Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

The adventures of the working class: Marx and the Proudhonists

C’est une societe d’etude, non une
nouvelle charbonnerie.

Henri-Louis Tolain on the International³⁹

Marx’s disputes with the Proudhonists in the earlier years of the Inter-
national foreshadow his later disputes with Bakunin in more than any
immediately obvious sense. The former dispute directly set the terms
for the latter only to a limited extent, since Proudhon and Bakunin
were very different kinds of anarchist, having very different kinds of
appeal to very different kinds of individuals and groups. Those Inter-
nationalists who looked to the memory of Proudhon (who died in
1864) and to his voluminous writings for guidance and direction were
remarkably distinct from those who looked to the presence of Bakunin
as exemplar for their guidance and direction. We shall have occasion
presently to draw out more adequately the differences between Proud-
hon and Bakunin as anarchist theorists, and between Proudhonism




and Bakuninism as anarchist movements (this latter enterprise being
by now more to the point); for the time being we must content our-
selves with two contrasts between these movements which, when
taken together, indicate that the dispersal of the Proudhonists, which
in one sense cleared the ground for Marx’s later battle with Bakunin,
in another sense raised the stakes of victory and defeat in that con-
frontation.

In the first place, Proudhon’s followers, like Proudhon himself,
were ‘social individualists’ (to use George Woodcock’s apt formulation)
who perceived not individualism but collectivism as the enemy. They
were opposed not so much to individualism, which they merely con-
sidered to have been perverted by capitalism, but to collectivist regi-
mentation which, they reasoned, always accompanied authority.
Bakunin and his followers, by contrast, were resolute collectivists,
opposed in the first instance not only to political authority but also
to individualism, the bourgeois principle they considered a mainstay
of illegitimate authority relations.

In the second place, Proudhon’s followers were, like their mattre
(as Marx called him), anti-revolutionary. They recoiled - again like
Proudhon himself - from violence, from revolution, even from strikes;
and, like most people, they were less prone to verbal violence than
Proudhon had been. In all these respects, Bakunin could hardly have
been more different. He was a convinced and fervent revolutionary,
who espoused violence, not as a necessary evil but as something posi-
tively to be valued.

These differences mean that arguments arrayed against Proudhon
cannot be stretched to cover Bakunin too. Marx, who tended to over-
state the connections between the two, came to a recognition of this
inapplicability, but rather too late. Marx’s objections to Proudhonism
did not serve him well, and could not have served him well, against
Bakuninism, a movement that pointed elsewhere. Proudhonism in the
late 1860s was something of a rearguard action; Bakuninism by its
very nature was forward looking and anticipatory. The Proudhonist
movement always gave the impression of glancing backward, as though
it needed for its each and every act some posthumous imprimatur from
the shade of Proudhon. This need had the effect of further restricting
the movement, defensively, within its francophone limits. Bakuninists,
by contrast, were to be rather better served not only by the apparent
omnipresence of their leader but also by the beliefs they shared with
him. The two beliefs that are here isolated, somewhat arbitrarily,
for the purposes of argument - revolutionism and collectivism - are
not just beliefs Proudhon detested, but are also beliefs, differently
understood, that Marx and Bakunin shared. We should be careful,
however, not to draw errant conclusions from what was not a con-
vergence of belief or a substratum of agreement but a penumbra, an




overlap. This apparent narrowing of the ground of dispute did nothing
to make the dispute any less intense; if anything, it had the very op-
posite effect.

Yet the eventual disarray of Proudhonism (owing to certain shifts
within the French labour movement as well as the thunderous sounding
declamations and denunciations that came from the platforms of suc-
cessive Internationalist Congresses) did help clear the ground for Marx’s
dispute with Bakunin. Marx’s disputation with the Proudhonists in the
International was something other than a mere re-run of his earlier,
doctrinal dispute with Proudhon; the outcome of these disputations,
within the forum of the International, goes beyond questions of doc-
trine. It has to do with the influence of political ideas on political
action and with the nature and survival of a political movement whose
fate has affected that of so many subsequent ones.

