Karl marx an Intellectual Biography Rolf Hosfeld

Lost Illusions

For Marx, real world history took place in another way and at other places. On 28 September 1864, four weeks after Lassalle’s death, the First International was raised from the baptismal font in Lon- don’s St. Martin’s Hall. The old music hall in Charles Street, not far from Covent Garden, had been reopened after a fire two years earlier. Usually there were concerts here, and on occasion also read- ings—for example, by Charles Dickens—and sometimes also politi- cal meetings. Two thousand participants showed up on this evening at the concert house lit by gaslight candelabras, which was densely occupied to the point of suffocation. Marx, too, was there. He was overwhelmed. There is now evidently a revival of the working classes taking place, he reported enthusiastically to Engels in Manchester. On this evening, it was resolved to found a Workingmen’s Inter- national Association, with a general council in London and sec- tions in Germany, Italy, France, and England.²⁰³ The founders of the International, Marx wrote to his financially powerful but philan- thropically inclined uncle Lion Philips, were the same people who had organized the grand reception of Giuseppe Garibaldi in London and, through an enormous meeting in St. James’s Hall, prevented a war between England and the northern states of America—that is, they were the real workers’ leaders in London, in particular the union leader George Odger. It was a real movement from the moment of its birth, and that was all that mattered to him.

The mood at the time was internationalist in a way that it had seldom been before, in many respects exceeding the euphoria of the Spring of Nations in 1830. For the first time, the meeting included transatlantic components, most clearly evident in the sympathy of the British workers’ movement for Abraham Lincoln’s war against slavery. This even gripped Marx. As he noted at the end of No- vember 1864, never has such a gigantic revolution occurred with such

rapidity as in America. Only three and a half years earlier Lincoln had proclaimed that no further concessions would be made to slave- holders, and now, his declared, and in part already accomplished, goal was the complete abolition of slavery.²⁰⁴ In Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class,²⁰⁵ Marx saw a great revo- lutionary who did not shy from using armed force to bring down an entire societal system, in this case the slavery-based relations of production of the American South. Lincoln, for Marx, embodied a type of citizen completely different from the frightened subjects of the European monarchs. This example, Marx hoped, would in the future have a highly beneficial influence on the whole world.²⁰⁶ Namely, the war against slavery unmistakably marked the beginning of a new era of ascendancy for the working class.²⁰⁷ It was worldwide because the openly declared war against slavery could only be the prelude to a general struggle against all slavery, thus also wage slavery.²⁰⁸ To the same extent that he wanted to see czarist Russia toppled into an abyss, Marx—unlike Lassalle, who as a Hegelian advocated the no- tion that the Americans were incapable of having their own ideas— admired the American dream, which at the time was still leavened with many socialist ideas.

Lincoln’s friends on the other side of the Atlantic were not lib- erals like William Gladstone, who initially predicted (and for rea- sons of free trade in cotton, also desired) victory for the South—and who maintained, after the secession, that an entirely new nation had been created south of the Potomac. Rather, they were the Eu- ropean and especially the British workers, who, through large rallies in London, Manchester, and Sheffield against England’s entry into the war on the side of the South, first made the public aware that the American situation concerned not only contracts for the British ship-building industry and the supply of cotton but also the question of the abolition or retention of the system of slavery. Marx was im- pressed above all by the sound attitude of the British working classes.²⁰⁹ Even though supply failures of cotton caused by the war on the far side of the Atlantic led to a substantial crisis in the textile industry and to massive layoffs,²¹⁰ they took to the streets with admirable persistence for the sake of a political principle.²¹¹

A similar situation occurred in April 1864 during the reception of Giuseppe Garibaldi in London. The partisan leader and hero—a legend in his own lifetime—was cheered by hundreds of thousands of people who were clearly, as the Times reported, from the working

class. The former carpenter and union leader George Potter rode picturesquely on a horse next to Garibaldi’s wagon. Such highly ro- mantic scenes would recur in similar fashion in other English towns. Marx viewed Garibaldi’s national ambitions rather critically, but the fact that the British workers’ movement’s sympathies for the Italian freedom fighter were chiefly directed against the usurper Louis Na- poléon, who still occupied Rome, might have allowed him to come to terms with this flaw. In an era of ascendant bourgeois national movements, the receptions for Garibaldi were festivals of proletar- ian internationalism—much like the previous year’s large rallies in sympathy for Poland.

