Delhi university library

a celebrated letter to Engels, Marx pointed out that the defeat of Germany, which would


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have strengthened Bonapartism and crippled the German workers for many years to come, might have been even more disastrous than German victory. By transferring the centre of gravity from Paris to Berlin, Bismarck was doing their work for them, however unconsciously; for the German workers, being better organized and better disciplined than the French, were consequently a stronger citadel of social democracy than Frenchmen could have been; while the defeat of Bonapartism would remove a nightmare from Europe.

In the autumn the French army was defeated at Sedan, the Emperor taken prisoner, and Paris besieged. The King of Prussia, who had solemnly sworn that the war was defensive and directed not against France but against Napoleon, changed his tactics, and, armed with an enthusiastic plebiscite from his people, demanded the cession of Alsace-Lorraine and the payment of an indemnity of five billion francs. The tide of English opinion, hitherto anti-Bonapartist and pro-German, under the influence of continual reports of Prussian atrocities in France, veered round sharply. The International issued a second Manifesto violently protesting against the annexation, denouncing the dynastic ambitions of the Prussian King, and calling upon the French workers to unite with all defenders of democracy against the common Prussian foe. ‘If frontiers are to be fixed by military interests’, wrote Marx in 1870, ‘there will be no end of claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory: they can never be fixed fairly or finally because they always must be improved by the conqueror or the conquered, and consequently carry within them the seeds of fresh wars. History will

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measure its retribution, not by the extent of square miles conquered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Ike policy of conquest.' This time war credits were voted against, not by Liebknecht and Bebel .alone, but also by the Lassallians, shamed out of their recent patriotism. Marx jubilantly wrote to Engels that for the first time the principles and policy of the International had obtained public expression in a European legislative assembly: the International had become a force to be officially reckoned with: the dream of a united proletarian party with identical ends in all countries was beginning to be realized. Paris was presently starved into submission and capitulated; a national assembly was elected, Thiers was made President of the new Republic, and appointed a provisional government of conservative views. In April the government made an attempt to disarm the Paris National Guard, a volunteer citizen force which showed signs of radical sympathies. It refused to give up its arms, declared its autonomy, deposed the officials of the provisional government, and elected a revolutionary committee of the people as the true government of France. The regular troops were brought to Versailles and invested the rebellious city. It was the first campaign of what both sides immediately recognized to be an open class war.

The Commune, as the new government described itself, was neither created nor inspired by the International : it was not even, in a strict sense, socialist in its doctrines, unless a dictatorship of any popularly elected committee in itself constitutes a socialist phenomenon. It consisted of a highly heterogeneous collection of individuals, for the most part followers of Blanqui,

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Proudhon, and Bakunin, with an admixture of pure rhetoricians, like Felix Pyat, who knew only that they were fighting for France, the people, and the revolution, and proclaimed death to all tyrants, priests and Prussians. Workmen, soldiers, writers, painters like Courbet, scholars like the geographer Reclus and the critic Vallds, ambiguous politicians like Rochefort, foreign exiles of mildly liberal views, bohemians and adventurers of every description were swept up in a common revolutionary wave. It rose at a moment of national hysteria after the moral and material misery of a siege and a capitulation, at a moment when the national revolution which promised to do away finally with the last relics of BonaparList and Orleanist reaction, denounced by Thiers and his ministers, abandoned by the middle classes, uncertain of support among the peasantry, seemed suddenly threatened with the return of all that it most feared and loathed, the generals, the financiers, the priests. By a great effort the people had shaken off the nightmare first of the Empire then of the siege; they had hardly awoken yet when the spectres seemed to advance upon them once again: terrified, they revolted. This common sense of horror before the resurgence of the past was almost the sole bond which united the Communards. Their views on political organization were vague to a degree: they announced that the state in its old form was abolished, and called upon the people in arms to govern itself.

