There were not many who heard Engels speak. We do not know exactly what he said. On the one hand, he left behind a draft: on the other hand, he wrote himself in Der Sozialdemokrat that he gave a speech ‘something like’ the one that was being printed. Both texts deviate from each other greatly. Engels probably spoke rather freely, but with one eye on his draft.
In any case, he used no small words about his friend. Marx was placed alongside Darwin, he had revolutionized science both through his views on the decisive motive forces of history and with his theory on the laws of development of capitalism, and he had also made independent contributions in other areas of knowledge as well. But his scientific work was not simply something for itself; in his eyes, science was a force that could change society and he had himself contributed to this social change through both his political work and his journalistic activities.
That was why he had also become the most hated man of his time. Except when it was absolutely necessary to defend himself, he treated all these expressions of loathing like spiderwebs he could easily brush aside. And now that he was dead, he was mourned by millions of colleagues from Siberia to California. He also had many opponents, but no personal enemies.
Greetings from Russian social democrats and French and Spanish socialists were read at the graveside, and finally Liebknecht gave a speech in which he singled out Marx not only as a great social scientist but also as the creator of both German social democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association.5
The latter were statements that Marx himself would have repudiated. But now he no longer had any say, and a monument could be raised over him – then only in words, but later also in stone. With few exceptions, the statues in stone or metal belong to the Soviet era, usually depicting Mark as a powerful, self-confident fighter gazing resolutely into the future. Sometimes he is alone, sometimes he is with Engels, but the style – as with statues of Lenin and other revolutionaries – is heroic.
Once Marx was dead, the battle over the correct interpretation of what he said and wrote began in earnest. In the beginning, there were two people who were close to him that had the greatest authority. One was of course Engels; the other Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor. They were both close to each other; Engels had watched Eleanor grow up and had remained the family’s closest friend and support. But they had somewhat different ideas of how Karl Marx’s intellectual legacy should be handled. There is at least one picture of this divergence that Eleanor Marx’s latest biographer, Rachel Holmes, depicts.
The Second International was formed on 14 July 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Engels was the great leading figure in the new movement, and was greeted with ovations at the congresses he was able to take part in before he died in 1895. Eleanor Marx had a strong position that only initially had to do with her kinship with the great Karl. She herself possessed a formidable intellectual capacity and was additionally equipped with a great capacity for work. It was also to her advantage that she spoke perfect German and English from childhood, and taught herself equally perfect French in her youth.
At the Zürich conference of the Second International in 1893, Margarete Greulich had painted a giant portrait of Karl Marx; under it, Engels gave a brief, eloquent, and highly acclaimed speech about his friend. Eleanor was not completely happy about the idolization of her father. The aging Engels, on the other hand, seems to have had nothing against it.6
As we have seen, Marx had defended himself against the designation ‘Marxist’. He did not recognize himself in the roughly knocked together theory ascribed to him in both France and Russia. Even his youngest daughter sometimes had to fight against the same vulgarization. During one of her many lecture tours, she encountered a man who explained to her after her speech what her father had actually meant by social democracy. When the man had finally got to his point, Eleanor exclaimed: ‘Heaven save Karl Marx from his friends!’7
As far as is known, Eleanor never used the term ‘Marxism’. But Engels accepted it when it began to be more widely adopted around 1890, as German social democracy was enjoying great electoral success and it became legal to propagandize for the party and its ideas. For a short time, Marxism additionally became a fad among younger people, especially young students and artists. One group, chiefly concentrated in Berlin but spread across Germany, was called Die Jungen (The Young).
Die Jungen were active in various ways – politically, scientifically, and artistically. They found unity in Karl Marx. Students played him off against their academic teachers. One of the most prominent, Paul Ernst, wrote much later in his memoirs: ‘Going from Schmoller to Marx was like going to heaven.’ Gustav von Schmoller was a political economist of the ‘historical school’, a professor in Berlin and the architect behind Bismarck’s welfare programme that was to alleviate the workers’ dissatisfaction. It need hardly be said that he stood far from Marx.
Die Jungen played a role in the rapidly growing left press, and took on a leading role in newspapers such as Volks-Tribüne (People’s Tribune) in Berlin and Volksstimme (The People’s Voice) in Magdeburg.8
But the young enthusiasts who called themselves Marxists had a problem with Marx’s view of history. What role did the superstructure, where they themselves intended to work, actually have?
In Engels, they saw an oracle, or least someone better able than anyone else to enter questions on the subject. He thus received a number of letters from young men. The most well-known response he wrote was to Joseph Bloch, a student in Berlin who also made a name for himself as editor of a few socialist publications. It was in the letter to Bloch where Engels pointed out that ‘production and reproduction of actual life’ was only ‘in the final analysis’ the determining moment in the development of society.9 The determination ‘in the final analysis’ has caused headaches among his interpreters. Greater clarity can be obtained if it is noted that the same expression occurs in Anti-Dühring. There, it was part of a polemic against Eugen Dühring, who had claimed to lay out ‘conclusive truth in the final analysis’ (endgültige Wahrheit letzter Instanz) in the fields of moral philosophy and economy. Dühring’s ambition was to turn both moral philosophy and political economy into a type of more complex mechanism. Ethical truths would be as unchangeable as the laws of mechanics.