In late January 1863, a national uprising had broken out in Rus- sian-occupied Congress Poland. “What do you think of the Polish business?” Marx wrote to Engels upon hearing the news. This much was certain: the era of revolution was once again fairly opened in Europe. In fact, Marx expected the uprising in Poland to start a revolutionary wave like that of 1848, in which the lava will flow from East to West and not in the opposite direction.²¹² Revolutions in Poland, according to the dream, would be followed by the collapse of czarism and then, as an almost necessary consequence, a new German revolution. But the Polish uprising was brutally crushed and its leaders relentlessly pun- ished with death penalties, forced labor, or deportation. The west- ern states, whence the Polish insurgents had expected support, held themselves back; Prussia even found itself openly on the side of Russia. Massive protests, especially on the part of the trade unions, opposed these developments. In summer 1863, a delegation of French workers even traveled to London for a large sympathy rally for Poland.

The International grew out of this meeting for Poland. To this day it remains unclear who seized the initiative. The French who partic- ipated in the founding meeting in St. Martin’s Hall later spread the version that it was a child born in France and breast-fed in London. In any case, French and English workers’ representatives discussed the matter after the London meeting for Poland. Freemason con- nections might also have played a role.²¹³ Be that as it may. Secre- tary of the London Trades Council George Odger wrote an address to the workers of France, inviting them to an international congress slated for fall 1864 in London. Marx was anything but the initiator, and he was invited to St. Martin’s Hall only at the last minute, but he would very quickly become the most important and significant voice of the International.

Marx’s invitation was delivered by Victor Le Lubez, a French emi- grant living in London, with the inquiry as to whether Marx wanted to participate in the meeting “pour les ouvriers allemands”—for the German workers. Though he had become accustomed to turn- ing down such requests over the past ten years, Marx immediately agreed. This time, he informed Engels, he had the clear feeling that for the first time, real powers were in play on the sides of both Lon- don and Paris.²¹⁴ He did not say a word in St. Martin’s Hall, but he soon sat on the program commission that developed the principles and statutes of the new association. Nobody there could match him as a theoretician. A number of drafts were circulated and rejected, until finally the commission met for further discussion at his house on 20 October; in the end the matter was left in his hands alone. As he informed Engels with great satisfaction, the general council adopted his Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s As- sociation with great enthusiasm.²¹⁵

The Inaugural Address was not a new Communist Manifesto. The composition of the International was too heterogeneous for that. Anyway, Marx wrote to Engels, time must pass before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used.²¹⁶ But the reticence he displayed tentatively also had other reasons, which carefully tell a story of lost illusions. He had been preoccupied for some time with the fact that the almost childish enthusiasm with which they had greeted the revolutionary era prior to 1848 was a thing of the past and now forever gone to the devil.²¹⁷ As the crisis invoked by the American Civil War slowly ebbed in 1864, Engels was even overcome with doubts about their old dogma concern- ing the relationship between crisis and revolution. It was really a shame, he wrote to Marx, that “these things do not come to a proper head.”²¹⁸ Marx tried to calm him with the unfounded argument that the crises of the future would replace what they lost in intensity with what they now gained in frequency.²¹⁹ The Great Depression of 1873, which marked the end of the Industrial Revolution in England, Ger- many, and Western Europe as a whole, was admittedly very intense. In the meantime, however, such uncertainties regarding prophesies of revolution and crises also bespoke a new realism on the part of the International.

Marx did not attain his leadership position in the general coun- cil of this association as he had done in 1847 in the Communist League, namely through his futuristic revolutionary models. Rather,

he did so as a dignified theorist of the need for union politics. In 1865 this question occasioned a controversy on the International’s leadership committee. A member of the General Council, the for- mer carpenter John Weston, publicly advocated the thesis that a general wage increase was of no use to workers and would only lead to an increase in prices. Weston, who in any event found himself in a minority position, argued that unions were therefore somewhat harmful. Weston was a supporter of the early socialist experimenter Robert Owen; like Lassalle, he saw the solution to social problems in the expansion of self-administrating productive cooperatives. Marx was asked to counter Weston. We shall do our best,²²⁰ he said, and on 20 and 27 June 1865 he delivered a lecture entitled “Wages, Price, and Profit” to the General Council in London.

