A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  But what can be said about his words on the Commune as a promising start to a social revolution? Here there is more that squares with his deepest convictions. He expressed the ideas on free association of people in many other places. His views on politics as a form of the real content of society – humanity’s metabolism with nature – are unmistakably his own.

  It is clear that the Commune affected him deeply, and in certain important aspects actually changed his convictions – at least for the time being. Above all, he now saw bloody conflicts as a part of social development that would be hard to avoid. His thought that the Commune was only the first of a series of increasingly far-reaching class struggles contrasted with his earlier warnings against establishing a commune in Paris. It is completely possible that he was influenced by Engels, who was growing even closer to him now that they both lived in London and Engels was actively involved in the innermost circles of the International. Engels, as we know, was a man with military ideas and ideals, in contrast to the eternal civilian Marx.

  One question the reader gets no response to is how political development as Marx outlined it here relates to the concentration of capital. Would the future not also contain ever greater businesses – though communally owned – alongside all the communes? How would this affect the communes? It is clear that the Commune had become extraordinarily important for Marx. It is nonetheless risky to fully identify his political ideas with what he expressed in his letters and addresses about the striking and harrowing months in Paris in the spring of 1871. We will soon see why.

  The Dissolution of the International

  After the Commune, the centres of power – with Bismarck at their head – regarded Marx as the most dangerous man in Europe. Marx was not displeased with the role after years in the background. At the same time, political problems were piling up for him. In the International, the British delegation had set the tone; this also helped him into the central position he obtained in the organization. But the British, without exception, thought poorly of the Paris Commune. Systematic union work stood at the centre for them, and, in that light, the French experiment appeared to be senselessly rash and fundamentally hopeless.

  Marx estranged himself from the British with his address on the Commune, choosing instead to enter into competition with Bakunin and the anarchists. The anarchists argued that the Commune showed they were right in relation to Marx about the path to a free and equal society. The spontaneity in the process spoke to their advantage. At the same time, neither Marx nor Bakunin had counted on such a social experiment having the misery and suffering of war as its immediate basis, but the anonymous shots from the embittered soldiers who killed two generals became the starting signal for the Commune.

  In the words of Wolfgang Schieder, Marx’s address – held when the commune had already been crushed – was one of his ‘politische Meisterlösungen’ (political master solutions).57 Marx interpreted the Commune with its own categories – the Communards thus did not annihilate state power, which the anarchists had as a goal, but fundamentally changed it for their own purposes. They did not seek to repeat the communal experiment of the 1790s – what Marx had warned against – but created something completely new that could be developed further in the future.

  But the anarchists were not convinced. On the contrary, they gained ground. The Italian and Spanish sections sided with Bakunin, and the Russians strengthened their position in France. Marx – with Engels at his side – sought to seize the initiative through a smaller conference in London in September 1871. Marx completely dominated it – according to a careful calculation, he spoke 100 times58 – and rode completely roughshod over his chief opponent, the Spaniard Anselmo Lorenzo, who stood very close to Bakunin. Marx behaved in a more conciliatory manner towards the Blanquist (and Communard) Édouard Vaillant, but did not accept the thesis that insurrection was the only way to go. No, Marx declared, parliamentarism was an alternative to revolutionary opposition.59

  This is a standpoint that does not emerge in the address on the Commune. But it is nonetheless probable that it lies closest to Marx’s actual political convictions at the time. By all appearances, he was quite disillusioned in his views on the International. In a letter to Danielson, he likened the organization to a prison. Jenny Marx told Liebknecht that her husband was upset about all the accusations after the Commune. Her letter in general is marked by a great melancholy, both her own and on behalf of Karl and the International. ‘Now I have grown too old to hope for much and the recent terrible events have completely shattered my peace of mind’, she wrote.60

  But one final battle still remained for the International. Marx and Engels both travelled to the Congress in The Hague in September 1872, the first and last of the International’s congresses that both participated in. Marx’s followers had a narrow majority over the anarchists, with Bakunin at their head. Their opponents could thus be thrown out of the International. But the victory was not worth much. Bakunin was able to quickly gather his troops into a counter-congress. Marx’s last desperate attempt was to move the centre of the International to New York. He had great confidence in the future of the workers’ movement in the United States, to be sure, but he undoubtedly had no illusions that the International would be able to attain its earlier position so far away from most of the associated workers’ organizations.61 In 1874, the International dissolved.

  The German Social Democrats

  It was only now that Marx seriously began occupying himself with the development of the workers’ movement in Germany. In his eyes, Germany had always lagged behind Great Britain, and was several steps behind France. The Germans had not even had their own bourgeois revolution.

  In the initial phase of the International, British trade union leaders had been his most important support. As a result of the Commune, France came into focus. But once the Commune had been crushed and its surviving activists forced into a bitter life as refugees in London, at the same time as Bakunin had attained decisive influence over the workers’ movement of southern Europe, the new German Reich appeared as the remaining alternative for Marx’s and Engels’s political involvement.