It may seem strange that Engels took over Dühring’s expression ‘in the final analysis’ in the middle of a polemic with the latter. But he loaded the expression with new content. History (and, for example, ethics with it) is constantly changing, a process we also therefore have insufficient knowledge of. What we can say in general about history is limited to ‘platitudes and commonplaces of the sorriest kind – for example, that, generally speaking, men cannot live except by labour; that up to the present they for the most part have been divided into rulers and ruled; that Napoleon died on 5 May 1821, and so on’.10
These were words spoken in the heat of battle. Class society is hardly a platitude, in Engels’s opinion. But the meaning is clear: his words echo with what both he and Marx said many times previously – at the earliest in The German Ideology – namely that the general principles of history that can be established are not a timetable according to which history can be arranged. The real development only emerges in the study of concrete historical material.
This was what he meant in his letter to Bloch. But here, it is not so explanatory. He said that it is often the form (he italicized the word) that determines the course of events in historical conflicts; as we know, the form is the political, legal, and ideological conditions – in fact, even personal circumstances – that can determine the actual outcome. He referred to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to Capital, and to his own Anti-Dühring.
Engels also patiently wrote a number of other responses to young enthusiasts who wanted clarity on the issue. But his attitude towards the movement was fundamentally negative. The fact that Capital had got a number of new, conscientious readers played no role. Engels was upset over
what he saw as the young men’s conceit.
Otto von Boenigk, a young baron who complained in his letter about the masses’ lack of education, received particularly harsh treatment. Engels was furious. He could not understand how Boenigk could say such a thing when German workers had just displayed their outstanding political maturity in the struggle against the Anti-Socialist Laws. Arrogance among the ‘educated’ was a greater danger. ‘We’ – that is, the workers’ movement – lack occupational categories such as engineers, agronomists, and architects, to be sure. But the capitalists have been able to buy such skills, and ‘we’ can do that as well. Engels continued: ‘But apart from specialists like these, we shall manage very well without the rest of the “educated” men; e. g. the present heavy influx of literati and students into the party will be attended with all sorts of mischief unless those gentry are kept within bounds.’11
These were harsh words. His wrath is explained not only by von Boenigk’s pride in his education. There were also more tactical reasons. Die Jungen criticized the Social Democrats for taking entirely too cautious an attitude in politics. The revolutionary flame had died down, and the party leadership had adapted itself to existing German society.
But Engels, like Bebel and Liebknecht, knew that it was now a question of navigating carefully and not verbally challenging those governing the country. Bismarck had disappeared, but a more aggressive nationalism was developing under Kaiser Wilhelm II. A social democratic movement that directly threatened an uprising could be the subject of even more brutal repression than the newly abolished Anti-Socialist Laws. The party programme itself could indeed be radicalized – which happened at the 1891 congress in Erfurt, where Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme served as guidance. But fate should not be tempted in practical politics as long as they were at a disadvantage as regards numbers and power.
Incidentally, Engels began his letter to von Boenigk with a confession of gradual development. Socialist society is not created all at once, he explained. It is a continuous process of change. It can be implemented gradually (graduell) without difficulty. The communities of production and distribution – that is, cooperatives – that the workers have been able to create and make competitive prove this.
This assurance is far from the revolutionary slogans that Die Jungen gave vent to. But if looked at carefully, revolution – and even the dictatorship of the proletariat – can be found in the party programme that Engels would soon successfully propagandize for. On the other hand, he was afraid that Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme would be leaked far too early and become a weapon in the hands of the young enthusiasts. This is how a letter he wrote to Karl Kautsky in December 1890 has to be interpreted. He enclosed the manuscript of Marx’s Critique, but warned Kautsky to lay low with it for the time being – otherwise it could end up in the wrong hands. He promised to write a few introductory lines to the text himself, but could not say when – his hands were full with letters he had to write first. He was talking about exactly that type of correspondence we just became acquainted with.
It was typical of him to write this to Kautsky. Born in 1854, Karl Kautsky was a few years older than the members of Die Jungen but was still a relatively young man. He had precisely the academic background that Engels dismissed in his letter to von Boenigk, but he was an even-tempered person and had won both Marx’s and Engels’s confidence during a visit to London in 1881. Two years later, he had founded the periodical Die Neue Zeit (The New Times), which gradually found a position as the main theoretical organ of German social democracy – in fact, of all of Marxism. It was there that Engels published Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme with an introductory clarification, and it was there that various feuds about the correct direction of Marxism played out.12
Kautsky also wrote a series of books that became important for the consolidation of Marxism. The first of them was called Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren (The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx); it was published in 1887 and became a great success. The thirteenth edition, from 1910, is now on the Internet. In the introduction, Kautsky establishes his thesis that Marx’s ‘individual doctrines are parts of a firmly constructed system and can only be understood in their context’. We who have followed Marx’s lifelong work as researcher and author know that this is as far from the truth as can be imagined. The Marx who is continually on the road towards new horizons becomes here instead a system-builder who carefully joins together bits of his knowledge so that everything fits together, as in a puzzle. The only competent interpreter is the person who takes stock of the puzzle.