At heart it was about what determined the levels of wages. The starting point of the “iron law of wages,” as put forth by Weston and Lassalle, could lead to totally different conclusions. One existed in the communist utopias advocated by both these men; the other, in Marx’s own Jacobin theory of revolution that he himself—back then still supporting a form of the iron law of wages—had propounded in 1848. Now, however, he had changed his position on two decisive counts. To be sure, then as now, he held the view that the general tendency of capitalist production was to sink the average standard wage. But in determining the value of labor, which according to his theory was the basis of wage levels, he now included a variable quantity, one that was subject to historical change: namely, the tra- ditional standard of life of a respective country. Incidentally, the level of wages had nothing to do with other market prices. High wages only reduced the profits of the capitalists, and the entire question ul- timately resolved into a question of the respective powers of the combat- ants, thus of class struggle. With these explanations, Marx became the leading intellectual of the International. Basically, however, the controversy concerned the theory of a political economy of trade unions, which was how the General Council understood it as well, even if Marx closed his lecture with the remark that unions totally defeated their own purpose if they limited themselves to waging a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system instead of simul- taneously trying to change it.²²¹

Like Weston, Marx gave instruction to Lassalle’s successor in the German Workers’ Association, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, who in any event already stood closer to the idea of unions than his pre-

decessor. Coalitions with the unions that grew out of the working class, he wrote in a long letter to Schweitzer, were extremely impor- tant, and not only as a means of organizing that class. In Germany the right of association—to form coalitions—would also limit police rule and bureaucratism and tear up the Gesindeordnung (rules gov- erning relations between masters and servants) in the countryside. In short, unions were an important measure for making the subjects responsible, whereas Lassalle’s state-supported cooperative societies extended the system of tutelage. The honor of the workers’ party thus urgently required that it reject such delusions. He ended his letter to Schweitzer, however, much more clearly than his lecture in London. The working class, Marx told him somewhat dramatically, is either revolutionary or it is nothing.²²²

Marx actually believed that the International would enable him to lead the European and even the American working class along such a path. Les choses marchent—things are moving forward—he gushed to Engels, and with the International they would have a powerful machine in their hands during the next revolution.²²³ In barely over a year they had managed to draw the only really big work- ers’ organization—the English trade unions that earlier had dealt only with questions of wages—into the movement.²²⁴ What move- ment? In reality, the International Workers’ Association was never at any point revolutionary. What was real for the association was something else—for example, the ten hours bill, which according to Marx was not only a practical success but also the victory of a principle. For the first time, through the statutory determination of the maximum length of the workday, the political economy of the mid- dle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.²²⁵ This victory, Marx asserted in his polemic against Weston, would never have been achieved through a private agreement between work- ers and capitalists. It needed the legislative interference of the state, which, however, only came about because of the working men’s con- tinuous pressure from without.²²⁶ From this perspective, then, one might ask, did the possibility not exist for other victories of the po- litical economy of the proletariat, that is, victories within the exist- ing conditions? During this period Marx’s revolutionary prospects took on the appearance of a social democrat wearing a Jacobin hat. They became increasingly vague, even if he never admitted it.

The International itself was basically the product of a momen- tary alignment of various interests and moods. The latter should

not be underestimated. The influence of the Methodist movement, for example, and its cult of worldwide brotherhood on the English working class was considerable and contributed significantly to the emotional character of the campaign against slavery and the support for the Italian and Polish struggles for freedom. It also promoted the readiness for international solidarity among workers, who all saw themselves as victims of the same exploitation. In terms of immedi- ate interests, though, the British primarily wanted the network of the International to prevent the importation of strikebreakers and cheap labor from the continent.