Presently, as supplies began to give out, and the condition of the besieged grew more desperate, terror developed: proscriptions began, men and women were condemned and executed, many of them certainly guiltless, and few deserving of death. Among those executed

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was the Archbishop of Paris who had been held as a hostage against the army at Versailles. The rest of Europe watched the monstrous events with growing indignation and disgust. The Communards seemed even to enlightened opinion, even to old and tried friends of the people like Louis Blanc and Mazzini, to be a band of criminal lunatics dead to the appeal of humanity, social incendiaries pledged to destroy all religion and all morality, men driven out of their minds by real and imaginary wrongs, scarcely responsible for their enormities. Practically the entire European Press, reactionary and liberal alike, combined to give the same impression. Here and there a radical journal condemned less roundly than the others, and timidly pleaded extenuating circumstances. The atrocities of the Commune did not long remain unavenged. The retribution which the victorious army exacted took the form of mass executions; the white terror, as is common in such cases, far outdid in acts of bestial cruelty the worst excesses of the regime, the misdeeds of which it had come to end.

The International vacillated; composed as it largely was of enemies of the Blanquists and neo-Jacobins who formed the majority of the Commune, opposed to the Communard programme, and in particular to acts of terrorism, it had, moreover, formally advised against the revolt declaring that ‘any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, . . . would be desperate folly’. The English members were particulail) anxious not to compromise themselves by open association with a body which, in the opinion of the majority of their countrymen, was little better than a gang of common murderers. Marx solved their doubts by a

‘the RED TERRORIST DOCTOR* 24I

very characteristic act. In the name of the International he published an address in which he proclaimed that the moment for analysis and criticism had passed. After giving a swift and vivid account of the events which led to the creation of the Commune, of its rise and fall, he acclaimed it as the first open and defiant manifestation in history of the strength and idealism of the working class—the first pitched battle which it had fought against its oppressors before the eyes of the whole world, an act forcing all its false friends, the radical bourgeoisie, the democrats and humanitarians to show themselves in their true colours, as enemies to the ultimate ends for which it was prepared to live and die. He went further than this: he recognized the Commune as that transitional form of social structure by passing through which alone the workers could gain their ultimate emancipation. To this extent he once more, as in 1850 and 1852, retracted the doctrine of the Communist Manifesto, which had asserted, as against the French Utopians and early anarchists, that the immediate end of the revolution was not to destroy, but to seize the state and make use of it to liquidate the enemy.

His pamphlet, later entitled The Civil War in France, was not primarily intended as a historical study: it was a tactical move, and one of typical audacity and intransigeance. Marx was sometimes blamed by his own followers for allowing the International to be linked in the popular mind with a band of law-breakers and assassins, an association which earned for it an unnecessarily sinister reputation. This was not the kind of consideration which could have influenced him in the slightest degree. He was, all his life, a convinced and uncompromising believer in a violent working class

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revolution. The Commune was the first spontaneous rising of the workers in their capacity as workers: the June emeute of 1848, was, in his view, an attack on, and not by, them. The Commune was not directly inspired by Marx. He regarded it, indeed, as a political blunder: his adversaries the Blanquists and Proudhonists predominated in it to the end; and yet its significance in his eyes was immense. Before it there had indeed been many scattered streams of socialist thought and action; but this rising, with its world repercussions, the great effect which it was bound to have upon the workers of all lands, was the first event of the new era. The men who had died in it and for it, were the first martyrs of international socialism, their blood would be the seed of the new proletarian faith: whatever the tragic faults and shortcomings of the Communards, they were as nothing before the magnitude of the historical role which these men had played, the position which they were destined to occupy in the tradition of proletarian revolution.

