's TEMPER.’ That was not to suggest that Engels was ever soft on the man he called ‘that fat Bakunin’. ‘If this damned Russian really thinks of intriguing his way to the top of the workers' movement, then the time has come to give him once and for all what he deserves.’27

  From his move down to London and election on to the General Council, Engels – who always liked to lead a hunt – propelled himself to the forefront of the struggle against Bakuninism and its attempts to undermine the International as a centralized, policy-making organization. The anarchists’ ambition was to run it on purposefully antiauthoritarian lines as ‘a simple office for correspondence and statistics’. To the military-minded Engels, a man whose sense of discipline crossed imperceptibly from personal to party matters, this self-regarding idealism threatened to undo the entire communist cause. Moreover, he regarded Bakunin's counter-vision as a direct affront to Marx's authority and an alternative power base that had to be smothered at birth. So from his elegant, marble and pine study at No. 122, with its handily placed pillar-box over the road, Engels became the global hub for every manner of Machiavellian procedural manoeuvre against the anarchists. All the tricks he had learned running the Paris Communist League were now deployed against the Bakuninist insurgency in Spain and Italy. In a celebrated essay for the Italian paper Almanacco Republicano, ‘On Authority’ (which Lenin much admired), he confronted the anarchist farrago by reminding his readers of the principle which he and Marx had first outlined in The German Ideology, that class struggle was an arduous, ruthless task requiring tight discipline and organization in the face of the ruling elite. Revolution, he now announced, was ‘certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all’.28 To Paul Lafargue in Madrid, where Marx's son-in-law was serving his apprenticeship at the Spanish International, he wrote that ‘I should very much like to know whether the good Bakunin would entrust his portly frame to a railway carriage if that railway were administered on the principle that no one need be at his post unless he chose to submit to the authority of the regulations… Just try abolishing “all authority, even by consent,” among sailors on board a ship!’29 In the wake of the Commune's disintegration, where the terrible absence of an organized workers’ party had doomed the revolution to failure, this anarchist self-indulgence was shortsighted and politically dangerous. ‘Just now, when we have to defend ourselves with all the means at our disposal, the proletariat is told to organize not in accordance with requirements of the struggle it is daily and hourly compelled to wage, but according to the vague notions of a future society entertained by some dreamers.’30

  The animosity came to a head at the 1872 Hague Congress where Marx and Engels used foul means and fair to purge Bakunin and his Swiss followers. With the support of Paul Lafargue, Engels led the prosecution of Bakunin as both a terrorist provocateur, happy to use the services of Russian gangsters, and as the member of a wider political conspiracy ‘got up to hamper the proletarian movement’. On the last day of the congress a vote was called. ‘Then I saw Engels,’ the German social democrat Theodor Cuno wrote. ‘He was sitting to the left of the presiding officer, smoking, writing, and eagerly listening to the speakers. When I introduced myself to him he looked up from his paper, and seizing my hands he joyfully said: “Everything goes well, we have a big majority.” ’31 By twenty-seven votes to seven, Bakunin was out. But it was a Pyrrhic victory since Marx and Engels had already stunned the congress by announcing the evacuation of the International's General Council to New York City (where it petered out four years later). Marx claimed he was exhausted by the endless European politicking; Engels played up the prospect of a fresh start in a virgin political landscape full of proletarian promise. In truth, it was an admission of unexpected political defeat: the cancer of anarchism had eaten into the body politic of the International and the entire orga
nization needed to be dissolved and founded again from first principles. Marx and Engels were never quite such successful political operators as they thought.

  Fat Bakunin was not the only charismatic ideologue Marx and Engels had to face down: the exotic figure of Ferdinand Lassalle proved a further rival for the hearts and minds of the European workers’ movement. Another product of the Young Hegelian stud at Berlin, Lassalle was a philosopher and activist given over to flamboyant displays of chivalry – such as his decade-long advocacy of the divorce case of Countess von Hatzfeldt. Unlike Engels, this son of a self-made Jewish tailor had never quite got the romance of ‘Young Germany’ out of his system. After the failure of '48, from his box at the Berlin opera Lassalle was involved with various proletarian parties before establishing in 1863 the General Association of German Workers (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein). Never a man over-burdened by crises of confidence, allegations of misappropriated funds and dictatorial treatment of colleagues dogged Lassalle wherever he pitched his political tent. ‘It would be a pity about the fellow because of his great ability, but these goings-on are really too bad,’ Engels wrote to Marx in 1856 after the Dusseldorf communists complained about Lassalle's high-handed manner. ‘He was always a man one had to keep a devilish sharp eye on and as a real Jew from the Slav border was always [willing] to exploit anyone for his own private ends on party pretexts.’32 Marx was inclined to be lenient since Lassalle was helping him to find a publisher for Das Kapital, but Engels fell out permanently with him over the 1859 Franco-Austrian war: whereas Engels placed the struggle against Bonaparte above all else, Lassalle feared an Austrian victory would only accelerate nationalistic reaction in Germany.