  There had been a growing German workers’ movement ever since the early 1860s in this new kingdom. Its pioneer was Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle was seven years younger than Marx and had much in common with him. Both had Jewish backgrounds, both studied in Berlin and were decisively influenced by Hegel’s thought, both stayed a few years in Paris, and both had a burning interest in Ancient Greece; Lassalle’s interest materialized in a two-volume work on Heraclitus and his philosophy.

  Both also had a great interest in literature. Marx had given up writing poetry early on in his youth, but Lassalle was more persistent. In 1859, he sent Marx a drama titled Franz von Sickingen after the German knight from the time of Luther who acquired great power and great wealth through various tricks. Lassalle was eager to get his older friend’s assessment of the document, and Marx wrote a proper review in his response.

  First came the praise: the construction was good, as was the plot (more than could be said about most modern German dramas, he added sourly). Reading it had quite simply livened him up. The iambs limped, to be sure, but that did not need to be a disadvantage. The tragic plot reminded him of the revolutionary party of 1848–49, which rightly came to grief. It was a worthy theme for a drama. But – and now came the objections – was the chosen subject really suitable for illustrating the current failures? The parallels stumbled. Franz von Sickingen had gone under because as a knight, he belonged to a social class on the decline. He only imagined that he was revolutionary. Marx also criticized the characteristics of the other characters in the play. Sickingen appeared entirely too abstract, and the rest of the cast devoted too much time to reflection. Lassalle’s unfortunate partiality for Schiller’s brooding heroes shone through. Marx ultimately toned the criticism down a bit by saying that his wife Jenny had enjoyed reading the play.62

  Lassalle’s drama gradually became t
he subject of a large and involved literary debate. But Marx had already done his part with the review in his letter, which itself testifies to the fact that strong intellectual and aesthetic interests brought him and Lassalle together.63

  Marx would also become interested to some extent in a woman who played a special role in Lassalle’s life: the countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt. Lassalle had made her acquaintance in Berlin. At a very young age, Sophie von Hatzfeldt had been forced into a marriage with a man from the high nobility who turned out to be a scoundrel and a tormentor. Lassalle, who like Marx knew a lot about the law, took up her case and conducted lawsuits against her husband for nearly nine years. He was successful; the countess was awarded a significant part of the family fortune, and from it she endowed Lassalle with a generous annual sum. It is unclear whether the countess and the young socialist were united by any amorous connections. In any case, the political harmony between the two was palpable. Sophie von Hatzfeldt became ‘the red countess’ and played an important role in the early German workers’ movement.

  It was Lassalle who founded the first workers’ party in Germany in 1863. It was actually not called a ‘party’ but an ‘association’: Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV, The General German Workers’ Association). Lassalle was only with the party during its first years. At the age of thirty-nine, he fell in a duel with a rival – a Romanian boyar named Janko von Racowitza – over the favours of a young woman.

  The relationship between Marx and Lassalle was full of contradictions. Marx, who was used to playing first fiddle when meeting people with leftist opinions, found the incessantly talkative, enthusiastic, self-confident and conceited – yet extremely versatile – Lassalle difficult. Upon receiving message of the fatal outcome of the duel, Engels wrote appreciatively to Marx: ‘Whatever Lassalle may have been in other respects as a person, writer, scholar – he was, as a politician, undoubtedly one of the most significant men in Germany.’ Marx responded that despite everything, Lassalle was ‘one of the vieille souche and the foe of our foes’. Marx found it difficult to imagine that the mouth that had spoken so incessantly was now forever silenced.

  But he would soon become more negative once he had acquainted himself with the social theory Lassalle had allowed to serve as guidance for the political movement he started. He had taken essential elements from Marx, to be sure, but without referring to his guide; Marx was extremely irritated with those who did not acknowledge his priority. It was worse with Lassalle’s political positions. Lassalle, who came from Breslau (now Wrocław) in Silesia, did not share Marx’s loathing for Prussia. On the contrary, he hailed Prussia’s advances with satisfaction.

  He and Marx also had entirely different ideas about the best strategy for the working class. Marx stuck to his understanding from 1848 that the German still had to undergo a bourgeois revolution, and that the working class must therefore ally with the bourgeoisie (or ‘middle class’, to use the term he used in the Inaugural Address). Lassalle and his followers, on the other hand, indicated the capitalists as the immediate enemy and saw the landowning class as a natural ally.

  He also had a completely different attitude towards state power as such, arguing that a socialist party should be able to make direct use of the state. Bismarck, the powerful and victorious chancellor of Germany, took a certain amount of interest in Lassalle and even initiated written correspondence with him. The letters remained unknown and were not published until 1928. It is easy to imagine how furious Marx would have been if he had learned about the correspondence.64

  After Lassalle’s death, other forces took over his party. A newspaper named Der Sozial-Demokrat appeared as a party organ. Its editor-in-chief was named Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, a young man from a good family. Schweitzer tried to get Marx and Engels as contributors. Marx actually contributed a few articles, but soon became deeply displeased with the newspaper and with Schweitzer. One of the reasons was that Schweitzer, like Lassalle earlier, turned out to be rather positive not only towards Prussia but also to Bismarck.

