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In a sense he succeeded more rapidly than he could have hoped: the rise and swift growth upon the ruins of 1848 of a new and militant party of socialist workers in Germany created for him a sphere of new practical activity in which the latter half of his life was spent. This party was not indeed created by him, but his ideas, and above all a belief in the political programme which he had elaborated, inspired its leaders. He was consulted and approached at every turn; everyone knew that he, and he alone, had inspired the movement and created its basis; to him all questions of theory and practice were instinctively referred; he was admired, feared, suspected
Ferdinand Lassalle, who created German Social Democracy and led it during its first heroic years, was one of the most ardent public personalities of the nineteenth century. By birth a Silesian Jew, by profes sion a lawyer, by temperament a romantic revolutionary, he was a man whose outstanding characteristics were his intelligence, his vanity, his boundless energy and self- confidence. Since most of the normal avenues of ad vancement were barred to him on account of his race and his religion, he threw himself with immense passion into the revolutionary movement, where his exceptional ability, his enthusiasm, but most of all his genius as an agitator and a popular orator swiftly raised him to leadership. During the German revolution he delivered inflammatory speeches against the Government, for which he was tried and imprisoned. During the years which followed the period of recantations and dishonour, when Marx and Engels were in exile, and Liebknecht alone among the original leaders who remained in Germany remained faithful to the cause of socialism, Lassalle took upon himself the task of creating a new and better organized proletarian party upon the ruins of 1848. He conceived himself in the part of its sole leader and inspirer, its intellectual, moral and political dictator. He accomplished this task with brilliant success. His EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE 195 beliefs were derived in equal parts from Hegel and from Marx: from the latter he derived the doctrines of economic determinism, of the class struggle, of the inevitability of exploitation in capitalist society. But, following Hegel, he rejected the distinction between state and society, refusing to follow His relations with Marx and Engels had never been wholly easy: like Proudhon, he declared that Marx was in theoretical matters his master, and treated him with nervous respect. He heralded him everywhere as a man of genius, arranged for the German publication of his books, and otherwise strove to be of service to him in many ways. Marx grudgingly recognized the value of Lassalle’s energy, and his organizing ability, but was repelled by him personally, and was deeply suspici ous of him politically. He disliked his ostentation, his extravagance, his vanity, his histrionic manners, his loud public profession of his tastes, his opinions and his ambitions; he detested the very brilliance of his im pressionistic surveys of social and political facts, which ig6 KARL MARX seemed to him flimsy, superficial, and fallacious by comparison with his own painful and laborious thorough ness : he disliked and distrusted the temperamental and capricious control which Lassalle exercised over the workers, and, even more, his absorbed flirtation with the enemy. Finally, he felt jealous and possessive about a movement which owed to him both its practical policy and its intellectual foundations, and now seemed to have deserted him, infatuated by a political femme fatale, a specious, glittering adventurer, an avowed opportunist both in private life and in public policy, guided by no fixed plan, attached to no principle, moving towards no clear goal. Nevertheless, a certain intimacy of relations existed between them, or if not intimacy, a mutual appreciation. Lassalle was born and brought up under intellectual influences similar to his own, they fought against the same enemy, and on all fundamental issues spoke the same language, which Proudhon, Bakunin, and the English trade unionists had never done, and the former young Hegelians had long ceased to do. More over, he was a man of action, a genuine revolutionary, and absolutely fearless. Each recognized that with, perhaps, tire exception of Engels, the other possessed a higher degree of political intelligence, penetration, and practical courage than any other member of their party. They understood each other instinctively, and found communication bolh easy and exhilarating: when Marx went to Berlin, he stayed quite naturally with Lassalle. When Lassalle came to London, he stayed with Marx, and maddened his proud and sensitive host, then in the last stage of penury, by the mere fact of being a witness of his condition, and even more by his gay patter and easy extravagance, spending more on cigars and buttonholes EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE 197 than Marx and his family spent on a week’s liveli hood. There was some difficulty, too, about a sum of money which Marx had borrowed from him. Of all this Lassalle, it seems, was totally unaware, being exception ally insensitive to his surroundings, as vigorous and flamboyant natures often are. Marx never forgot his humiliation, and after Lassalle’s London visit their relations deteriorated abruptly. Lassalle created the new party by a method still novel in his day, and employed only sporadically by the English Chartists, although familiar enough later: he undertook a series of highly publicized political tours through the industrial areas of Germany, making fiery and seditious speeches which overwhelmed his prole tarian audiences and roused them to immense enthusi asm. There and then he formed them into sections of the new workers’ movement, organized as an official, legally constituted party, thus breaking openly with the old method of small revolutionary cells which met in secret and carried on underground propaganda. His last journey among his followers was a triumphal tour over conquered territory: it strengthened his already unique influence upon German workers of all types, ages and professions. The theoretical foundations of the programme were borrowed, largely from Marx, and perhaps to some extent from the radical Prussian economist Rodbertus- Jagetzow, but the party had many strongly non-Marxist characteristics: it was not specifically organized for a revolution; it was opportunist, and prepared for alliance with other anti-bourgeois parties; it was nationalistic and largely confined to German conditions and needs, One of its foremost ends was the development of a
ig8 KARL MARX workers’ co-operative system, not indeed as an alterna tive to, but as an intrinsic element in, political action, to be organized or financed by the state, yet still suffici ently similar to Proudhon’s anti-political mutualism, and the politically sluggish English trade unionism, to incur open hostility from Marx. Moreover, it had been created by means of the personal ascendancy of one individual. There was a strong emotional element in the unquestioned dictatorship which Lassalle exercised in his last years, a form of hero-worship which Marx, who disliked every form of unreason, and distrusted spell-binders in politics, instinctively abhorred. Lassalle introduced into German socialism the theory that circumstances might occur in which something like a genuine alliance might be formed with the absolutist Prussian government against the industrial bourgeoisie. This was the kind of opportunism which Marx must have considered the most ruinous of all possible defects; the experience of 1848, if it taught no other lesson, had conclusively demonstrated the fatal consequence to a young, and as yet comparatively defenceless, party of an alliance with a well-established older party, funda mentally hostile to its demands, in which each attempts to exploit the other, and the better armed force inevitably wins. Marx, as was made evident from his address to the Central Communist Committee in 1850, considered himself to have erred seriously in supposing that an alliance with the radical bourgeoisie was possible and even necessary before the final victory of the proletariat. But even he had never dreamed of an alliance with the feudal nobility for the purpose of delivering an attack on individualism as such, merely for the sake of attaining some kind of state control. Such a move he regarded as EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE I99 a typical Bakuninist caricature of his own policy and aspirations. ^ Both Marx and 200 KtRL MARX far Lassalle had m fact gone in this direction was subsequently revealed by the discovery m 1928 of Bismarck’s private record of the negotiations They were cut shoit by Lassalle’s early death m a duel, which arose out of a casual love-affair If he had lived, and Bismarck had