So far, the picture is unambiguous, and it is the same picture as the one in the Manifesto. The overabundance of capitalism was producing the poverty of the workers. Ricardo’s iron law of wages applied. But the dialectical turn of the article comes right at this point. A ray of light breaks in: positive things happened between 1848 and 1864! The first was the implementation of the ten-hour workday. The demand met with bitter opposition from the middle class. Marx uses that precise term – ‘middle class’ – that is, not ‘bourgeoisie’ as he did in 1848, and not ‘capitalist’ as he often otherwise did during the 1860s and 1870s. This is certainly not by accident. The term can also include important parts of the petty bourgeoisie, of the smaller tradesman type. The spokesmen for this middle class – Andres Ure, Nassau W. Senior, and others – proclaimed that the ten-hour workday would sound the death-knell of British industry. But now the legislation was in force, and the wheels were spinning faster than ever.
The other positive change that Marx placed even greater importance on was the cooperative movement, which constituted a grand experiment whose value could not be overestimated. If the workers themselves owned and ran their factories, not only slave labour but also wage labour would disappear and be replaced by ‘associated labour’ where each and every one toiled ‘with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart’.17
But as long as the cooperative movement is reduced to its own forces, it cannot keep step with the formation of private monopolies. Intelligent supervisors had shown this back in the 1850s. To succeed, the movement had to develop on a national scale. But both landowners and capitalists were trying to put obstacles in the path of such a development.
It was therefore the great duty of the working class to conquer political power. The workers had natural strength in their numbers, but the strength only becomes effective if the many individuals collaborate and at the same time are guided by knowledge. Previous experience showed how badly it could go if the ‘bond of brotherhood’ uniting workers from different countries was held in contempt. Marx concluded with the same slogan as the Manifesto: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’
There are several things to dwell upon in this text. The importance attached to the union struggle is greater here than in anything else he had written up to that point. The struggle over the length of the working day returns in Capital, the first volume of which was first published in 1867. But in the Inaugural Address, its significance is programmatically emphasized. At the same time, he emphasized that it was thanks to the legislation that the shortened working day could be pushed through. This line of thinking returns in regards to the cooperative movement. Only on a national scale would it be able to outdistance privately owned businesses. For that, the workers’ collective political activity was required.
One of the keywords of the text is ‘association’. The word is a central concept in nineteenth-century political thinking. The opposite was the compulsory communities that individuals were incorporated into, regardless of their wishes. The traditional family was one such; marriage was in principle indissoluble, and children were bound to the parents until the age of adulthood. The idea of the association was also incompatible with the constraint of the guilds, with village communities, and with forced affiliation to the church. Serfdom and slavery constituted the absolute opposites. In the association, both liberals and socialists found a key to a new and better society. The early socialists went further. People should have the right to construct their own societies from the bottom up. Adventurous groups left the Europe of compulsion to build a phalanstère in the style of Fourier, or an Icaria as Cabet outlined it, somewhere in America. It should be free to each person to join the collective, or to leave it.
The International itself was an association: the International Workingmen’s Association. Free adherence was a fundamental principle. If someone did not feel at home in the organization, they only had to leave it. The principles of military cadres were foreign to it.
And now, Marx had written in the founding document itself that the labour of the future would be organized in accordance with the principle of association. Gone are the individual owners – the capitalists – who purchase labour time from the worker, whose only choice is starvation or toil for someone else’s profit. In the cooperative, it is – as the word implies – cooperation that is the essential thing: cooperation among equals.18
The text contains nothing more than a faint outline. What is written there can appeal to anarchists to a great degree. The only difference is that Marx says that the association of the workers – and thereby the victory of the producers’ cooperative – must occur on a national scale, which is the same thing as saying that the state must be used as a means of force. The difference between Marx’s solution and Bakunin’s would soon have fateful consequences for the future of the International.
There is yet another element in the Inaugural Address that requires commentary. Marx wrote that the workers could only conquer political power in cooperation with each other, and if they are guided by knowledge. He thus in all likelihood has in mind a social theory that also provides guidelines for political action. This is the very thing he had in readiness, and it is what made him feel he was suited to write the Address. But what is important is that he did not say that the workers should be guided by those who possess knowledge. He was, as we have seen, very consistent on this point.
At the same time, there is a problem. Marx would be extremely active in the work of the International the whole time. He provided criticism and advice, and was, as always, prone to polemics. He strongly – sometimes ruthlessly – opposed strategies that clearly deviated from his own. The tone and the Inaugural Address, on the other hand, is mild and conciliatory. Here, Marx was not a man of conflict, but of cooperation.
An absence on one point can be noted in his text, just as in his later contributions to the meetings of the International. He used the traditional word ‘brotherhood’ for international solidarity among workers. This is the old term from the French Revolution – indirectly, in fact, from early Christianity.
