A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  13

  Marx the Politician

  Karl Marx kept his roles as social researcher and politician strictly separate. Rarely is this so clear as in a letter he wrote to the English professor of history Edward Spencer Beesly in 1871. Beesly was an acquaintance of his, and additionally a man who published articles on subjects close to Marx’s heart. But he was also a positivist in the style of the times – that is, a follower of the doctrines of French philosopher Auguste Comte. In his letter, Marx wrote that he himself ‘as a party man’ had a thoroughly hostile attitude towards ‘Comtism’ and that ‘as a scholar’ (als Mann der Wissenschaft) he had a very low opinion of it. Beesly, however, constituted an exception. He depicted the historical turning points in the history of England and France not as a sectarian, but as a ‘historian in the best sense’.1 The position of the opposites is clear: party man or scientist, sectarian or historian. Marx differentiated between research and politics.

  That alone is reason enough to examine his more pronounced political work during the 1860s, 70s, and 80s in a chapter by itself. Politics for Marx was not only an emanation or an application of the social theory he was developing in Capital. It was, to be sure, deeply influenced by the development of the forces of production and the struggle between capital and labour. But politics is also an arena where people’s desires and fears, their ambitions and dreams, their friendship and hate find direct expression. Politics is additionally marked by institutions and factions, traditions and fads.

  Marx would play an important political role during several periods in his life. For a long time, it was primarily as a journalist, in his early youth with the Rheinische Zeitung and then during the revolutionary years of 1848–49 as the editor-in-chief for Neue Rheinische Zeitung. That kind of activity decreased later. It is true that in his articles for the New York Daily Tribune he took up political subjects of the greatest immediate interest, but his readers were on the other side of the ocean and entirely too distant for him to directly wish to influence them. The economic crisis of 1856–57 gave him great hopes of a more thorough revolution than the one that broke out in 1848. But nothing happened; by all appearances, this very non-event played an important role in Marx’s life. The euphoria from the time of the Grundrisse was gone. The clearly more limited work with Capital now began. But it had barely managed to get its outlines before Marx broke off to write his thick pamphlet Herr Vogt, which was published in December 1860. In a way, this book signifies a low point in his political life. He stood outside all political groups, and was fighting for his own honour.

  It is all the more surprising, then, that in 1864, at first hesitatingly and half unwillingly and then with mounting enthusiasm, he got into the work of forming the first International Workingmen’s Association. He really did not have the time; the work on Capital was in a hectic phase, and Engels up in Manchester was sceptical towards the association. But Marx would soon be the most important inspiration for what posterity would call the First International (which here will simply be called the International). When Engels moved to London in 1870, he too joined the leadership. Marx would get to display characteristics he is not usually associated with, namely the ability to bring conflicting wills into a common project. But it was not the first time he was a forger of compromises; he had been so back when he was editor-in-chief of Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In the International, his patience gave out only when the pugnacious Mikhail Bakunin began challenging him on the ideological plane.

  The feud between Marx and Bakunin would gradually split the organization. But before that, something happened that Marx did not expect. After the defeat of France by Bismarck’s Prussia, an uprising broke out in Paris and the Paris Commune was declared. The intent was to continue along the radical line that the original Paris Commune had followed, above all between 1792 and 1795. The new Commune held out for two months, and made Marx famous as the brains behind it. He was now beloved and hated across all of Europe. But he did not have any direct relation to the Commune. On the contrary, the Commune posed an important challenge to his political thinking.

  Political developments in Germany played a particular role in his life. Ferdinand Lassalle was the first person there to take the initiative for a political party that could be called socialist, but the relationship between Lassalle and Marx was full of contradictions, to say the least. Gradually, another competing party with leaders who stood closer to Marx was formed. In the International, Marx nevertheless tried to keep good relations with both social democratic parties which in 1875, about a year after the dissolution of the International, came together as the single Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAPD) at a conference held in the city of Gotha. Marx severely criticized the new party’s platform; this criticism became one of his most influential political documents.

  In his later years, Marx would become fascinated by political developments in Russia. The ‘Russian road’ that Teodor Shanin talks about in his 1983 book Late Marx and the Russian Road, became a fateful one.2 It influenced the interpretation of what happened in Russia in 1917.

  There are a number of more fundamental questions regarding Marx’s efforts as a politician that ultimately must be asked. How did Marx mean his political proclamations to be taken? Did he issue prognoses – that is, did he make predictions about what would happen? Or did they concern rather a normative programme, in which he wrote about what seemed to him to be both a possible and a desirable development?

  These are questions we have already touched upon in talking about the Manifesto, and now they are important regarding his contribution to the work of the International as well as his commentary on the Paris Commune.