chosen to continue to play on his almost megalomaniac vanity, Lassalle would in the end almost certainly have lost, and the newly created party might have foundered long before it did, indeed, as a theoi 1st of state supremacy and as a demagogue, Lassalle should be counted among the founders not only of European socialism, but equally of the doctrine of peisonal dictatorship and fascism, which doubtless is precisely what had attracted Bismarck. In the subsequent conflict between the Marxists and the Lassalleans, Marx won a formal victory which saved the purity of his own doctrine and political method, not, oddly enough, for Germany, for which it was primarily intended, but for application m far more primitive countries which scarcely entered his thoughts, Russia China, and, up to a point, Spam and Mexico The report of Lassalle’s death m the spring of 1864 roused little sympathy m either Marx or Engels To both it seemed a typically foolish end to a career of absuid self-dramatization. Lassalle, had he lived, might well have proved an obstacle of the first magnitude Yet the relief, at least in the case of Marx, was not unmixed with a certain sentimental regret for the passing of so famihai a figure on whom he looked, in spite of all his failings, with something not wholly unlike affection Lassalle was a German and a Hegelian, inextricably connected with the events of 1848, and his own revolutionary past a man who, m spite of all his colossal defects, stood head EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE 201 and shoulders above the pygmies among whom he moved, creatures into whom he had for a brief hour infused his own vitality, and who would soon sink exhausted into their old apathy, appearing even smaller, pettier, meaner than before. ‘He was, after all, one of the old stock,’ he wrote, ‘the enemy of our enemies ... it is difficult to believe that so noisy, stirring, pushing a man is now as dead as a mouse, and must hold his tongue altogether . . . the devil knows, the crowd is getting smaller and no new blood is coming forward.’ The news of Lassalle's death sent him into one of his rare moods of personal melancholy, almost of despair, very different from the cloud of anger and resentment in which he normally lived. He suddenly became over whelmed by the sense of his own total isolation, and the hopelessness of all individual endeavour in the face of the triumphant European reaction, a feeling which the tranquillity and monotony of life in England sooner or later induced in all the exiled revolutionaries. Indeed the very respect, and even admiration with which many of them spoke of English life and English institutions, were an implicit acknowledgement of their own personal failure, their loss of faith in the power of mankind to achieve its own emancipation. They saw themselves gradually sinking into a cautious, almost cynical, quietism which they themselves knew to be an admission of defeat and a complete stultification of a life spent in warfare, the final collapse of the ideal world in which they had invested beyond recovery everything that they themselves possessed, and much that belonged to others. This mood, with which He.rzen, Mazzirii, Kossuth were intimately acquainted, was with Maix uncommon : he
ao2 KARL MARX was genuinely convinced that the process of history was both inevitable and progressive, and this intense belief excluded all possibility of doubt or disillusionment on fundamental issues; he had never relied on reason or the idealism of individuals or of the masses as decisive factors in social evolution, and having staked nothing, lost nothing in the great intellectual and moral bank ruptcy of the ’sixties and ’seventies. All his life he strove to destroy or diminish the influence of popular leaders and demagogues who believed in the power of the individual to alter the destinies of nations. His savage attacks on Proudhon and Lassalle, his later duel with Bakunin, were not mere moves in the struggle for personal supremacy on the part of an ambitious and despotic man resolved to destroy all possible rivals. It is true that he was by nature almost insanely jealous: nevertheless, mingled with his personal feelings there was genuine indignation with the gross errors of judge ment of which these men seemed to him too often guilty: and, even more strongly felt, ironical as it may seem when his own position is remembered, a violent dis approval of the influence of dominant individuals as such, of the element of personal power, which, by creating a false relation between the leader and his followers, is, sooner or later, bound to blind both to the demands of the objective situation. Yet it remains the case that the unique position of authority which he himself occupied in international socialism during the last decade of his life, did far more to consolidate and ensure the adoption of his system than mere attention to his works or the consideration of history in the light of them could ever have achieved. His writings during these years make depressing reading: EXILE IN LONDON: THE FIRST PHASE 203 apart from journalism in German and American papers, and literary hackwork forced on him by his poverty, he confined himself almost entirely to polemical tracts, the longest of which, Herr Vogt, written in i860, was designed to clear his own name from the imputation of having brought his friends into unnecessary danger during the Cologne trials, and to counter-attack his accuser, a well-known Swiss physicist and radical politician, Karl Vogt, by alleging that he was in the pay of the French Emperor. It is of interest only for the melancholy light which it throws on ten years of frustra tion, filled with squabbles and intrigues, which succeeded the heroic age. In 1859 he finally published his Critique of Political Economy, but it was little read: its main theses were much more impressively stated eight years later, in the first volume of Das Kapital. His faith in the ultimate victory of his cause remained unaffected even during the darkest years of the reaction. Speaking in the early ’fifties at a dinner given to the compositors and staff of The People's Paper, in answer to the toast ‘The proletarians of Europe’ he declared: ‘In our days ev 204 KARL MARX wish to get rid of modern arts in order to get rid of modern conflicts. . . . For our part we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit that continues to mark these contradictions . . . we recognize our old friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast . . . the Revolution.’ It must have seemed a singularly unplausible thesis to the majority of his listeners : certainly the events of the years which followed did little to bear out his prophecy. In i860 Marx’s fame and influence were confined to 1/ a narrow circle: interest in communism had died down since the Cologne trials in 1851; with the phenomenal development of industry and commerce, faith in liberal ism, in science, in peaceful progress, began to mount once more. Marx himself was almost beginning to acquire the interest of a historical figure, to be regarded as the formidable theorist and agitator of a former generation, now exiled and destitute, and supporting himself by casual journalism in an obscure corner of London. Fifteen years later all this had altered. Still comparatively unknown in England, he had grown abroad into a figure of vast fame and notoriety, regarded by some as the instigator of every revolutionary move ment in Europe, the fanatical dictator of a world move ment pledged to subvert the moral order, the peace, happiness and prosperity of mankind. By these he was represented as the evil genius of the working class, plotting to sap and destroy the peace and morality of civilized society, systematically exploiting the worst passions of the mob, creating grievances where none existed, pouring vinegar in the malcontents’ wounds, exacerbating their relations with their employers in order to create the universal chaos in which everyone EXILE IN LONDON'! THE FIRST PHASE 20", would lose, and so finally all would be made level at last, the rich and the poor, die bad and the good, the industrious and the idle, thejust and the unjust. Others saw in him the most indefatigable and devoted strategist and tactician of labouring classes everywhere, the infallible authority on all theoretical questions, the creator of an irresistible movement designed to over throw the prevailing rule of injustice and inequality by persuasion or by violence. To them he appeared as an angry and indomitable modern Moses, the leader and saviour of all the insulted and the oppressed, with the milder and more conventional Engels at his side, an Aaron ready to expound his words to the benighted, half-comprehending masses of the proletariat. The event which more than any other was responsible for this transformation was the creation of the first Workers’ International in 1864, which radically altered the character and history of European socialism.