By coming forward to pay them open homage he achieved what he intended to achieve: he helped to create a heroic legend of socialism. More than thii ly years later Lenin defended the Moscow rising, which occurred during the abortive Russian revolution of 1905, against the highly damaging criticisms of Plek- hanov, by quoting the attitude of Marx towards the Commune: by pointing out that the emotional and symbolic value of the memory of a great heroic outburst, however ill conceived, however harmful in its immediate results, was an infinitely greater and more permanent asset to a revolutionary movement than the realization of its futilily at a moment when what matters

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most is not to write accurate history, or even to learn its lessons, but to make it.

The publication of the address embarrassed and shocked many members of the International and hastened its ultimate dissolution. Marx attempted to forestall all reproaches by revealing his name as the sole author of the work. ‘The Red Terrorist Doctor’, as he was now popularly known, became overnight the object of public odium: anonymous letters began to arrive, his life was several times threatened. Jubilantly he wrote to Engels: ‘It is doing me good after twenty long and boring years of idyllic isolation like a frog in a swamp. The Government organ—the Observer—is even threatening me with prosecution. Let them try it. I snap my fingers at the canaille!’ The hubbub died down, but the damage done to the International was permanent: it became indissolubly connected in the minds both of the police and of the general public with the outrages of the Commune. A blow was dealt to the alliance of the English trade-union leaders with the International, which was, in any case, from their point of view entirely opportunist, based on its usefulness in promoting specific union interests. The unions were at this time being strongly wooed by the Liberal Party with promises of support upon these very issues. The prospect of a peaceful and respectable conquest of power made them less than ever anxious to be associated with a notorious revolutionary conspiracy; their sole end was to raise the standard of living and the social and political status of the skilled workers whom they represented. They did not look upon themselves as a political party, and if they subscribed to the programme of the International, this was due partly to the elasticity

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of its statutes, which skilfully avoided committing its members to definitely revolutionary ends, but most of all to their haziness on political issues. This fact was well appreciated by the Government which, in reply to a circular from the Spanish Government demanding the suppression of the International, replied in the person of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, that in England they felt no danger of armed insurrection: the English members were peaceful men, solely occupied in labour negotiations, and gave the Government no ground for apprehension. Marx himself was b tterly aware of the truth of this: even blarney and Jones were in his eys preferable to the men he now had to deal with, solid trade-union officials like Odger, or Cremer or Apple- garth, who distrusted foreigners, cared little for events outside their country, and took little interest in ideas.

No meetings of the International having been held in 1870-r, a meeting was convened in London in 1872. The most important proposal brought up by this Congress, that the working class henceforth cease to rely in the political struggle upon the assistance of bourgeois parties, and form a party of their own, was, after a stormy debate, carried by the votes of the English delegates. The new political party was not set up during Marx’s lifetime, but, in idea at least, the Labour party was born at this meeting, and may be regarded as Marx’s greatest single contribution to the internal history of his adopted land. At the same congress the English delegates insisted on, and won, the right to form a separate local organization instead of, as before, being represented by the General Council. This displeased and frightened Marx: it was a gesture of distrust, almost

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of rebellion; at once he suspected the machinations of Bakunin, whom the recent events in France had put in a proud and ecstatic mood, since he felt that they were overwhelmingly due to his personal influence. A large part of Paris was destroyed by fire during the Commune: this fire seemed to him a symbol of his own life, and a magnificent realization of his favourite paradox: ‘Destruction, too, is a kind of creation.’

Marx neither understood nor wished to understand the emotional basis of Bakunin’s acts and declarations: his influence was a menace to the movement, and must consequently be destroyed.

