It seems almost oxymoronic that an organisation rejoicing in the name ‘International’ could be started in England, where insularity has long been not so much a geographical fluke as a way of life and generations of schoolchildren have learned to chant the Shakespearean cadences about this scepter’d isle, this other Eden:
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …
When the English talk about ‘Europe’ or ‘the Continent’ they do not include their own country: they are referring to Abroad, a strange and savage place where the natives piss on your shoes and eat garlic in bed. One can visit Abroad, of course – and indeed conquer it to create the largest empire ever known – but the purpose of such expeditions, whether by Victorian gunboat-diplomats or modern football hooligans, is to remind Johnny Foreigner that he will always remain a lesser breed. After all, which other nation can boast that it arose from the azure main at heaven’s command? The nineteenth-century humorist Douglas Jerrold, friend of Dickens and contributor to Punch magazine, was kidding on the level when he wrote, ‘The best thing I know between France and England is – the sea.’ These quasi-jokes are still a staple of English tabloid headlines today. The very thought of England can transform even intelligent people into babbling tosh-merchants. ‘When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air,’ George Orwell wrote in a famous and vastly overpraised essay. ‘In the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener …’ Poor old Abroad: it can’t even produce a decent lawn.
Alongside the history of bragging and xenophobia, however, there is another tradition – quieter but no less enduring – of English internationalism, particularly among trade unionists. One thinks of their campaigns against South African apartheid, or their refusal to produce goods for the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s: time and again, at least some British workers have been willing to demonstrate an instinctive kinship with the oppressed. As the Chartist George Julian Harney said at the time of the 1847 Portuguese uprising, ‘People are beginning to understand that foreign as well as domestic questions do affect them; that a blow struck at Liberty on the Tagus is an injury to the friends of Freedom on the Thames; that the success of Republicanism in France would be the doom of Tyranny in every other land; and the triumph of England’s democratic Charter would be the salvation of the millions throughout Europe.’ It would be easy to assume, as the ruling élite of the time did, that these friends of Freedom on the Thames existed only in Harney’s imagination. Why else did England remain immune from the revolutionary epidemic that afflicted the rest of Europe in 1848? Harney’s society of Fraternal Democrats – whose committee included refugees from France, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia – might hold meetings to discuss the stirring events on the Continent, but did ordinary British workers care two hoots about the struggle in far-away countries of which they knew nothing?
The answer was provided by the astonishing ‘Haynau incident’ of 1850 – which, by happy coincidence, did indeed take place right beside the Thames. Field Marshal Baron von Haynau was a brutal Austrian commander known as ‘the Hyena’ who had fully earned the sobriquet by torturing prisoners and flogging women while suppressing revolts in Italy and Hungary. In August 1850, as a respite from these exhausting duties, he took a short holiday in London, where his sightseeing itinerary included a tour of Barclay and Perkins’s Brewery on the south bank of the river. Though George Julian Harney encouraged all friends of Freedom to protest at the visit he had little hope of success – and was as surprised as anyone by what happened next. As soon as the Hyena entered the brewery, a posse of draymen threw a bale of hay on his head and pelted him with manure. He then ran out into the street, where lightermen and coal-heavers joined the chase – ripping his clothes, yanking out great tufts of his moustaches and shouting ‘Down with the Austrian butcher!’ Haynau tried to hide in a dustbin at the George Inn on Bankside, but was soon routed out and pelted with more dung. By the time the police reached the pub, rowing him across the Thames to safety, the bedraggled and humiliated butcher was in no fit state to continue his holiday. Within hours, a new song could be heard in the streets of Southwark:
Turn him out, turn him out, from our side of the Thames,
Let him go to great Tories and high-titled dames.
He may walk the West End and parade in his pride,
But he’ll not come back again near the ‘George’ in Bankside.