The French Revolution is the precursor of another, more magnificent revolution which will be the last. Gracchus babeuf, Manifeste des Egaux, 17g6 The First International came into being in the most casual possible fashion. In spite of the efforts of various organizations and committees to co-ordinate the activities of the workers of various countries, no genuine ties between them had been established. This was due to several causes. Since the general character of such bodies was conspiratorial, only a small minority of radically minded, fearless and ‘advanced’ workers were attracted to them; moreover, it was generally the case that before anything concrete could be achieved, a foreign war, or repressive measures by governments, put an end to the existence of the secret committees. To this must be added the lack of acquaintance and sympathy between the workers of different nations, working under totally different conditions. And finally, the increased economic prosperity which succeeded the years of hunger and revolt, by raising the general standard of living, automatically made for greater individualism, and stimulated the personal ambition of the bolder and more politically minded workers towards local self-improvement and the pursuit of immediate ends, and away fiom the comparatively nebulous ideal of an international alliance against the bourgeoisie. The development of the German workers, led by Lassalle, is a typical example of such a purely internal movement, rigorously centralized but confined to a single land, THE INTERNATIONAL 207 spurred on by an optimistic hope of gradually forcing the capitalist enemy to terms by the sheer weight of numbers, without having recourse to a revolutionary upheaval or violent seizure of power. This was en couraged by Bismarck’s anti-bourgeois policy which appeared to weight the scales in favour of the workers. In France the fearful defeat of 1848-9 left the city pro letariat broken, and for many years incapable of action on a large scale, healing its wounds by forming small local associations more or less Proudhonist in inspir ation. Nor were they entirely discouraged in this by the government of Napoleon III. The Emperor himself had in his youth posed as a friend of the peasants, artisans and factory workers against capitalist bureau cracy, and wished to represent his monarchy as an entirely novel and infinitely subtle form of government, an original blend of monarchism, republicanism and Tory democracy, a kind of New Deal in which political absolutism was tempered by economic liberalism; while the government, although centralized and responsible to the Emperor alone, in theory rested ultimately on the confidence of the people, and was therefore to be an entirely new and thoroughly modern institution, in finitely sensitive to new needs, responsive to every nuance of social change. Part of Napoleon’s elaborate policy of social con ciliation was the preservation of a delicate balance of power between the classes by playing them off against each other. The workers were therefore permitted to form themselves into unions under strict police super vision, in order to offset the dangerously growing power of the financial aristocracy with its suspected Orleanist loyalties. The workers, with no alternative choice before 208 KARL MARX them, accepted this cautiously outstretched official hand, and began constituting trades associations, a process half encouraged, half hampered, by the authorities. When the great Exhibition of Modern Industry was opened in London in 1863, French workers were given facilities for visiting it, and a selected deputation duly came to England, half tourists, half representatives of the French proletariat, theoretically sent to the Exhibi tion in order to study the latest industrial developments. A meeting was arranged between them and the repre sentative English unions. At this meeting, which originally was probably as vague in intention as other gatherings of its kind, there naturally arose such ques tions as comparative hours and wages in France and England, and the necessity of preventing employers from importing cheap black-leg labour from abroad with which to break strikes organized by local unions. A meeting was called in order to form an association which should be confined not merely to holding dis cussions and comparing notes, but for the purpose of beginning active economic and political co-operation, and perhaps for the promotion of an international democratic revolution. The initiative on this occasion came not from Marx, but from the English and French labour leaders themselves. On their fringe were radicals, of various kinds, Polish democrats, Italian Mazzinists, Proudhonists, Blanquists and neo-Jacobins from France and Belgium: anyone, indeed, who desired the fall of the existing order was at first freely welcomed. The first meeting was held in Sr Martin’s Hall, and was presided over by Edward Beesly, a charming and benevolent figure, then professor of ancient history in THE INTERNATIONAL 209 the University of London, a radical and a positivist, who belonged to the small but notable group which included Frederic Harrison and Compton, and had been deeply influenced by Comte and the early French socialists. Its members could be counted on to support every enlightened measure, and, for many years alone among the educated men of their time defended the highly unpopular cause of trade unionism at a period when it was being denounced in the House of Commons as an instrument deliberately invented to foment ill will between the classes. The meeting resolved to constitute an international federation of working men, pledged not to reform but to destroy the prevalent system of economic relations, and to substitute in its place one in which the workers would themselves acquire the ownership of the means of production, which would put an end to their economic exploitation and cause the fruit of their labour to be communally shared, an end which entailed the ultimate abolition of private property in all its forms. Marx, who had previously held himself coldly aloof from other gatherings of democrats, per ceived the solid character of this latest attempt at combination, organized as it was by genuine workers’ representatives and advertising definite and concrete purposes in which his own influence was clearly trace able. He rarely took part in any movement which he had not initiated himself. This was to be the exception. The German artisans in London appointed him their representative on the executive committee, and by the time the second meeting was held to vote the constitu tion, he took entire charge of the proceedings. After the French and Italian delegates, to whom the task of drafting the statutes was entrusted, had failed to produce 210 KARL MARX anything but the usual faded democratic commonplaces, Marx drew them up himself, adding an inaugural address which he composed for the occasion. The constitution which, as framed by the International Committee, was vague, humanitarian, and tinged with liberalism, emerged from his hands a tightly drawn, militant document constituting a rigorously disciplined body whose members were pledged to assist each other not merely in improving their common condition, but in systematically subverting, and whenever possible over throwing, the existing capitalist regime by open political action, and in particular by gaining representation in democratic parliaments, as the followers of Lassalle were beginning to attempt to do in German countries. A formal request was thereupon made to include some expressions of respect for ‘right and duty, truth, justice and freedom’. The words were inserted, but in a context in which Marx declared that ‘they could do no possible harm’. The new constitution was passed, and Marx began to work with his customary feverish rapidity, emerging into the limelight of international activity after fifteen years, if not of obscurity, of inter mittent light and darkness. The Inaugural Address of the International is, after the Communist Manifesto, the most remarkable docu ment of the Socialist Movement. It occupies little over a dozen octavo pages and opens with the declaration ‘. . . T THE INTERNATIONAL 211 economic emancipation of the working class is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means. That all efforts aiming at this great end have hitherto failed from want of solidarity between the manifold divisions of labour in each country, and from ihe absence of a fraternal bond of union between the working classes of different countries ... for these means the undersigned . . . have taken the steps necessary for founding the International Working Men’s Association.’ It contains a survey of the economic and social con-i ditions of the working class from 1848, and contrasts' the rapidly growing prosperity of the propertied classes with the depressed condition of the workers. 1848 is recognized as a crushing defeat for their class, yet even so it was not wholly without benefit: as a result of it, the feeling of international solidarity among workers had awoken. Its existence had made agitation for the legal limitation of the working day not entirely un successful, this being the first definite victory over a policy of extreme laissez-faire. The co-operative move ment had proved that high industrial efficiency was compatible with, and even increased by, the elimination of the capitalist slave-driver: wage labour had thus been demonstrated to be not a necessary but a transient and eradicable evil. The workers were at last beginning to grasp that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by listening to their capitalist advisers who, when ever they could not use force, sought to play on national and religious prejudices, on personal or local interests, on the profound political ignorance of the masses. Who ever might gain by national or dynastic wars, it was the workers on both sides who always lost. Yet their212 KARL MARX strength was such that by common action they could prevent this exploitation in peace as in war: as, indeed, their success in intervening in England against the send ing of help to the Southern states in the American civil war had proved. Against the formidable and in appearance overwhelming power of their enemy they had only one weapon—their numbers, ‘but numbers weigh in the scales only when they are united and organized and led consciously towards a single aim’; it was in the political field that their slavery was most manifest. To hold aloof from politics in the name of economic organization, as Proudhon and Bakunin taught, was criminal short-sightedness; they would obtain justice only if they could uphold it, if necessary by force, wherever they saw it trampled upon. Even if they could not intervene with armed force, they could at least protest and demonstrate and harass their governments, until the supreme standards of morality and justice, by which relations between individuals were conventionally judged, became the laws governing relations between nations. But this could not be done without altering the existing economic structure of society which, in spite of minor improvements, necessarily worked for the degradation and enslavement of the working class. There was only one class in whose real interest it was to arrest this downward trend and remove the possibility of its occurrence: that was the class which, possessing nothing, was bound by no tics of interest or sentiment to the old world of injustice or misery—the class which was as much the invention of the new age as machinery itself. The Address ended like the Communist Manifesto with the words, ‘Workers of the world unite!’ THE INTERNATIONAL 213 * The tasks of the new organization as embodied in this document were: to establish close relations between the workers of various countries and trades; to collect relevant statistics; to inform the workers of one country of the conditions, needs and the plans of the workers of another; to discuss questions of common interest; to secure co-ordinated simultaneous action in all countries in the event of international crises; to publish regular reports on the work of the associations, and the like. It was to meet in annual congresses and would be convened by a democratically elected general council in which all affiliated countries would be represented. Marx left the constitution as elastic as possible in order to be able to include as many active workers’ organiza tions as possible, however disparate their methods and character. At first he resolved to act cautiously and with moderation, to bind and unify, and eliminate dissidents gradually, as a greater measure of agreement was progressively reached. He carried out his policy precisely as he had planned it. The consequences were ruinous, although it is difficult to see what other tactics Marx could have adopted consistently with his principles. The International grew rapidly. Union after union of workers in the principal countries of Europe was converted by the prospect of united warfare for higher wages, shorter hours and political representation: it was far better organized than either Chartism or the earlier communist leagues had ever been, partly because tactical lessons had been learnt. Independent activity on the part of individuals was suppressed, popular oratory was discouraged and rigid discipline in all departments was introduced, mainly because it was led 214 KARL MARX and dominated by a single personality. The only man who might have attempted to rival Marx in the early years was Lassalle, and he was dead; even so, the spell of his legend was strong enough to insulate the Germans against full support of the London centre. Liebknecht, a man of mediocre talent, boundlessly devoted to Marx, preached the new creed with enthusiasm and skill, but the continuation of Bismarck’s anti-socialist policy, and the tradition of nationalism derived from Lassalle, kept the German workers’ activity within the frontiers of their country, preoccupied with problems of internal organization. As for Bakunin, that great disturber ol men’s spirits had lately returned to Western Europe after a romantic escape from Siberia, but while his personal prestige, both in the International and outside it, was immense, he had no organized follow'ing : he had drifted away from Herzen and the liberal agrarian party among the Russian emigres, and no one knew whither he was tending, least of all he himself. In common with the great majority of Proudhonists he and his followers became members of the International, but since it was openly committed to political action, they did so in defiance of their principles. The most enthusiastic members at this time were English and French trade unionists, who were temporarily under the spell of the new experiment with its vast promise of prosperity and power; they were no theorists, nor wished to be, and left all such questions to the General Council of the International. While this mood lasted, Marx had no serious rivals in the organization, being altogether superior in intellect, revolutionary experience and strength of will, to the odd amalgam of professional men, factory workers and stray ideologists who, with THE INTERNATIONAL 215 the addition of one or two dubious adventurers, com posed the First Internationa] Working Men’s Association^ Marx was now forty-six years of age and in appear ance and habits prematurely old. Of his six children three were dead, largely as a result of the material conditions of the life led by the family in their rooms in Soho: they had contrived to move to a more spacious house in Kentish Town, although they were still almost destitute. The great economic crisis, the severest yet experienced in Europe, which began in 1857, was warmly welcomed both by him and by Engels as likely to breed diseontent and rebellion, but it also curtailed Engels’s income, and so struck a blow at Marx himself at a moment when he could least afford it. The New Tork Tribune and occasional contributions to radical German newspapers saved him from literal starvation; but the margin by which the family survived was for twenty years perilously thin. By i860 even the American source began to fail; the editor of the New Tork Tribune, Horace Greeley, a fervent supporter of democratic nationalism, found himself in growing disagreement with his European correspondent’s sharply worded views. The economic crisis, and the added effect of the civil war, led to the dismissal of many of the Tribune's European correspondents: Dana pleaded to be allowed to retain Marx, but in vain. He was gradually edged out of his post during the beginning of 1861; the association finally ceased a year later. As for the International, it added to his duties and enlivened his existence, but did not increase his income. In despair he applied for a post of booking clerk in a railway office, but his tattered clothes and his menacing appearance were unlikely to produce a favourable impression on a 2l6 KARL MARX potential employer of clerical labour, and his application was finally rejected on account of his illegible hand writing. It is difficult to see how, without the support of Engels, he and his family could have survived at all during those fearful years. Meanwhile branches of the