In fact, the success of the 1866 strike by London’s tailor appren- tices could be traced back to the International Workers’ Association and its activities. Conversely, in early 1867 the British helped the bronze workers of the French firm Bardedienne during their strike. The International collected funds for the striking workers, and the General Council turned to the trade unions, which immediately promised to provide all kinds of support and credit. The labor con- flict ended on 24 March with the complete success of the bronze workers.²²⁷ Workers in Basel who had been locked out, thrown out of their homes, and deprived of their credit line with food mer- chants were able to weather their lengthy strike from fall 1868 to spring 1869 only with the help of the International.²²⁸ There were many actions of mutual solidarity during this period of conflict, in which employers engaged in extreme brutality, often with fatal con- sequences and frequently with the support of the police and state. The more effectively the International made itself felt in these af- fairs, the more its prestige increased in Europe. But, as Foreign Min- ister Lord Granville explained to worried foreign governments, the International always remained an organization that was primarily concerned with labor conflicts. Revolutionary plans, if they did ex- ist, reflected perhaps the views of foreign members, but not those of the British workers.²²⁹ In fact, they played hardly any role in the work of the International, and where they did appear Marx, as the mouthpiece of the real movement, fought them fiercely.

In England, the unions were the major field of activity for the International, and many of the tone-setting union leaders sat on its General Council. The Bee-Hive, the official organ of the trade unions directed by George Potter, functioned simultaneously as its mouthpiece.²³⁰ On the continent, most of the International’s ini- tial support was in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Later there

were also members from Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and the United States, including the National Labor Union with a mil- lion members. But it could barely find footing among the workers in heavy industry in northern England. Germany, too, was difficult, above all because of Lassalle’s continuing influence. Not until the fall of 1868 did the German Workers’ Association publicly commit itself to the International’s principles. The International brought widely different currents together under its roof, welcoming Brit- ish unionists, the positivist historian Beesley, Belgian freethinkers, Genevan clockmakers, republicans, democrats, French radicals, and even Proudhonists,²³¹ who suffered a decisive defeat in 1867 when, totally in keeping with Marx’s political economy of the unions, the International Congress in Brussels declared that strikes were a legit- imate weapon of the working class.²³² In 1868, the Congress recom- mended Marx’s Capital, which had been published the previous year, to “the workers of all countries.”²³³ The Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in Eisenach in 1869, committed itself from the outset to the principles of the International. Wilhelm Liebknecht ensured that its members joined the association as individuals because col- lective membership was prohibited by German law.

To Marx’s dismay, in November 1868 the Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie Socialiste under the Russian anarchist Mikhail Ba- kunin also applied for membership. Marx knew Bakunin well from his days in Parisian exile, and when he saw him again in 1864 for the first time in sixteen years—Bakunin having escaped his Siberian banishment—he found that Bakunin was one of the few people to have moved forwards and not backwards.²³⁴ Now, however, he feared— with some justification—that Bakunin wanted to use his alliance as an instrument to disorganize the International.²³⁵ Thus Bakunin first had to officially dissolve his alliance and divide it into independent national sections. Even so, once the Russian, with his always impen- etrable secret associations, began haunting the International, Marx was increasingly overcome by fears of a Bakunin plot, a complete con- spiracy²³⁶ of the Bakunin gang.²³⁷ And in fact, Bakunin had made it a top priority to fight a merciless war against the “authoritarian com- munism of Marx” and the entire German school.²³⁸

Marx grew increasingly concerned about England as well. The influx of cheap Irish labor to the island, compelled by poverty, had led to a profound antagonism between the Irish and English proletarians and in a certain sense divided the working class into two classes.²³⁹ These circumstances changed England’s political landscape, and it

was principally the “English workers’ hatred of the Irish” that led to a clear Tory majority in the fall 1868 elections in industrialized Lan- cashire.²⁴⁰ But in the scenario Marx envisioned, only England—the metropolis of capital²⁴¹—because of its high level of industrialization, organized working class, and dominant position in the world mar- ket, could serve as the lever for a serious economic revolution.²⁴² He appeared already to be seeking reasons why this act of world theater would never be performed.