Harney’s Red Republican newspaper saw the debagging of Haynau as proof of ‘the progress of the working classes in political knowledge, their uncorrupted love of justice, and their intense hatred of tyranny and cruelty’. A celebratory rally in the Farringdon Hall, at which Engels spoke, was so oversubscribed that hundreds had to be turned away. Letters of congratulation arrived from workers’ associations as far afield as Paris and New York. Even Palmerston was secretly amused, reckoning that the Field Marshal could only be improved by a sip of his own medicine. But conservative newspapers such as the Quarterly Review found nothing to laugh at: the riotous scenes in Bankside were a most alarming ‘indication of foreign influence even amongst our own people’ foreign influence being the standard mid-century euphemism for the dread virus of socialism.
The Quarterly Review needn’t have worried; not yet, anyway. For the next ten years the spirit of Bankside was invisible, as the few socialist groups in Britain – the Communist League, the Chartists, the Fraternal Democrats – either died or fell asleep. It was not until about 1860 that the proletariat began to wake from its long doze. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has remarked, this revival manifested itself in ‘a curious amalgam of political and industrial action, of various kinds of radicalism from the democratic to the anarchist, of class struggles, class alliances and government or capitalist concessions. But above all it was international, not merely because, like the revival of liberalism, it occurred simultaneously in various countries, but because it was inseparable from the international solidarity of the working classes.’
The London Trades Council, founded in 1860, was behind much of this activity. It organised a demonstration to welcome the Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi (who drew a crowd of about 50,000), and in March 1863 it held a public meeting at St James’s Hall to pledge support for Abraham Lincoln’s fight against slavery in the American Civil War. Marx, who made a rare journey into town for the occasion, was pleased to note that ‘the working men themselves spoke very well indeed, without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric’. But one shouldn’t overlook the unwitting contribution of Napoleon III, who paid for a delegation of French workers to visit London during the Exhibition of 1862, thus giving them the chance to establish contact with men such as George Odger, secretary of the Trades Council. When several of these representatives returned to London for a rally in July 1863 to mark the Polish insurrection, Odger wrote an ‘Address to the Workmen of France from the Working Men of England’, proposing that they should formalise their cross-Channel solidarity. Yet another meeting was called – this time at the cavernous St Martin’s Hall in Covent Garden, on 28 September 1864 – to consecrate their new union in the International Working Men’s Association.
Note the title: if this was to be more than merely an Anglo-French entente they would need at least a few token figures from elsewhere. Which is why, one September morning in 1864, a young Frenchman named Victor Le Lubez knocked on the door of 1 Modena Villas and asked if Karl Marx would suggest the name of someone to speak on behalf of the ‘German workers’. Marx himself was far too bourgeois to be eligible so he recommended the émigré tailor Johann Georg Eccarius, an old ally from the Communist League. One wonders why Le Lubez and Odger hadn’t thought of Eccarius
already, since he was well known to them through his involvement in the London Trades Council. Perhaps familiarity had bred contempt, as it usually did with Eccarius: his gauche and humourless manner antagonised almost all who had to work with him, and they may have hoped that Marx could recruit a rather more inspiring proletarian orator for this important assembly.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what Marx’s patronage of Eccarius tells us about his own character. According to the legend tirelessly peddled by his critics, Marx was an incorrigible snob who despised working-class socialists, regarding them as dolts and asses who had acquired ideas above their station. The biographer Robert Payne, for example, refers to ‘Marx’s contempt for humanity and especially for that section of it which he called the proletariat’. Even a sophisticated Marxologist such as Professor Shlomo Avineri can write that ‘Marx’s sceptical view of the proletariat’s ability to conceive its own goals and realise them without outside intellectual help has often been documented. It suits his remark that revolutions never start with the “masses” but originate in élite groups.’ Where have these views and remarks been documented? You will search the works of Marx – and indeed the footnotes of Avineri – in vain. Avineri mentions the ‘snubbing’ of Wilhelm Weitling: as we have seen, however, Marx was in fact remarkably generous to Weitling, arguing that one shouldn’t be too beastly to a poor tailor who had genuinely suffered for his beliefs, and what caused their eventual rift was not lordly disdain for the underclass but terminal exasperation at the political and religious delusions of an insufferable egomaniac. Had Weitling been a middle-class intellectual, Marx would have treated him far more savagely.