International had been established in Italy and Spain; by 1865 governments began to grow frightened; there was talk of arrests and proscriptions; the French Emperor made a half-hearted attempt to suppress it. This only served to heighten the fame and the prestige of the new body among the workers. For Marx, after the dark tunnel of the ’fifties, this was once more life and activity. The work of the International consumed his nights and days. With the customary devoted help of Engels he took personal possession of the central office, and acted not only as its semi-dictatorial adviser, but as the central drafti: g office and clearing-house of all correspondence. Every thing passed through his hands and moved in the direction which he gave it. The Swiss, Italian and Belgian sections, bred on the anti-authoritarianism of Proudhon and Bakunin, made vague but unavailing protests. Marx, who enjoyed complete ascendancy over the Council, tightened his hold still further: he insisted on rigid conformity to every point of the original programme. His old energy seemed to return. He wrote spirited, almost gay letters to Engels; even his theoretical works bear the imprint of this newdy found vigour, and as often happens, intense work in one field stimulated dormant activity in another. A sketch of his economic theory had appeared in 1859: but his major work, which poverty and ill-health had interrupted, now at last began to near its end. THE INTERNATIONAL 217 Marx made few personal appearances at the meetings of the congress of the International: he preferred to control its activities from London, where he regularly attended the meetings of the General Council and issued detailed instructions to his followers on it. As always he trusted and relied almost entirely on Germans: he found a faithful mouthpiece in an elderly tailor named Eccarius, long resident in England, a man not burdened with excess of intelligence or imagination, but depend able and thorough. Eccarius, like the majority of Marx’s underlings, eventually revolted, and joined the secessionists, but for eight years, as secretary to the Council of the International, he carried out Marx’s instructions to the letter. Annual congresses were held in London, Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels, Basle, at which general problems were discussed and definite measures voted upon; common decisions were adopted with regard to hours and wages; such questions as the position of women and children, the type of political and economic pressure most suitable to differing conditions in various European countries, the possibility of collabor ation with other bodies, were considered. Marx’s chief concern was to arrive at a clear formulation of a concrete international policy in terms of specific demands co ordinated with each other, and the creation of a rigorous discipline which guaranteed undeviating adhesion to this policy. He therefore successfully resisted all offers of alliance with such purely humanitarian bodies as the League of Peace and Freedom, then newly founded under the aegis of Mazzini, Bakunin and John Stuart Mill. This dictatorial policy was bound, sooner or later, to lead to discontent and rebellion; it crystallized round Bakunin whose conception of a loose federation of 218 KARL MARX semi-independent local bodies began to gain adherents in the Swiss and Italian sections of the International, and to a lesser extent in France. Finally they resolved to consti tute themselves, under Bakunin’s leadership, into a body to be called the Democratic Alliance, affiliated to the International, but with an internal organization of its own pledged to resist centralization and to support federal autonomy. This was a heresy which even a more tolerant man than Marx could not afford to over look : the International was not intended to be a mere correspondence society between a loose association of radical committees, but a unified political party pressing for a single end in all the centres of its dispersion. He believed firmly that any connexion with Bakunin—or indeed any Russian—was bound to end by badly betray ing the working class, a view which he had acquired after his brief and enjoyable flirtation, and subsequent disillusionment, with the aristocratic Russian radicals of the ’forties. As for Bakunin, while he professed sincerely enough to admire Marx’s personal genius, he never concealed either his personal antipathy for him, or his rooted loathing of Marx’s belief in authoritarian methods, expressed both in his theories and in his practical organization of the revolutionary party. ‘We, revolutionary anarchists’, Bakunin declared, ‘are the enemies of all forms of state and state organization ... we think that all state rule, all governments, being by their very nature placed outside the mass of the people, must necessarily seek to subject it to customs and purposes entirely foreign to it. We therefore declare ourselves to be foes ... of all state organizations as such, and believe that the people can only be happy and free, when, organized from below by means of its own THE INTERNATIONAL 2ig autonomous and completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its own life. ‘We believe power corrupts those who wield it as much as those who are forced to obey it. Under its corrosive influence, some become greedy and ambitious tyrants, exploiting society in their own interest, or in that of their class, while others are turned into abject slaves. Intellectuals, positivists, doctrinaires, all those who jruLscicnce before life . . . defend the idea of the state and its authority as being the only possible salva tion of society—quite logically, since from their false premiss that thought comes before life, that only abstract theory can form the starting-point of social practice . . . they draw the inevitable conclusion that since such theoretical knowledge is at present possessed by very few, these few must be put in control of social life, not only to inspire, but to direct all popular movements, and that no sooner is the revolution over than a new social organization must at once be set up; not a free associa tion of popular bodies . . . working in accordance with the needs and instincts of the people, but a centralized dictatorial power concentrated in the hands of this academic minority, as if they really expressed the popular will. . . . The difference between such revolu tionary dictatorship and the modern State is only one of external trappings. In substance both are a tyranny of the minority over the majority in the name of the people—in the name of the stupidity of the many and the superior wisdom of the few—and so they are equally reactionary, devising to secure political and economic privilege to the ruling minority, and the . . . enslave ment of the masses, to destroy the present order only to erect their own rigid dictatorship on its ruins.’ 220 KARL MARX Bakunin’s attacks on Marx and Lassalle could not pass unnoticed, the more so because they were tinged by anti semitism, for which his friend Herzen more than once had occasion to reproach him. And yet, when in 1869 Herzen begged him to leave the International, he wrote, with a characteristic burst of magnanimity, that he could not join the opponents of a man ‘who has served [the cause of socialism] for twenty-five years with insight, energy, and disinterestedness in which he undoubtedly excelled us all’. Marx’s dislike of Bakunin did not blind him to the need for conceding a certain measure of regional inde pendence for motives of sheer expediency. Thus he successfully foiled the plan to create international trade unions because he believed that this was premature and would lead to an immediate rift with the existing, nationally organized, trade unions from which, at any rate in England, the chief support of the International was drawn. But if he made this concession, he did so not for love of federalism as such, but solely not to endanger what had already been built up, without which he could not create a body, the existence of which would make the workers conscious that there were be hind their demands, not, as in 1848, merely sympathizers here and there, prepared to offer moral support or at best occasional contributions—but a well-disciplined, militant force pledged to resist, and, when necessary, intimidate and coerce their own governments, unless justice were done to their brothers everywhere. In order to create the permanent possibility of such active solidarity in theory and in practice, a central body in un disputed authority, a kind of general staff responsible for strategy and tactics, seemed to him indispensable.