Thus the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 almost provided Marx with a sort of relief from the often small-minded routines of the Interna- tional and his increasing doubts about the British workers’ move- ment. Until shortly before the onset of hostilities, he adhered to his old idea from the 1840s that German unity could be achieved only through a German revolution sweeping away the Prussian dy- nasty.²⁴³ But just one day after France declared war on Prussia and the South German states joined the North German Confederation, Marx was hoping that the Prussians would prevail. “The French de- serve a good hiding,” he wrote to Engels, just as convinced as the latter that the war could not be waged without the chauvinism of the French population at large.²⁴⁴ If Prussia was victorious, then the centralization of state power would also ultimately lead to the cen- tralization of the German working class, and the center of gravity of the western European workers’ movement would shift from France to Germany. Marx put these thoughts to paper two weeks before the war actually entered its fighting phase with the storming of Weißen- burg by Bavarian and Prussian troops on 4 August.

For Marx, the actions performed in the costumes of Grenadier and Cuirassier uniforms on the battlefields of Alsace and Lorraine were also evidently the secret work of the cunning of reason. If the Prussians won, he calculated, then the resulting predominance of the German working class over the French on the world stage would in- evitably also lead to the predominance of our theory over Proudhon’s.²⁴⁵ As Engels maintained, ever since the war against Austria and the founding of the German Confederation in 1866, Bismarck had in any case done “a bit of our work, in his own way and without mean- ing to.”²⁴⁶ Now he was—again without knowing it—well on his way toward also finishing off Proudhon for good and ensuring Marx’s un- challenged position in the international workers’ movement.

After four weeks of fighting, the fortress of Sedan, having been bombarded by Krupp’s cast steel artillery until it was ripe for attack, was forced to surrender on 2 September. Over a hundred thousand

French soldiers, including Louis Napoléon, were taken prisoner. “My Emperor, my Emperor is a captive!” mocked Engels in an allusion to a poem by Heinrich Heine.²⁴⁷ But the war continued. Two days after the fall of Sedan, the Republic was proclaimed in the Paris Hôtel de Ville, and under the leadership of the young Léon Gambetta the call went out immediately for a national uprising of the people against the Germans. The Germans responded to this French populist up- rising by terrorizing civilians, imposing requisitions, burning down entire villages, and shooting both alleged and actual guerillas. Marx saw this as a relapse into barbarism reminiscent of the Thirty Years’ War, something he believed had long been overcome.²⁴⁸ Addition- ally, with the appearance of the lust for Alsace and Lorraine, which he considered the greatest misfortune that could befall Europe and es- pecially Germany,²⁴⁹ he completely changed his mind about the war. A defensive war had turned into a war of conquest. “History will measure its retribution,” he wrote on 9 September 1870 in the name of the General Council, “not by the extent of the square miles con- quered from France, but by the intensity of the crime of reviving, in the second half of the 19th century, the policy of conquest!”²⁵⁰

As of 18 January 1871, a cease-fire prevailed. On 28 February, Adolphe Thiers, chief of the French Executive, who had always op- posed the war, was forced to sign a preliminary peace treaty in Ver- sailles, and on 1 March the National Assembly, which had moved to Bordeaux, ratified it. The Thiers government’s policy of surrender was one of the reasons for the uprising of the Paris Commune. Marx had not desired this development, even though after the cease-fire was arranged he felt that France could perhaps be saved if it finally grasped that revolutionary measures and revolutionary energy were required in order to conduct a revolutionary war.²⁵¹ But that was not to be expected from a country under the leadership of Thiers and Jules Favre, one of the most notorious tools of the reign of terror of Cavaignac in 1848.²⁵² Moreover, Marx always rejected actions that were not carefully considered. As the French members of the Inter- national exiled in London set off for Paris after the capture of Louis Napoléon and the proclamation of the Republic, he feared they might commit all sorts of follies there in the name of the International, overthrow the provisional government, and seek to establish a Com- mune de Paris.²⁵³ The French working class should not allow itself to be deluded by the national souvenirs of 1792, he insisted in the name of the General Council. Any attempt to topple the new regime while

the enemy was practically pounding on the gates of Paris would be nothing but desperate folly. They would do better by looking for- ward and using the republican freedom to employ their energies and wisdom to build up the organization of their own class.²⁵⁴ Thus Marx was advocating the actual position of the International.