Which brings us to Avineri’s second exhibit. ‘Even one of his most loyal followers, George Eccarius, also a tailor by trade, came in for a generous measure of unearned contempt from his master and teacher.’ Once again no sources are cited: clearly Marx’s lofty scorn for tailors, cobblers and other pond-life is so universally accepted as to need no verification.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. It was Marx who gave Eccarius his first break by publishing his study of ‘Tailoring in London’ in the short-lived London journal NRZ Revue. ‘The author of this article,’ Marx informed readers, ‘is himself a worker in one of London’s tailoring shops. We ask the German bourgeoisie how many authors it numbers capable of grasping the real movement in a similar manner? … The reader will note how here, instead of the sentimental, moral and psychological criticism employed against existing conditions by Weitling and other workers who engage in authorship, a purely materialist understanding and a freer one, unspoilt by sentimental whims, confronts bourgeois society and its movement.’
No sign there of contempt, unearned or otherwise. Throughout the darkest days of the 1850s Marx remained attentive and sympathetic, helping Eccarius place articles in German-language newspapers abroad in the hope of rescuing him from the treadmill of tailoring from five in the morning until eight in the evening. ‘If any money is forthcoming, I would suggest that Eccarius get some first so that he doesn’t have to spend all day tailoring,’ he advised a journalistic comrade in Washington. ‘Do try and see that he gets something, if at all possible.’ However dire his own financial straits might be, he insisted that Eccarius’s needs should take priority.
When Eccarius went down with consumption, in February 1859, Marx described it as ‘the most tragic thing I have yet experienced here in London’. A few months later he noted sadly that Eccarius ‘is again going to pieces in his sweatshop’, and asked if Engels could send the poor chap a few bottles of port to sustain him. In 1860, forced by ill health to give up tailoring for a while, Eccarius was installed in lodgings rented at Marx’s own expense and fixed up with regular work for the American press at $3 an article. When three of Eccarius’s children died during the scarlet-fever epidemic of 1862, it was the poverty-stricken Marx who organised an appeal fund to cover the funeral expenses. Finally, when invited to nominate a speaker for the historic public meeting in September 1864, he again pressed the claims of his old friend. Eccarius put on a ‘splendid performance’, Marx reported to Engels afterwards, adding that he himself had been happy to remain mute on the platform. And yet, even now, many authors continue to repeat the old nonsense about Marx’s mean-spirited and snooty disdain for mere tailors.
In fact, it was the presence of so many genuine workers – and the refreshing lack of preening middle-class dilettantes – that attracted him to the International’s inaugural rally, persuading him ‘to waive my usual standing rule to decline any such invitations’. Although he came to St Martin’s Hall only as a silent observer, by the end of the evening he had been co-opted on to the General Council.
Now there seems to be a slight paradox here. Marx himself was indisputably a bourgeois intellectual. By joining the Council was he not in danger of diluting the proletarian purity which he so admired? To answer the question we need to look more closely at the composition of the International. The General Council consisted of two Germans (Marx and Eccarius), two Italians, three Frenchmen and twenty-seven Englishmen – almost all of them working class. It was a muddled mélange: English trade unionists who cared passionately about the right to free collective bargaining but had no interest in socialist revolution; French Proudhonists who dreamed of utopia but disliked trade unions; plus a few republicans, disciples of Mazzini and campaigners for Polish freedom. They disagreed about almost everything – and particularly about what role, if any, the enlightened middle classes should be allowed to play in the International. In a letter to Engels two years after its foundation, Marx reported an all-too-typical contretemps:
By way of demonstration against the French monsieurs – who wanted to exclude everyone except ‘travailleurs manuels’, in the first instance from membership of the International Association, or at least from eligibility for election as delegate to the congress – the English yesterday proposed me as President of the General Council. I declared that under no circumstances could I accept such a thing, and proposed Odger [the English trade union leader] in my turn, who was then in fact re-elected, although some people voted for me despite my declaration.