THE INTERNATIONAL 221 Bakunin, by bis attempts to loosen the structure of the International and to encourage varieties of opinion in the local sections, appeared to him to be deliberately aiming to destroy this possibility. If he were successful, it would mean the loss of what had been won, a return to utopianism, the disappearance of the new sober outlook, of the realization that the sole strength of the workers lay in unity, that what delivered them into the hands of their enemies in 1848 was the fact that they were engaged in scattered risings, sporadic emotional outbursts of violence, instead of a single carefully concerted revolution, organized to begin at a moment chosen for its historical appropriateness, directed from a common source and to a common end, by men who had accurately studied the situation and their own and their enemy’s strength. Bakuninism led to the dissipation of the revolutionary impulse, to the old romantic, noble, futile heroism, rich in saints and martyrs, but crushed only too easily by the more realistic enemy, and neces sarily followed by a period of weakness and disillusion ment likely to set the movement back for many decades. Maix did not under-estimate Bakunin’s revolutionary energy and power to stir men’s imaginations: indeed, it was for this reason that he regarded him as a dangerously disruptive force likely to breed chaos wherever he went. The workers’ cause would rest on volcanic soil if he and his followers were allowed to irrupt into the ranks of its defenders. Hence after some years of desultory skirmish ing, he decided upon an open attack. It ended with the excommunication of Bakunin and his followers from the ranks of the International. CHAPTER X ‘THE RED TERRORIST DOCTOR’ We are what we are because of him: without him we should still be sunk in a slough of confusion. FRIEDRICH ENGELS, 1883 The first volume of Das Kapital was finally published in 1867. The appearance of this book was an epoch- makmg-event in the history of international socialism and in Marx’s own life. It was conceived as a com prehensive treatise on the laws and morphology of the economic organization of modern society, seeking to describe the processes of production, exchange and distribution as they actually occur, to explain tlicir present state as a particular stage in the development constituted by the movement of the class struggle, in Marx’s own words, ‘to ‘the red terrorist doctor’ 223 of characteristics which came into prominence only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; or else describe societies which if they were ever real, have long since vanished. He therefore conceived it as his task to create a new system of concepts and definitions which should have definite application to the contemporary world, and be so constructed as to reflect the changing structure of economic life in relation not only to its past, but also to its future. In the first volume Marx made an attempt at once to provide a systematic exposition of certain basic theorems of economic science, and more specifically to describe the rise of the new industrial system, as a consequence of the new relations between employers and labour created by the effect of technological progress on the methods of production. The first volume therefore deals with the productive process; that is, on the one hand, the relation between machinery and labour, and on the other between the actual producers, i.e. the workers and those who employ and direct them. The remaining volumes, published after his death by his executors, deal with the methods in use of marketing the finished product, i.e. the system of exchange and the financial machinery whiclf^if involves, and with relations between producers and consumers, which determine the rate of interest and profit. The general thesis which runs through the entire work is that adumbrated in the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s earlier economic writings.1 It traces the rise of the modern proletariat by correlating it with the1 For a more detailed account of Marxist economic doctrine, together witli the best-known criticisms of it, the reader is referred to the chapter on ‘Communist Economics’ in Pro fessor H. J. Laski’s Communism, published in this series. 224 KARL MARX general development of the technical means of produc tion. When, in the course of their gradual evolution, these means become too costly and elaborate to be cap able of being made by each man for his own use, certain individuals, owing to their superior skill, power and enterprise, or to accident of fortune, acquire sole control of such instruments and tools, and thus find themselves in a position in which they can hire the labour of others by offering them more in the form of a regular remunera tion than they would receive as independent producers vainly attempting to achieve the same results with the old and obsolete tools which alone they have in their possession. As a result of selling their labour to others, these men themselves become so many commodities in the economic market, and their labour power acquires a definite price which fluctuates precisely like that of other commodities. A commodity is any object embodying human labour for which there is a social demand. It is thus a concept which, he is careful to point out, can be applied only at a relatively late stage of social development: and is no more eternal than any other economic category. The commercial value of a commodity is assumed to be directly constituted by the number of hours of human labour which it takes an average producer to create an average specimen of its kind (a view derived from a somewhat similar doctrine held by Ricardo and the classical economists). A day’s work by a labourer may well produce an object possessing a value greater than the value of the minimum quantity of commodities which he needs for his own support; he thus produces something more valuable than he consumes; indeed, unless he did so, his master would have no economic THE RED TERRORIST DOCTOR’ 225 reason for employing him. As a commodity in the market, his labour power may itself be acquired for £x, which represents the minimum sum needed to maintain him in sufficient health to enable him to do his work efficiently; the goods he produces will sell for £y> £y~x represents the extent by which he has in creased the total wealth of society, and this is the residue which his employer pockets. Even after the reasonable reward of the employer’s own work in his capacity as the organizer and manager of the processes of production and distribution is deducted, a definite residue of the social income remains, which in the form of rent, interest on investments, or commercial profit, is shared, according to Marx, not by society as a whole, but solely by those members of it who are called the capitalist or bourgeois class, distinguished from the rest by the fact that they alone in their capacity as sole owners of the means of production, obtain and accumulate such unearned increment. Whether Marx’s concept of value be interpreted as meaning the actual market price of commodities, or an average norm, round which the actual prices oscillate, or an ideal limit towards which they tend, or that which in a rationally organized society prices ought to be, or something more metaphysical and Hegelian, an im palpable essence, infused into brute matter by the creativeness of human labour, or, as unsympathetic critics have maintained, a confusion of all these; and again whether the notion of a uniform entity called un differentiated human labour (which according to the theory constitutes economic value), different manifesta tions of which can be compared in respect of quantity alone, is, or is not, valid—and it is not easy to defend 226 KARL MARX Marx’s use of either concept—the theory of exploitation based on them remains comparatively unaffected. The central thesis which • made so powerful an appeal to workers, who did not for the most part