  Another complex of questions concerns the political ideals he developed at that time. He often spoke warmly about democracy, above all in the form of a universal right to vote. After an absence of many years, the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ turns up again in his vocabulary in connection with the Paris Commune of 1871. Do democracy and dictatorship not exclude each other? Was Marx developing a more reformist strategy before 1871? Or did he remain a revolutionary straight through?

  Herr Vogt

  In early February 1860, Marx wrote to Engels that he was going to aim a devastating blow at Carl Vogt. ‘The defensive does not suit our purpose.’3 Engels had no objections in his response, and thus did not advise his friend to stick to his work with Capital. On the other hand, his Russian friend Nikolai Ivanovich Sasonov did. Marx reproduced a letter that Sasonov had written to him, advising him instead to continue with the ‘admirable work as soon as possible’.4 But Marx did not want to hear it. He was firmly resolved to neutralize Vogt and exonerate himself from the accusations directed towards him.

  In his time, Carl Vogt was a famous and widely read scientist. But he was also a politician, and as such an opponent of Marx. These were no small matters Vogt had charged Marx with. He maintained that everyone who came into close contact with Herr Doktor Marx sooner or later fell into the clutches of the police. In short, Marx was a police agent.

  To posterity, the accusation may seem bizarre. We know that Prussian police spies were on Marx’s heels back during his time in Paris. They visited him regularly in London, writing reports about his conditions at home. But they did not know that on the Continent. Vogt was trying to make his accusations plausible above all through the ‘Communist trial’ in Cologne – the one that Marx had written so vividly about, though anonymously. Was not everyone who got into trouble there closely associated with Marx? And had Marx himself not gone free?

  Marx thought about bringing a lawsuit against Vogt, or more precisely against the newspaper the accusations had been reproduced in, the National-Zeitung in Berlin. He wrote his petitions according to the rules of the art, but the Prussian court refused to take up his case. It was only then that he wrote his far-too-thick book at breakneck speed.

  It is a massive text with many disparate elements. There is a long letter here from the brush maker, polymath, and socialis
t newspaper editor Johann Philipp Becker who said he knew Vogt personally, but not Marx. Becker unhesitatingly took sides with Marx, expressing his dismay over ‘the frivolous and unscrupulous manner in which Vogt has entered the lists on this occasion’.5

  Marx also provides a small history of the Bund der Kommunisten, emphasizing that he had kept out of all political associations since the Bund had dissolved. His only efforts had consisted of holding free lectures in the German Workers’ Association in London. On the twentieth anniversary of the Association, the eighty members present had unanimously decided to reject Vogt’s slander.6

  Marx wanted to get his book – or ‘pamphlet’, as he called it in his correspondence with Engels – out quickly and decided to publish it in London with Albert Petsch, a German publisher in exile. Engels warned in the most resolute terms against hiring an exile publisher; a book like that would go nowhere. But Marx was firm, and Herr Vogt joined the ranks of his writings that remained largely unread both in his time and in posterity. As regards Herr Vogt in particular, one can scarcely feel sorry about the obscurity. The indignation it expresses is understandable. But nearly 300 pages of rather spontaneous text? Hardly so.7

  Marx quickly moved on to more productive undertakings. He left Herr Vogt behind him. He would reap one triumph from it, however, a decade later. In his book, he had levelled a counter-accusation, claiming that Vogt was a paid agent for Napoleon III. When the emperor fell and his archive was opened, it turned out that a certain ‘Vogt’ was found on the list of imperial payments. It was almost impossible that the name could refer to anyone other than Carl Vogt.8

  The International

  In the substantial literature on Marx, there are numerous monographs on his political thought and political activity. A well-known example is Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri’s 1968 work The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, in which the author asserts that there is a tension in Marx’s writings between his conviction about an immediately impending revolution and the better-grounded idea that history is a longer process in which, for example, fully developed free trade is a precondition for the transition to a socialist society.9

  Doubtless the most well-balanced modern monograph on Marx the politician is Wolfgang Schieder’s 1991 work Karl Marx als Politiker. In it, Schieder points out that in his time, Marx was chiefly known for his political efforts. Posterity may read him for the sake of Capital, the Grundrisse, or the youthful Manuscripts. That same posterity also tends to see what he did in 1848–49 or in the International as the outflow of his social theories. In the Soviet tradition this was officially so, but the determined opponents of everything he did and stood for also agreed.