The minute-book for this meeting records that Marx ‘thought himself incapacitated because he was a head worker and not a hand worker’, but it is not quite as simple as that. (His desire to get on with writing Capital may have exerted a stronger tug at the sleeve.) A few years later, when a doctor called Sexton was proposed for membership, there were the usual mutterings about ‘whether it was desirable to add professional men to the Council’; according to the minutes, however, ‘Citizen Marx did not think there was anything to fear from the admission of professional men while the great majority of the Council was composed of workers.’ In 1872, when there were problems with various crackpot American sects infiltrating the International, it was Marx himself who proposed – successfully – that no new section should be allowed to affiliate unless at least two-thirds of its members were wage labourers.
In short, while accepting that most office-holders and members must be working class, Marx was unembarrassed by his own lack of proletarian credentials: men such as himself still had much to offer the association as long as they didn’t pull rank or hog the limelight. Engels followed this example, though as an affluent capitalist he was understandably more reluctant to impose himself. After selling his stake in the family firm and moving down to London in 1870, he accepted a seat on the General Council almost at once but declined the office of treasurer. ‘Citizen Engels objected that none but working men ought to be appointed to have anything to do [with] the finances,’ the minutes record. ‘Citizen Marx did not consider the objection tenable: an ex-commercial man was the best for the office.’ Engels persisted with his refusal – and was probably right to do so. As the Marxian scholar Hal Draper has pointed out, handling money was the touchiest job in a workers’ association, for charges of financial irregularity were routine ploys whenever political conflict started; and a Johnny-come-
lately businessman from Manchester would have been an obvious target for any ‘French monsieurs’ who wanted to stir up trouble.
Marx may have preferred to work behind the scenes, but he worked exceptionally hard all the same: without his efforts the International would probably have disintegrated within a year. The Council met every Tuesday at its shabby HQ in Greek Street, Soho – on the site which, almost exactly a century later, was to become the Establishment night-club, where satirists such as Lenny Bruce and Peter Cook used rather different techniques to undermine prevailing orthodoxy. The minute-books show that he was happy to take on his share of the donkey-work. (‘Citizens Fox, Marx and Cremer were deputed to attend the Compositors’ Society … Citizen Marx proposed, Citizen Cremer seconded, that the Central Council thank Citizen Cottam for his generous gift … Citizen Marx stated that societies in Basle and Zurich had joined the Association … Citizen Marx reported that he had received £3 from Germany for members’ cards, which he paid to the Financial Secretary …’) His influence was apparent from the outset. The initial item of business at the Council’s very first meeting, on 5 October 1864, was a proposal by Marx that William Randal Cremer of the London Trades Council should be appointed secretary. (‘Mr Cremer was unanimously elected.’) Later that evening Marx was elected to a subcommittee whose task was to draw up rules and principles of the new Association.
So far so good. But then Marx fell ill, thus missing the next two meetings. He was roused from his sick-bed on 18 October by an urgent letter from Eccarius, who warned that if he didn’t come to the General Council that evening a hopelessly insipid and confused statement of aims would be adopted in his absence. Marx staggered down to Greek Street and listened aghast as the worthy Le Lubez read out ‘a fearfully cliché-ridden, badly written and totally unpolished preamble pretending to be a declaration of principles, with Mazzini showing through the whole thing from beneath a crust of the most insubstantial scraps of French socialism’. After long debate, Eccarius proposed that this unappetising menu be sent back to the subcommittee for further editing, cunningly forestalling any suspicion of a coup by promising that its ‘sentiments’ would remain unchanged.
Karl Marx Page 29