Yet when, in the National Assembly elections of early February 1871, the majority of the French voted not for Gambetta’s repub- licans and the continuation of the war but for the peace-seeking monarchists, Marx’s mood instantly changed. He now characterized the representatives in this assembly of Krautjunkers (cabbage Junk- ers) as only the rebellious slaveholders of Bordeaux.²⁵⁵ They were the actual secessionists from republican honor, like the Confederates in the American Civil War. To place the requisite emphasis on the historical-political parallels, Marx caricatured the French assembly’s political leaders in garish colors, polemically in the style of George Grosz, who was no better a painter than Marx was consistently a serious historiographer in his text about the civil war in France. Not only had Thiers proved his lying powers as an historian prior to becom- ing a statesman and in the end possessed a brain all the vitality of which had fled to the tongue; he also, Marx claimed, had agitated for the war against Prussia—which was clearly untrue. Now the Kraut- junker assembly had appointed Thiers its chief executive.

In contrast, the majority in Paris—besieged by the Prussians since September 1870—had voted republican and patriotically. The National Guard was under arms, and the first demands for the elec- tion of a Commune rang out by October. Revolutionary commit- tees formed in the quarters of Paris and joined the National Guard to become a Central Committee. Thiers and Jules Favre, on the other hand, were in Marx’s view nothing but reprobate creatures for whom appeasing the insurgent capital was opportune mainly be- cause only after Paris was again at peace could they receive commis- sion payments worth millions of francs for arranging state loans in the billions.²⁵⁶ Only through a violent intervention, he maintained, presuming to have understood their motives, could the appropriators of wealth hope to shift the costs of a war that they brought about themselves onto the shoulders of the producers of wealth.²⁵⁷ In his judgment, this conspiracy was the true secret of the slaveholders’ re- bellion in France.

In fact, however, the French had lost a war for which they had been poorly prepared. They had little recourse, apart from agree-

ing to the humiliating conditions of the peace treaty and, as impo- tent spectators, enduring the proclamations of a German emperor in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Bismarck knew their weakness, and he therefore refused to intervene in Paris. Instead he made a mockery of the French. They were supposed to fulfill the stipulated conditions of the peace treaty themselves, which was not possible without the government’s control of its own capital city. Bismarck provided them with a battalion of released war prisoners to solve the problem. The Commune of Paris was officially proclaimed on 29 March through the municipal assembly. On 1 May—as in 1793—a Committee of Public Safety public was formed. At the end of May, French government troops forced their way into the city at the Porte de Saint-Cloud. The civil war in Paris lasted one week. According to estimates by Marshal Mac-Mahon, the war resulted in seventeen thousand dead on the side of the Commune, though presumably there were many more. Ninety-three death sentences were issued; two hundred fifty Communards were sentenced to forced labor; and forty-five hundred were transported to New Caledonia.

Marx’s text on the civil war in France was an obituary of this drama, one that would finally make him a legend in Europe. The Paris-Journal honored him in a headline as the “Grand Chef de l’Internationale,”²⁵⁸ and thereafter the title wound its way through the European press. The text, which the General Council published as an address, went through three editions in two months and was translated into most European languages. Everyone believed that the Paris Commune was the work of the International, which was not the case. In reality, according to Benedetto Croce, it represented a rebellion of the defeated and the armed, people who had not yet given up and for whom a few federalist ideas were mixed up with the tendencies of a socialist Republic.²⁵⁹ In a surrounded, starved-out city, Republicans, nostalgic old Jacobins, Blanquists, and Proudhon- ists belonging to the International (in whom Marx, incidentally, had little confidence) came together—despite considerable differ- ences—in an emergency situation under a red flag. They included the painter Gustave Courbet; the author Jules Vallès, whose novel Jacques Vingtras was one the most gripping depictions of the events; and Eugène Pottier, author of the “Internationale,” which later be- came the anthem of the worldwide communist movement.