begin to compre hend the intricacies of Marx’s general argument about the relation of exchange value and actual prices, is that there is only one social class, their own, which produces more wealth than it enjoys, and that this residue is appropriated by other men simply by virtue of their strategical position as the sole possessors of the means of production, that Is, natural resources, machinery, means oT transport, financial credit, and so forth; for withoufithese the workers cannot create; while control over them gives those who have it the power of starving the rest of mankind into capitulation on their own terms. Political," ^social, religious and legal institutions are represented as being so many moral and intellectual weapons designed to organize the world in the interest of the employers. These last employ, over and above the producers of commodities, that is, the proletariat, a whole army of ideologists: propagandists, interpreters^ and apologists, who defend the capitalist system, em bellish it, and create literary and artistic monuments to it, designed to increase the confidence and optimism of those who benefit under it, and make it appear more palatable to its victims. But if the development of technology, as Saint-Simon correctly discovered, has for a period given this unique power to landowners, industrialists and financiers—every type of middle man, its uncontrollable advance will no less inevitably destroy them. Already Fourier, and after him Proudhon, had declaimed against the processes by which the great
‘the red terrorist doctor 227 bankers and manufacturers, by means of their superior resources, tend to eliminate small traders and craftsmen from the economic market, creating a mass of discon tented, declasse individuals, who are automatically forced into the ranks of the proletariat. Ruthless competition between individual capitalists, seeking to increase the quantity of surplus value, and the natural necessity arising from this of lowering the cost of pro duction and finding new markets, is bound to lead to greater and greater fusion of rival firms, that is to a ceaseless process of amalgamation, until only the largest and most powerful groups are left in existence, all others being forced into a position of dependence or semi-dependence, in the new centralized industrial hierarchy, which grows, and will continue to grow, faster and faster. Centralization is a direct product of rationalization: of increased efficiency in production and transport secured by the pooling of resources, of the formation of great monopolistic trusts and combines which are capable of planned co-ordination. The workers previously scattered among many small enter prises, reinforced by continual influx of the sons and daughters of the ruined small traders and manufacturers, automatically become united into a single self-conscious proletarian army by the very processes of integration at work among their masters. Their power as a political and economic force grows correspondingly greater. Already trade unions, developing in the shadow of the factory system, represent a far more powerful weapon in the hands of the proletariat than any that existed before. The process of industrial expansion will tend to organize society more and more into the shape of an immense pyramid, with fewer and increasingly powerful 228 KARL MARX capitalists at its summit and a vast, discontented mass of exploited workers and colonial slaves forming its base. The more machinery replaces human labour the lower the rate of profit is bound to fall, since ‘surplus value’ is determined solely by the quantity of the latter. The struggle between competing capitalists and their countries, which are in effect controlled by them, will grow bitterer and more deadly, being wedded to a system of unhampered competition, under which each can only survive by overreaching and destroying his rivals. Within the framework of capitalism and unchecked private enterprise, these processes cannot be controlled, since the vested interests on which capitalist society rests, depend for their survival on absolute freedom of competition. Marx did not, however, clearly foresee the consequences of the competition between rival imperialisms, and, in particular, the development of political nationalism as a force cutting across and trans forming the development of capitalism itself, and offer ing a bulwark to the gradually impoverished section of the bourgeoisie, which forms an alliance with the reaction in its desperate anxiety to avoid its Marxist destiny of falling into the proletariat below it.His classification of social strata into the obsolescent military-feudal aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, the proletariat^ and that casual riff-raff on the edge of society which he called the Lumpenproletanat—a fruitful and original classification for its time—over-simplifies issues when it is too mechan ically applied to the twentieth century. A more elaborate instrument is required, if only to deal with the independ ent behaviour of classes, like the semi-ruined petite
Marx prophesied that the periodic crises due to the absence of planned economies, and unchecked industrial strife, would necessarily grow more frequent and acute. Wars, on a hitherto unprecedented scale, would ravage the civilized world, until finally the Hegelian contra dictions of a system, whose continuance depends upon more and more destructive conflicts between its con stituent parts, would obtain a violent solution. The ever-decreasing group of capitalists in power would be overthrown by the workers whom they themselves would have so efficiently drilled into a compact, dis ciplined body. With the disappearance of the last possessing class, the final end would be reached of the war between the classes, which is the sole and sufficient cause of economic scarcity and social strife. In a celebrated passage in the twenty-second chapter of the first volume of Das Kapital he declared: ‘While there is a progressive diminution in the number of capitalist magnates, there is of course a corresponding increase in the mass of poverty, enslavement, degenera tion and exploitation, but at the same time there is a steady intensification of the role of the working class—a class which grows ever more numerous, and is disciplined, unified and organized by the very mechanism of the
The publication of Das Kapilal had at last provided a definite intellectual foundation for international social ism in the place of a scattered mass of vaguely defined and conflicting ideas. The interdependence of the ‘the red terrorist doctor’ 231 historical economic and political theses preached by Marx and Engels was revealed in this monumental compilation. It became the central objective of attack and defence. All subsequent forms of socialism hereafter defined themselves in terms of their attitude to the posi tion taken in it, and were understood and classified by their resemblance to it. After a brief period of obscurity, its fame began to grow and reached an extraordinary height. It acquired a symbolic significance beyond anything written since the age of faith. It has been blindly worshipped, and blindly hated, by millions who have not read a line of it, or have read without under standing its obscure and tortuous prose. In its name revolutions were made; the counter-revolutions which followed concentrated upon its suppression as the most potent and insidious of the enemy’s weapons. A new social order has been established which professes its principles and sees in it the final and unalterable expres sion of its faith. It has called into existence an army of interpreters and casuists, whose unceasing labours for nearly three-quarters of a century have buried it beneath a mountain of commentary, which has out grown in influence the sacred text itself. In Marx’s own life it marked a decisive moment. He intended it to be his greatest contribution to the emancipation of humanity, and had sacrificed