‘The International was founded’, he wrote in 1871, ‘in order to replace the socialist and semi-socialist sects with a genuine organization of the working class for its struggle. . . . Socialist sectarianism and a real working-class movement are in inverse ratio to each other. Sects have a right to exist only so long as the working class is not mature enough to have an independent movement of its own: as soon as that moment arrives sectarianism becomes reactionary. . . . The history of the International is a ceaseless battle of the General Council against dilettantisl experiments and sects. . . . Towards the end of 1868 the International was joined by Bakunin whose purpose it was to create an International within the International, and to place himself at its head. For M. Bakunin, his doctrine (an absurd patchwork composed of bits and pieces of views taken from Proudhon, Saint-Simon, &c.) was, and still is, something of secondary importance, serving him only as a means of acquiring persona! influence and power. But if Bakunin, as a theoriest, is nothing, Bakunin, the intriguer, has attained to the highest peak


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of his profession. ... As for his political non-participation, every movement in which the working class as such is opposed to the ruling classes, and exercises pressure upon it from without, is eo ipso a political movement . . . but when the workers’ organization is not so highly developed that it can afford to risk decisive engagement with the dominant political power—then it must be prepared for this by ceaseless agitation against the crimes and follies of the ruling class. Otherwise it becomes a plaything in its hands, as was demonstrated by the September revolution in France, and, to some extent, by the recent successes in England of Gladstone & Co.’

Bakunin at this period had entered upon the last and strangest phase of his bizarre existence. He had completely fallen under the spell of a young Russian terrorist, Nechayev, whose audacity and freedom from scruple he found irresistible. Nechayev, who believed in blackmail and intimidation as essential revolutionary weapons justified by their end, had written an anonymous letter to the agent of the prospective publisher of Bakunin’s Russian version of Das Kapital, threatening him in general but violent terms, if he should continue to force his wretched hackwork upon men of genius, or pester Bakunin for the return of the advance which had been paid him. The frightened and infuriated agent sent the letter to Marx. It is doubtful whether the evidence of the intrigues conducted by Bakunin’s organization, the Democratic Alliance, would in itself have been sufficient to secure his expulsion, since he numbered many personal supporters at the Congress; but the report of the committee instructed to look into this scandal and the dramatic production of the Nechayev letter, turned the

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scale. After long and stormy sessions, in the course of which even the Proudhonists had finally been persuaded that no party could preserve its unity while Bakunin was in its ranks, he and his closest associates were expelled by a small majority.

Marx’s next proposal also came as a bombshell to the uninitiated members of the Congress: it was to transfer the seat of the Council to the United States. Everyone realized that this was tantamount to the dissolution of the International. America was not merely infinitely distant from European affairs, but insignificant in the affairs of the International. The French delegates declared that one might as well remove it to the moon. Marx gave no explicit reason for this proposal, which was formally moved by Engels, but its purpose must have been clear enough to all those present. He could not operate without the loyal and unquestioned obedience of at least some sections of the body over which he ruled : England had seceded; he had thought of moving the Council to Belgium, but there, too, the anti-Marxist element was becoming formidable; in Germany the government would suppress it; France, Switzerland and Holland were far from reliable; Italy and Spain were definitely Bakuninist strongholds. Sooner than face a bitter struggle which could end at best in a Pyrrhic victory and destroy all hope of a proletarian unity for many generations, Marx decided, after ensuring that it did not fall into Bakuninists’ hands, to allow the International to die peacefully.

His enemies claim that he judged the merit of all socialist assemblies solely by the degree to which he was himself permitted to control them: this equation was certainly made both by him and by Engels and made


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quite automatically; neither ever showed any sign of understanding the bewildered indignation which this attitude excited among broad sections of their followers. Marx attended the Hague congress in person, and his prestige was such that, in spite of violent opposition, the Congress finally by a narrow majority voted its own virtual extinction. Its later meetings were sordid travesties: it finally expired in Philadelphia in 1876. The International was, indeed, reconstituted thirty years later, but by that time—a period of rapidly increasing Socialist activity in all countries—its character was very different. Despite its explicitly revolutionary aims, it was more parliamentary, more respectable, more optimistic, essentially conciliatory in temper, more than half committed to the belief in the inevitability of the gradual evolution of capitalist society into moderate socialism under persistent but peaceful pressure from below.


CHAPTER XI

LAST YEARS

I remarked [to Marx] that as I grew older I became more tolerant. ‘Do you’, he said, 'do you?’