  Schweitzer’s most immediate opponents, however, were in Germany. One of the most important was Wilhelm Liebknecht, a close acquaintance of the Marx family during his years as a young refugee in London and now busy supporting himself as a journalist, with varying success. He had tried contributing to Schweitzer’s newspaper at one time, but the contradictions became too great. In Leipzig, Liebknecht met August Bebel, a young carpenter who had given himself over to journalism and politics, and they both founded the Sächsische Volkspartei (People’s Party of Saxony), in which socialists and liberals agreed on their anti-Prussian convictions.65 But the ideological framework soon became too vague for both socialists, who in 1869 created Germany’s second social democratic party, Die sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (The Social Democratic Party of Germany) in the Thuringian city of Eisenach. The party was more openly revolutionary than Lassalle’s and Schweitzer’s, and Liebknecht was forced to spend several years in prison.

  Ideologically, Liebknecht and Bebel stood closer to Marx than Lassalle or Schweitzer. But both Marx and Engels were constantly displeased, particularly with Liebknecht who they often branded as slow-witted and lacking in judgement. In his role as the chief spokesman for the International, Marx also tried to have diplomatically acceptable relations with both German parties, even if it was only Liebknecht and Bebel who were formally linked to the organization.

  By the end of the 1860s, the International had become a force to reckon with in Germany. Whereas Schweitzer had once spoken with contempt about ‘the antiquated Marxist clique’, Marx’s influence grew dramatically during the victorious years of the International. Roger P. Morgan points out that the person who above all contributed to its success was Johann Philipp Becker, who lived in Switzerland, it is true, but was untiring and successful in bringing forth new members in Germany as well.66

  At that time, the political landscape was also changing dramatically. The tactic of Lassalle and his party – seeking cooperation with the landowning class – was rendered defunct when the liberals allied themselves with Bismarck’s conservative grouping during Prussia’s years of victory in the 1860s. As representatives of the working class, both social democratic parties now stood alone. After the Paris Commune, repression became palpably more severe in the now-unified German Reich. Bebel ended up in prison, as did Liebknecht.

  Unifying both parties came naturally in this awkward situation, and this was achieved during a conference in 1875 in Gotha, a city in Thuringia. Marx wrote a temperamental criticism of the proposed unified party programme. His Critique of the Gotha Programme is one of his most important and most influential political texts. He did not send the text to Liebknecht – with whom he was extremely displeased at that point in time – but to Wilhelm Bracke, another person who was ideologically close. In the furious letter that accompanied it, he was horrified that he and Engels were generally regarded as the spiritual fathers of the German Social Democrats. If the programme became reality, he and his friend would publicly ‘entirely dissociate ourselves from said programme’.

  Engels had already sent critical letters on the draft programme to both Wilhelm Bracke and August Bebel. He anticipated some of Marx’s critical points in it but only some of them; there is no counterpart to Marx’s heavy criticism based in the social sciences. It is also worth knowing that he talked about ‘our party’ – that is, the party that Marx said they were both so far away from.67

  But it was Engels who much later – in 1891 – published Marx’s critique of the Gotha programme. By then, it would soon be time for a new programme for the large, extraordinarily successful German Social Democratic Party. The programme they agreed on in Erfurt in 1891 became the most palpably Marx-inspired in the party’s history. But by that time, Marx was already dead. In 1875, the unpublished document that Marx sent to Bracke was not given much importance. Two parties were to be united in Gotha, and Marx’s criticism did not have the effect on that work he undoubtedly expected
. Nor did he put his threat of a public repudiation into effect.68

  Critique of the Gotha Programme

  The Marx who criticized the Gotha programme is very different from the Marx who wrote the most important documents of the International. In the latter, he sought to bridge antagonisms; here, he was prepared for confrontation. The International no longer existed, and now his most important goal was to clean everything reminiscent of Ferdinand Lassalle’s ideas out of German social democracy. Moreover, both he and his audience were still living in the shadow of the Commune. The Commune had given him and many others new ideas of what was politically possible and desirable. After the era of repression in the 1850s and of new hopes in the 1860s came the Commune, born in a vacuum of power and crushed by merciless opponents. Where once a brighter path towards a classless society seemed to open up, only confrontation now remained.

  It was in this spirit that Marx set about critiquing the Gotha programme. It was an almost furious reckoning. It began as a lecture in the world of ideas of Capital. ‘Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture,’ the authors of the programme stated. No, Marx said, nature is just as much a source of the use values that people live on. Labour itself is the expression of a natural force. The conception of the ‘supernatural creative power’ of labour is bourgeois.

  Here, Marx’s criticism is independent of varying political conjunctures, touching on the often overlooked core itself of the theoretical structure of Capital. Humanity is a part of nature; society and its culture develop out of nature. Class society creates a gap between society and its source. Society appears as something supernatural, something standing over nature: humanity can own the nature from which it has sprung. The goal is to bridge the gap; this requires a grand development of the productive forces of labour and the workers’ collective striving for a society of free associations.