Marxism was on the way to becoming an orthodoxy. Orthodoxy both tames young hotheads and revives those who work in thoughtless routine. It is entirely natural that Kautsky took up the task of providing the correct interpretation of the new, radical party programme from Erfurt and responding to the tricky question of how ethics relates to the materialist conception of history.13
It is also Kautsky who must step in when his old friend and brother in the party Eduard Bernstein emerges with the demand that Marxism must be revised. According to Bernstein, experience showed that the social revolutions Marx said so much about were not necessary. The working class was already doing better; before it and its own party lay a possible path of constant improvements. Democracy was gaining ground, and through it the working class would come to power as soon as it had gained sufficient ‘intellectual maturity’ and was equal to economic development. Marxist theory thereby also had to be revised. Bernstein maintained that with his letters (which had been disseminated in party circles), Engels had already changed the theory and that it was a question of going further along the same road. What theory lost in uniformity, it gained as a science.
Bernstein was of the same generation as Kautsky, but had no academic background. After high school, he had made a living as a bank clerk before he gave himself over to social democracy. He had also got to know Marx and Engels personally, and he was and remained a close friend of Kautsky. It was in Kautsky’s periodical Die Neue Zeit that he published a series of articles on the problems of socialism, which Kautsky encouraged him to develop into a book. The result was the 1899 work Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (Evolutionary Socialism).
This ‘revisionism battle’ continued up until the First World War, with Kautsky and Bernstein as the main combatants. August Bebel, the leader of the party, sided with Kautsky’s interpretation; it thus became the official Social Democratic line up until Bebel’s death in 1913.14
But despite the orthodoxy, the German Social Democratic Party had fundamentally changed. When a militant nationalism gripped people’s minds during the new century, the German Social Democratic Party was unresisting, despite all its commitments in the Second International. Only two members of parliament, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (the son of Wilhelm), voted against the war credits the Kaiser demanded to throw the country into war. The party had revised its line in a more fateful way than Bernstein had intended.
One of the early contributors to Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit was the Russian Georgi Plekhanov. He wrote an article on Hegel that Engels found ‘ausgezeichnet’ (excellent), but which is memorable above all because it was there that the term ‘dialectical materialism’ was coined. Henceforth it became the name of the philosophy that Engels had drawn up the outlines for.15
In dialectical materialism, as it was now being outlined, Marx came ever closer to Darwin. Marx himself said that Darwin’s theory was the foundation of his own and Engels’s theory, but it also underlined the difference: humanity changed their environment, and thereby themselves, through production. This crucial difference was toned down step by step in the development of what was now being called Marxism. Everything was subject to evolution, species as well as societies. Determinism also took hold all the more firmly. Everything that Marx had said about the play of chance ended up in the background. The future was like a ball of yarn being unravelled, turn after turn. The difference between predictions and appeals
was forgotten.
Marxism became dogmatic. This was not only a development in Germany, but in France and the Nordic countries as well, even if the desire to build systems was not as conspicuous there. The first Italian to emerge as a Marxist of some importance was the professor of philosophy Antonio Labriola. He already had a long intellectual development behind him when he became a convinced follower of Marx and Engels. (Incidentally, he exchanged some interesting letters with Engels; only Labriola’s letters are preserved, however, and not Engels’s.) Labriola avoided dogmatic excesses, could comment critically on far-reaching determinism, and emphasized that Marxism was a philosophy of action, of praxis. He thereby heralded the most innovative Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.16
But the most decisive development was Russian. Plekhanov long remained the guiding name. Through his proximity to Engels and his contributions to Die Neue Zeit, he gained particular authority. It was only much later that one of his followers – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin – would overshadow him.
Lenin’s life is so well known that it can be depicted quite summarily: his background was solidly bourgeois; an older brother, Alexander, was active as a revolutionary narodnik and was executed when Vladimir was seventeen years old. Vladimir decided to complete his work. He earned a degree in law and became a Marxist, got involved in the Russian Social Democratic Party, was exiled to Siberia and escaped to Western Europe, where – with the brief exception of the first Russian Revolution in 1905 – he remained until 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown.
There were many other Russian social democratic refugees in Western Europe, and it was there that the party’s politics were pursued; in Russia their activities had to be strictly underground. There were no former followers of Lassalle or Proudhon among the Russians, nor were there any revisionists. The great majority had a background as narodniki, but had now become Marxists. But this harmony was only illusory. Marx’s work could be interpreted in various ways, and stress could be laid differently. Above all, it was difficult to talk about a uniform and natural political line in Marx.
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