H. M. hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life

The duel with Bakunin is the last public episode in Marx’s life. The revolution seemed dead everywhere, although its embers glowed faintly in Russia and Spain. The reaction was once more triumphant, in a milder form, indeed, than in the days of his youth, prepared to make definite concessions to its adversary, but appearing to possess all the more stability for that reason. The peaceful conquest of political and economic control seemed the workers’ best hope of emancipation. The prestige of Lassalle’s followers in Germany rose steadily, and Liebknecht, who represented the Marxist opposition, now that the International was dead, was inclined to come to terms with them, in order to form a single united party. He was persuaded that placed as he was inside Germany, he had a better grasp of the tactical exigencies than Marx and Engels, who continued to live in England and would not listen to any suggestion of compromise. The two parties finally held a conference at Gotha in 1875 and formed an alliance, issuing a common programme composed by the leaders of both factions. It was naturally submitted to Marx for approval. He left no doubt as to the impression which it made on him.

A violently worded attack was instantly dispatched to Liebknecht in Berlin and Engels was commanded to write in a similar strain. Marx accused his disciples of

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straying into the use of the misleading, half-meaningless terminology inherited from Lassalle and the True Socialists, interspersed with vague liberal phrases which he had spent half his life in exposing and eliminating. The programme itself seemed to him to be permeated by the spirit of compromise and to rest on a belief in the possibility of attaining social justice by peacefully agitating for such trivial ends as a ‘just’ remuneration for labour, and the abolition of the law of inheritance— Proudhonist and Saint-Simonian remedies for this or that abuse, calculated to prop up the capitalist system rather than hasten its collapse. In the form of angry marginal notes he conveyed for the last time his own conception of what the programme of a militant socialist party ought to be. The loyal Liebknecht received this, as everything else which came from London, meekly, and even reverently, but made no use of it. The alliance continued and grew in strength. Two years later Liebknecht was again sharply criticized by Engels, who took an even lower view than Marx of his political capacity. On this occasion the cause was the appearance in the pages of the official organ of the German Social Democratic party of articles by, and in support of, a certain Eugen Duhring, a radical lecturer on economics in the University of Berlin, a man of violently anti-capitalist but hardly socialist views, who was acquiring growing influence in the ranks of the German party. Against him Engels published his longest and most comprehensive work, the last written in collaboration with Marx; it contained an authoritative version of the materialist view of history, expounded in the blunt, vigorous, lucid prose which Engels wrote with great facility. The Anti- Diihring, as it came to be called, is an attack on the


LAST YEARS 25I

undialectical, positivistic materialism, then increasingly popular among scientific writers and journalists, which maintained that all natural phenomena could be interpreted in terms of the motion of matter in space, and advances against it the principle of the universal working of the dialectical principle far beyond the categories of human history, in the realms of biology, physics and mathematics. Engels was a versatile and well-read man, and had, by sheer industry, acquired some rudimentary knowledge of these subjects, but his discussions of them are exceedingly unfortunate. In particular the over- ambitious attempt to discover the working of the triad of the Hegelian dialectic in the mathematical rule by which the product of two negative quantities is positive, has proved a source of much embarrassment to later Marxists, who have found themselves saddled with the impossible task of defending an eccentric view not entailed by anything that Marx himself had ever asserted at any rate in his published writings. Marxist mathematics of our own day is a subject which, like Cartesian physics, forms a peculiar and isolated enclave in the development of a great intellectual movement, of antiquarian rather than scientific interest. Perhaps when Marx, towards the end of his life, declared that whatever else he might be, he was certainly not a Marxist, he had such extravagances in view. Very different are the chapters later reprinted as a pamphlet under the title The Evolution from Utopian to Scientific Socialism. That is written in Engels's best vein, and gives an account of the growth of Marxism from its origins in German idealism, French political theory and English economic science. It is still the best brief autobiographical appreciation of Marxism