The Commune ordered the separation of church and state, pro- hibited night work in bakeries, confiscated operations and factories

that had been abandoned by their owners, and encouraged the cre- ation of associations with inalienable common capital and workers’ self-administration. It absolved the petty bourgeoisie of its debts, ordered free schooling for boys and girls, introduced the principle of the election and recall of state officials, and abolished the divi- sion of powers, which Marx considered one of its most important measures.²⁶⁰ France itself was supposed to be transformed, follow- ing the Parisian model, from a centralized state into a community- based federation of self-administered municipalities. To the extent that the Commune aligned itself according to any basic ideas, they were most likely drawn from Proudhon’s Du principe fédératif. In this work written in 1863, Proudhon praised federalism as the universal key liberating humans from every kind of human enslavement and expected that the institution of federal, “mutualist” property would provide an escape from exploitation by capital and the domination of banks. “Whoever says republic says federation, or he says noth- ing,” he maintained; also, “whoever says socialism says federation, or he says nothing.”²⁶¹ Basically, however, the Commune was what Marx had feared from the start: the last act and swan song of the rev- olutionary years from 1792 to 1794. The myth of the revolution had raised its head one last time and was brutally drowned in blood.

In a certain way, thought Marx, who still wanted to discern in the events the hidden workings of reason, the Commune, too, re- mained an opaque sphinx²⁶² that did not understand itself. As Hegel interpreted the secret of the sphinx, it represented an “objective rid- dle,” a larva awaiting unveiling through a spirited “know thyself.”²⁶³ What then was the Commune,²⁶⁴ Marx asked—as had Oedipus, who toppled the sphinx from the cliff with the words the answer to the riddle is Man.²⁶⁵ “Its true secret was this,” came Marx’s an- swer: “It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.”²⁶⁶ Engels would later give Marx’s theses a tangible form, maintaining that the Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat in history.²⁶⁷ In a conversation with Eduard Bern- stein, however, he qualified that assessment, adding that such inter- pretations—including Marx’s—wanted to give expression “more to the unconscious tendencies of the Commune than to its conscious plans.”²⁶⁸ The Commune did not follow any plan. In keeping with the doctrine of historical materialism, Marx saw it as a performance

of the wisdom of history itself in the world-revolutionary drama he had already described, in his account of the eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, as a devouring and purifying purgatory.²⁶⁹ Con- cluding the address by the General Council, he wrote: “Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has al- ready nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.”²⁷⁰

With this obituary, Marx—the “Grand Chef de l’ Internatio- nale”—became overnight the best calumniated and most menaced man of London. The public attention after a tedious twenty years’ idyll in the backwoods clearly did him well. The Observer even threatened him with legal prosecution.²⁷¹ In lead articles, the Times, Telegraph, Stan- dard, Spectator, Daily News, and Pall Mall Gazette all commented on the text about the civil war in France, which caused more of a sensa- tion than any previous address by the General Council. To the pub- lic, the International suddenly appeared as a great European power. The Spectator praised Marx’s powerful language, and the Examiner even came out in support of the International.²⁷²

At the beginning of June 1871, Jules Favre sent a circular letter to the governments of Europe warning of the danger of the Interna- tional. The Spanish government did the same. In France, a harsh emergency law was enacted against the International, but the Brit- ish government was not very impressed by these frightening portray- als, and even Bismarck did not believe them. (However, in 1872 he used the specter of communism to create the so-called Three Em- perors’ League, a belated echo of the Holy Alliance.) Marx himself, in an extensive interview with the New York World, energetically denied that the International was trying to force a specific political form on any movement.²⁷³ Yet in a certain sense that was precisely what he tried to do with his address on the civil war, especially with the claim that the Commune had shown that the working class can- not simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery²⁷⁴ but rather must destroy it. Later, Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks presumably took this as the basic substance of Marx’s state doctrine.²⁷⁵

With the collapse of the Paris Commune, the great period of the International approached its end. Two trade union leaders, Benja- min Lucraft and George Odger, who had sat on the association’s General Council since its beginnings, announced their resignation

in response to the address about the civil war in France. Earlier, they had refused to undersign the address with their names.²⁷⁶ They were unwilling to be involved in a revolutionary radicalization of the In- ternational, now that it had issued an address on the civil war char- acterizing the Paris Communards as the advanced guard of the modern proletariat.²⁷⁷ Their chief concern in the summer of 1871 was Wil- liam Gladstone’s Trade Union Act, which would legally recognize the right to strike and the legal protection of unions and their trea- suries. Another issue on their agenda was the struggle for the nine- hour workday. A few months later the union leader John Hales, who until then had been the general secretary of the International, fol- lowed suit. The goals of the real workers’ movement were different than Marx’s, even if the trade unions did not likewise immediately jump ship.