The International would otherwise signify the breakthrough of the newer word ‘solidarity’. Above all, it was Johann Philipp Becker who was the successful driving force here. Solidarity, he said was ‘Brüderlichkeit der Tat’ (the brotherhood of action) that should not be confused with the bourgeois ‘Brüderlichkeit der Phrasen’ (the brotherhood of phrases).19 It is unlikely that Marx would have anything to object to with the word ‘solidarity’. But it would not be part of his normal vocabulary.
Closely linked to the Inaugural Address are the provisional statutes for the International, of which Marx was in all essentials the author. The main ideas are the same as those in the former text. The workers themselves will lead their struggle for liberation. The goal is to abolish class rule. This requires the workers’ economic liberation from a subjugation that constitutes the foundation of ‘all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence’. Liberation is neither a local nor a national task, but implies a social transformation that has to embrace all countries. This in turn requires ‘concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries’.
Marx also said that the workers’ movement had again begun to be a tangible force in the industrial countries of Europe, and arouse both hope and the memory of earlier mistakes. The International Workingmen’s Association had assembled in London to fulfil these hopes and to frustrate these fears.
The document concludes with ten points that constitute the actual statutes. In the original proposal that Marx worked up, there were forty such points, but he let the red pencil pass over most of them. It was established that the first conference would be held in Belgium, and that it would be populated by delegates of the workers’ associations that had joined in the meantime. Further, it was said that the Central Committee would have its seat in London, serving as a node between the organised workers of various countries, informing itself of their situations, and
taking up issues of common interest – including conflicts and controversies. Finally, it was emphasized that although the International served ‘fraternal cooperation’, the various ‘workingmen’s societies’ that had joined would retain their existing organization.20
Marx was satisfied with his efforts, as indicated by the letter to Engels that has already been discussed. His proposals were approved by the subcommittee he was a part of. He acknowledged that he was forced to make certain additions. Before the 10 points, he had to include two sentences on duties and rights, and another about ‘truth, morality, and justice’. But, he added reassuringly, ‘they are so placed that they can do no harm’.21
It is easy to find the sentences Marx referred to. It says that the International and all the associations linked to it fight for truth, justice, and morals both in their mutual relations and in encounters with all other people without regard to skin colour, faith, or nationality. Further on, it is established that rights and obligations hang together; duties are inevitably part of the rights and vice versa.
Marx’s aversion to such declarations did not mean that he disliked the ideals expressed in and through them. He maintained, on the other hand, that they were ineffectual in class society, and that additionally they could lead people into a false understanding that freedom had already been won when lofty words of this type were proclaimed as the guiding star of the state without anything being done about the oppression of workers and thus the greatest injustice in society. It is only through a social revolution that justice, which is not only empty talk, can be won.
In his response, Engels expressed his joy over Marx again coming in contact with people of this type. But he was pessimistic regarding the future of the International. It would surely be split ‘very soon’ between ‘those who are bourgeois in the thinking and those who are proletarian’ as soon as their positions were clarified, he said. In the German original, he used the pair of opposites ‘theoretisch bürgerlich’ (theoretically bourgeois) and ‘theoretisch proletarisch’ (theoretically proletarian).22
Marx tried to reassure his friend. The matter was not so complicated when it had to do only with workers. The only ‘literary man’ (or intellectual, as it might be said today) in the society was the Englishman Peter Fox, a writer and agitator, and he had written an appreciative note about the Address to Marx.
It is obvious that the International had already become a matter very dear to Marx’s heart. For the sake of the organization, he was willing to shelve old conflicts. Here he met pupils of Proudhon, whose doctrine he had fought so persistently for many years. Others believed, like Louis Auguste Blanqui, that a revolution could best be realized if a group of enlightened and single-minded revolutionaries carried out a Putsch – a coup – in the hopes that the masses would soon follow in revolutionary frenzy. Marx had dismissed Blanqui as ‘bourgeois’ – a strong word in his mouth (see above, p. 320), but he was now ready to cooperate with the bourgeois adepts. Even more remarkable was that he could get on with Italians who followed in the footsteps of Giuseppe Mazzini and thus the radical nationalistic movement La Giovine Italia (Young Italy). Marx could appreciate the Italians’ rhetorical ability, but strove for an entirely different type of society than Mazzini. Their personal encounters in London had not turned out well. But now Marx rejoiced over Mazzini’s followers signing the texts; his satisfied comment is a hotchpotch sentence typical of his correspondence with Engels: ‘Mazzini is rather disgusted, dass seine Leute mitunterzeichnen, mais il faut faire bonne mine à mauvais jeu’ (Mazzini is rather disgusted that his people are among the signatories, but one has to grin and bear it).23
Value, Price, and Profit
After his initial successes, Marx became a diligent writer in the name of the International. He wrote to Abraham Lincoln with an eloquent assurance of support from the workers in the war against the slave owners; when Lincoln was assassinated, he authored a letter of condolence to Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson, also promising wholehearted support from the International.24 He also wrote a number of other, smaller things. But his most important contribution during the first period of the International was a few lectures he held for the other members of the Central Committee.