to it fifteen years of his life and much of his public ambition. The labour which had gone towards it was truly pro digious. For its sake he endured poverty, illness and persecution both public and personal, suffering these not gladly indeed, but with a single-minded stoicism whose strength and harshness both moved and frightened those who came in contact with it. 232 KARL MARX He offered to dedicate his book to Darwin, for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries, regarding him as having, by his theory of evolution and natural selection, done for the morphology of the natural sciences, what he himself was striving to do for human history. Darwin hastily declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end—the advance ment of human knowledge. It was dedicated to the memory of Wilh ‘the red terrorist doctor’ 233 Marx’s scientific appetite had not diminished since his Paris days. He believed in exact scholarship and sternly drove his reluctant followers into the reading- room of the British Museum. Liebknecht, in his memoirs, describes how day after day the ‘scum of international communism’ might be seen meekly seated at the desks in the reading-room, under the eye of the master himself. Indeed no social or political movement has laid such emphasis on research and erudition. The extent of Marx’s own reading is to some degree indicated by the references in his works alone, which explore exceedingly obscure by-ways in ancient, medieval, and modern literature. The text is liberally sprinkled with footnotes, long, mordant and annihilating, which recall Gibbon’s classical employment of this weapon. The adversaries at whom they are directed are for the most part for gotten names to-day, but occasionally his shafts are aimed at well-known figures; Macaulay, Gladstone, and one or two notorious academic economists of the time, are attacked with a savage concentration which has inaugurated a new epoch in the technique of public vituperation, and created the school of socialist polemical writing which has entirely altered the general character of political controversy. There is conspicuously little praise in the book. The warmest tribute is earned by the British factory inspectors, whose fearless and un biased reports both of the appalling conditions which they witnessed, and of the means adopted by factory owners to circumvent the law, is declared to be a uniquely honourable phenomenon in the history of bourgeois society. The technique of social research was revolutionized by the example set by him in the use of Blue Books and official reports: the greater part of his a
234 KARL MARX detailed indictment of modem industrialism is based almost wholly upon them. After his death, Engels, who edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, found the manuscript in a far more chaotic condition than he expected. The year in which the first volume appeared marks not a turning but a breaking-point in Marx’s life. His views during the remaining sixteen years of his life altered little; he added, revised, corrected, wrote pamphlets and letters, but published nothing that was new; he reiterated the old position tirelessly, but the tone is milder, a faint note almost of querulous self-pity, totally absent before, is now discernible. His belief in the proximity, even in the ultimate inevitability of a world revolution, diminished. His prophecies had been disappointed too often; he had confidently predicted a great upheaval in 1842, during a weavers’ rising in Silesia, and even inspired Heine to write his famous poem upon it which he published in his Paris journal; again in 1851, 1857 and 1872 he expected revolutionary outhrea.ks which failed to materialize. His long-term predictions were far more successful, not only with regard to the general development of capitalism—concerning which he has proved a singularly true prophet, erring only in supposing that centralization of control neces sarily entailed centralization of ownership of economic resources, a hypothesis not borne out by the growth in the number of small investors, and the increasing tendency to divide the land into small holdings—but also more specifically, as when, after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Prussia, he foretold that this would throw France into the arms of Russia and so bring about the first great world war. He allowed that the revolution'the red terrorist doctor’ 235 may be longer in arriving than he and Engels had once estimated, and in some countries, notably in England, where in his day there was no real army and no real bureaucracy, it may actually not occur at all, ‘although’, he enigmatically added, ‘history indicates otherwise’. He was not fifty when he began to subside into conscious old age. The heroic period was over. Das Kapital created a new reputation for its author. His previous books had been passed over in silence even in German-speaking countries: his new work was reviewed and discussed as far afield as Russia and Spain. In the next ten years it was translated into French, English, Russian, Italian: indeed, Bakunin himself gallantly offered to translate it into Russian. But this project, if it was ever begun, collapsed in circumstances of sordid personal and financial scandal which were partly responsible for the demise of the International five years later. Its sudden rise to fame was due to a major event which two years earlier altered the history of Europe and completely changed the direction in which the working class movement had hitherto developed. If Marx and Engels sometimes predicted events which failed to happen, they more than once failed to foresee events which did. Thus Marx denied that the Crimean War would occur, and backed the wrong side in the Austro-Prussian War. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 came to them as something wholly unexpected. For years they had underestimated Prussian strength; the true alliance of cynicism and brute force was in their eyes represented by the Emperor of the French. Bismarck was an able Junker, who served his King and his class; even his victory over Austria did not convince them of 236 KARL MARX his real quality or aims. Marx may have been genuinely deceived to some extent by Bismarck’s representation of the war as being on his part purely defensive, for he signed the protest which the Council of the International immediately published only after it had been altered to make this clear—a step for which many socialists in Latin countries never forgave him, insisting in later years that it was inspired by pure German patriotism, to which both he and Engels were always conspicuously prone. The International in general, and in particular its German members, behaved irreproachably through out the brief campaign. The Council in its proclamation, issued in the middle of the war, warned the German workers against supporting the policy of annexation which Bismarck might well pursue; it explained in clear terms that the interests of the French and German proletariat were identical, being menaced only by the common enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie of both countries, which had brought about the war for its own ends, wasting for their sakes the lives and substance of the working class equally of Germany and of France. In due course it exhorted the French workers to support the formation of a republic on a broadly democratic basis. During the wild wave of war chauvinism which swept over Germany, and engulfed even the left wing of the Lassallians, only the Marxists, Liebknecht and Bebel, preserved their sanity. To the indignation of the entire country they abstained from voting for war credits and spoke vigorously in the Reichstag against the war, and in particular against the annexation of Alsace- Lorraine. For this they were charged with treason and imprisoned. In Yüklə 241,89 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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