On another front, Marx faced pressure from the Bakuninists. In this conflict, Marx, who initially envisioned his role in the In- ternational as the mouthpiece of a large movement, increasingly developed into a party unto himself. He considered Bakunin danger- ous—as he did the Blanquists who had washed up in London with the masses of Communard refugees—because he did not want to see the International compromised by their actionism and ill-conceived attempts at coups d’état and revolutions. In 1872, Bakunin and his supporters were expelled at a congress of the International at The Hague—the first congress in which Marx personally took part. Then Engels made the motion to transfer the Central Committee to New York, a second strategic move that primarily targeted the Blanquists.²⁷⁸ Marx and Engels wanted by any means to prevent the General Council from one day falling into the hands of these con- spirators. But the time of the International was over anyway. It was dissolved on 15 July 1876 in Philadelphia,²⁷⁹ and with that, Marx’s career as a politician came to an end.

As early as 1874, in something like an anticipatory obituary, Friedrich Engels characterized the International as a typical product of the era of the second French monarchy—the expression of a na- ive cosmopolitanism of different factions that could not withstand the reality check of the Paris Commune’s defeat and therefore inevi- tably disintegrated. He believed, however, that after Marx’s writings had enjoyed some years of influence, the next International would be “directly Communist and will openly proclaim our principles.”²⁸⁰ Yet things turned out differently. “In fact, with the expulsion of an-

archism,” in the judgment of Benedetto Croce, “socialism was ex- punging from its midst, unconsciously, communism itself.”²⁸¹ This remained valid for subsequent developments until the catastrophe of the First World War.

After the fall of the Commune, not even Marx still believed in a European revolution in the foreseeable future. His letters and publications from these years, incidentally, feature much about the quarrels with Bakuninists in the International, but hardly a word on the 1873 Gründerkrise—which was, after all, the greatest economic world economic crisis prior to 1929. He mentioned it only briefly in the afterword to the second edition of Capital in 1873 and again in a letter of mid June 1875.²⁸² This is noteworthy, for in the 1850s and 1860s an event of such secular significance, beginning with an epidemic of over-speculation and lasting many years before settling down, would still have produced great prophetic hopes. The crisis had resulted in a wave of anti-Semitism that Marx understood as little as he understood the nationalisms that in part were invoked by and also followed this wave. But more to the point, the economy underwent a complete transformation: the collapse revealed quick profits to be illusory, and soon everyone was talking about strategic thinking, the analysis of results, and systematic investment in indus- trial research and development. The days of the complete anarchy of primitive capitalism, which was a constant call for revolution, seemed to belong to the past. “No-one will speak of socialism again,” Thiers maintained during these days, “and that is a good thing. We are rid of it.”²⁸³ Typical of Thiers, this was in any case a somewhat carelessly expressed instance of wishful thinking. But in fact, the myth of the tradition of 1792 had departed from Europe forever.

With the downfall of the Commune, the era of the nineteenth century’s continental revolutions, into which Marx was born and which shaped him, was over. According to the judgment pro- nounced by Croce, all socialisms of the past now lived only in the sacred tales and golden legends of the party.²⁸⁴ The new reality con- sisted in unions and interest groups, in the creation of political par- ties, in elective assemblies and parliamentary representations. In the years of the Gründerzeit, Europe became increasingly bourgeois. Even Marx—to end with an anecdote—was confronted with this fact in a surprising way. In mid August 1879 at the Waterloo station, he chanced to meet his old friend, the former radical Chartist Julian Harney, with whom he had founded the Universal Society of Revo-

lutionary Communists in the 1850s. Both men were on their way to Jersey, that Channel Island where one spoke English and cooked French. The train arrived, and upon boarding they went separate ways to their compartments: while Harney had a first-class ticket, Marx’s ticket was for second class.²⁸⁵ In the socialist workers’ move- ment of the bourgeois Fin de Siècle, Marx would once again move up to first class, but not the way he would have imagined.