The background was that another member of the Central Committee, John Weston – a carpenter and follower of legendary socialist Richard Owen – made claims in the Bee-Hive, a trade union weekly, that the unions’ struggle for pay increases was futile, and was in fact detrimental to the workers’ cause. Marx offered to take up the subject in a few lectures. They must have been immensely entertaining. On two occasions, Marx lectured from the manuscript that contains just over seventy pages in the Swedish translation.
But Marx was in his element; it is once more a brilliant text. It is also marked by a mild and conciliatory tone. Weston, the subject of the criticism, is called ‘citizen Weston’ in the lecture (it is the French revolutionary form of address, citoyen, that was still being used in the International) and is treated in an extremely considerate manner.
In many respects, the lecture can be seen as a summary of essential lines of thought in the first volume of Capital. The distinction between (concrete) labour and labour power is clearly laid out. Perhaps in consideration of his many British listeners, Marx names Thomas Hobbes as the pioneer of the concept of labour power in an entirely different way than in Capital, where the Englishman is only found in a footnote. Marx emphasized the statement that a person is worth the price ‘as would be given for the Use of his Power’.
In Capital, Marx had problems laying out the relationship between exchange value and price. In the second edition, he solved it through a clear distinction between value and exchange value, fixing the latter as equal to price. In the lecture, he manages the same difficulty with the sentence: ‘Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value.’
As he did in Capital, he got onto the subject of original (‘primitive’) accumulation. It should actually be called original expropriation, he said here. What was actually happening was that the link between the workers and their tools was being severed. It was an idea he had been faithful to ever since the Manuscripts twenty years earlier. Profit is the unpaid labour that fattens both the landowner and the capitalist.
Marx views the collective struggle of the workers for pay increases and shorter work times in the light of this fundamental injustice. The workers were only trying to set limits to their exploitation by capital. The other side always has a counter-manoeuvre: shorter work time is met by increased work tempo.
The successful campaign for a ten-hour workday had two conditions. The first was the unceasing resistance of the workers, the other was the legislation (Marx did not even mention Parliament, the institution responsible for the legislation). Trade unions, he continued, work well as resistance against the autocratic ways of capital. But the goal is clear: ‘Abolition of the wages system’.
The presentation concluded without more detailed information on how this goal was to be achieved. Perhaps the reason was that Marx knew that his listeners were divided on the point. But perhaps he considered that he had already said enough on the subject in the Address. He had already achieved what he wanted to with the lecture, namely to outline his own theory and clarify his understanding of the task and significance of the trade unions.25
The lecture turns up a few times in the correspondence between Marx and Engels. In an initial letter, Marx wrote that he was struggling with differential calculus but also mentioned Weston’s article in the Bee-Hive, which had received support from another Englishman on the Central Committee. People were of course waiting for him to respond, Marx said, but for him ‘writing more of my book’ was more important. That was what Engels wanted to hear. But barely a month later Marx had nonetheless held the first part of the lecture, and the second part was waiting only a few days later. In the first part, he had responded to Weston’s ‘foolishness’ (Blödsinn), he said, whereas the second part was a theoretical exposition
.
It is striking how differently Marx spoke about Weston in his lecture and in his letter. In the lecture, his tone towards the carpenter was friendly and considerate; in the letter to Engels, Weston’s ideas are mentioned only with contempt. But the letters between Marx and Engels are often like that: two rascals nonchalantly throwing insults about.
The most important thing in the letter was something else: ‘people’ wanted to print his lecture. Marx was hesitant. On the one hand, he would come into contact with people such as John Stuart Mill and Edward Spencer Beesly. On the other hand, the presentation – which was relatively popular – anticipated many of the new things his book contained. Was it advisable to publicize the results of his research this way? He appealed to Engels’s more dissociated judgement.26
Engels’s response was a resolute ‘no’. Marx would reap no laurels in a polemic with ‘Mr Weston’, ‘and it would certainly not make a good début in English economic literature’. No, Marx should complete his book – and if he was not finished with it by 1 September, he would owe Engels twelve bottles of wine (this was written on 15 July).27
We do not know what happened with the bottles of wine; Capital, at least, was not ready by the appointed date. On the other hand, it can be said with certainty that Engels’s advice was extraordinarily unwise. Had Marx’s lectures been printed, it would have meant an easily accessible introduction to his theories in English. All the willing readers who had difficulty penetrating Capital would have avoided the detour through Engels’s later writings and would have been able to go to Marx himself. Weston would perhaps have been given a more central role than his ideas in the Bee-Hive deserved, but what of it? For a workers’ movement, it can hardly be a disadvantage that a carpenter gets attention.
A World to Win Page 64