  In his own time, however, Marx was almost exclusively known as a politician. It is true that his efforts were limited to two periods; Schieder talks about the years 1847–52 and 1864–72. He was nevertheless politically more active than any other political thinker in the nineteenth century.10

  His most important efforts concerned the International Workingmen’s Association. His first reaction to the invitations he received to the constituent assembly was hesitant. In Herr Vogt, he had stressed that he had kept himself out of politics for several years. When a Frenchman by the name of Victor Le Lubez encouraged him to participate, he did not react to it. It was only when the English union leader William Randal Cremer contacted him that he yielded. He described the course of events itself in a letter to Engels. Cremer wanted to have a few Germans there. Marx proposed his friend, the tailor Johann Georg Eccarius, but also slipped into the constituent meeting himself ‘in a non-speaking capacity’. He knew that this time, significant people were involved in the new project. That is why he could break his ‘usual standing rule to decline such invitations’.11

  Even if Marx had been politically inactive for several years, the idea of a grander project was not unfamiliar at the time. A letter to his old friend, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, from 1860 testifies to this. The Communist League was precisely nothing, one association among a hundred others, he said. The aim had to be set on a ‘party in the broad historical sense’.12

  Party formations in the modern European sense did not yet exist at the time (their start in fact took place with various social democratic and socialist parties, but Marx was not directly involved in their creation). What peradventure were called parties had up to then been more or less temporary fighting or collaborative organizations, or quite simply voting communities in decision-making conventions. Often, people spoke about associations rather than parties.

  But Marx obviously had something grander in mind in his letter to Freiligrath. The truly historical party is rooted in the class; in comparison with that, the Communist League was only an episode. According to Marx, it is the social development of the class that is the fundamental precondition for it to be able to manifest itself as a political party in a deeper sense. The working class must thus have achieved both sufficient proportions and internal stability before it can support a powerful political party.

  This was a magnificent concept of the party. Marx also had to put up with the fact that people often spoke about ‘Die Partei Marx’ – the Marx party. The concept was born during the Cologne trials back in 1852, when Marx’s closest followers were on trial. It then hung on more as a designation for those who completely embraced his theories than the name of a concrete political party. He often acted in a way that could provide reason for such a term; he distinguished sharply between those who were faithful to him or not.13

  As we have seen, Marx was careful in his own political activity to point out that the liberation of the working class must be its own work. But with ‘the Marx party’, the idea that Marx and his followers would direct the struggle for liberation was a natural one. With its careful division of followers and dissenters, he made it easier for such an understanding.

  From the beginning, the International was a British and French idea. Napoleon III had given permission for a delegation of French working-class leaders to travel to London to meet a number of union leaders. The French and the British wanted to find a form for lasting and profound collaboration between worker organizations of various types. Representatives from several other countries, most of them refugees in London like Marx, were also important.14

  The International was thus to be a collaborative body. A Central Committee was formed, consisting of twenty English, ten German, nine French, six Italian, two Polish, and two Swiss workers. Marx was one of the members, and he was also elected to a subcommittee that would propose a manifesto and regulations. The self-evident centre of the work was London, but the annual congresses would be held in other locations.

  From the very beginning, Marx was tolerant in his assessment of the men he met in his work with the International. He described the leader of the French delegation, Henri-Louis Tolain, in his letter to Engels as a ‘thoroughly nice fellow’ (sehr netter Karl), and the other French members were also characterized as ‘nice’.15 It is then revealed that Tolain was a follower of Proudhon, whom Marx usually commented so negatively on; even the others stood quite far from Marx in their opinions. Incidentally, Marx was rather unknown – in some cases, forgotten – in France at that time. The British knew more about him but also had other aims than he did; a few were old Chartists, others followers of Owen’s ideas regarding an ideal society.

  Marx missed several of the programme committee meetings. But when he got to see a proposal he found objectionable, he acted resolutely and invited the key people home for a visit. After a sound mangling that lasted till one o’clock in the morning, they reached an agreement on the rules for the International. After that, Marx wrote an address ‘to the working classes’ (as they were still called) on his own initiative, trimming down the number of rules. His proposals were accepted, with some interesting and significant amendments. Along with the rules he suggested, Marx’s proposals – which came to be called the Inaugural Address – comprise some of the most important political documents in his
hand. There is thus good reason to dwell upon them.

  The Address

  The text Marx presented to his newfound friends is a rhetorical masterwork of barely ten pages. First, the author depicted the contradictory development between 1848 and 1864 – that is, between the years of revolution that were also the moments of the Manifesto. What a fantastic development of industry and commerce there had been! The words vibrate with the author’s own enthusiasm in the face of the wonders of technology, the enormous feats of machinery, and the ability of world commerce to make neighbours of distant continents.16

  And all at the same time! At the hub of this development, in Great Britain, countless workers were suffering from destitution. Objective reports testified to poverty, malnutrition, and misery. In 1864, during ‘the millennium of free trade’, it turned out that craftsmen in London were eating worse than the poorest agricultural workers. For someone preaching ‘a fool’s paradise’ not purely out of self-interest, it was clear that ‘no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrial masses’. Quite the contrary – the development of the productive forces of labour would lead to deepening social rifts.