Marx, early in 1865, insisted on parading, all over again, his uncompli-
mentary, and less than charitable, views of Proudhon in J.B. von
Schweitzer’s Sozial-Demokrat, the house organ of the German Lassal-
leans.⁴⁰ That this ‘obituary’ was, between the lines, one of Lassalle
also may not have been lost on German readers (though it crept past
von Schweitzer); but such hidden messages were of little immediate
interest to French Internationalists, most of whom, as Proudhonians,
were still in mourning, and were (predictably enough) outraged by
what they took to be an ill-judged lack of courtesy on Marx’s part.
Whether or not this ‘obituary’ of Proudhon was intended for French
eyes, Marx’s ‘Inaugural Address’ most certainly was; yet even in what
was an otherwise diplomatically phrased ‘Address’ Marx had done
little enough to palliate, or endear his presence to the Proudhonists.
On the contrary, his emphasis on the conquest of political power, on
the educational value of trade union activity, and on the wrongs suf-
fered by the Poles, whatever their other justifications, could have
been deliberately calculated to ruffle Proudhonist feathers; and this
is the effect they immediately had. From this point onwards it was
Marx, unsurprisingly enough, who did more to antagonize the Proud-
honists than any other single member of the International. (The Poles
and the Mazzinians competed as groups for second place, but the
Mazzinians having been outmanoeuvred - also by Marx⁴¹ - ceded the
contest.)

This antagonism was reciprocated. The Proudhonists from the very
beginning were in Marx’s eyes, as he was in theirs, exasperating and
truculent. To begin with, the strongly Proudhonist Paris Committee of
the Internationa], charged in January 1865 with translating the Rules
drawn up in English the previous year (into the ‘Statuts de l’Association
Internationale des Travailleurs’), mistranslated Marx’s ‘Preamble’. They
dropped three words of the kind that matter so much in politics; this




deliberate mistake rankled, and was of more importance than might
initially seem to be the case because it was to be the Paris translation
(which the committee refused subsequently to correct)⁴² that would
circulate, as propaganda, in all French speaking countries. Marx’s
‘Preamble’ reads (in part) as follows:

Considering:

That the economical subjection of the man of labour to
the monopolizer of the means of labour, that is, the sources
of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all
social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence;

That the economical emancipation of the working classes is
therefore the great end to which every political movement
ought to be subordinate as a means... [emphases added]⁴³

These formulations in themselves were, of course, deliberately ambigu-
ous. They could be - and were intended to be - read according to the
predilection of the reader, as implying (or ‘meaning’) the primacy of
trade union activity at the workplace over political activity (variously
defined); or the indispensability of political action (whatever this may
mean) as a means of ‘economical emancipation’. (There is no doubt
that the English trade unionists read the second of these clauses as
advocating extension of the suffrage - indeed, much to the chagrin of
Marx and others, they acted upon this reading in the reform agitation
leading up to 1867, to the detriment of Internationalist duties, which
the Reform movement effectively upstaged.) The Paris Committee
considered any possible meaning to be a provocation. The terseness
of the translation of the first of these clauses - which is itself grounds
for suspicion - prepares us for the change in the meaning of the second:

Que l’assujetissement du travail au capital est la source de
toute servitude: politique, morale, et materielle;

Que, pour cette raison, l’emancipation economique des
travailleurs est le grand but auquel doit etre subordonne
tout mouvement politique.⁴⁴

This rendering completely alters the sense of the original; by the lack
of a ‘comme moyen’ (‘as a means’) to qualify it, the French ‘subordi-
nation’ of any political ‘mouvement’ is quite consistent with ruling
out political movements altogether. Marx was furious at being piqued
in this way, but his outrage and sense of betrayal was not simply a
matter of wounded pride or pedantry. It is likely that the mistrans-
lation of the ‘Preamble’ had the effect of misinforming people about
the Internationa] - or at least about what Marx wanted the International




to be. The Swiss Bakuninist James Guillaume (the author of a major
history of the International, written from a strongly francophone-Swiss
point of view) described his surprise when he first discovered that the
English original contained the words ‘as a means’, in 1905!⁴⁵

Marx’s private assessments of the Proudhonists seem quickly to have
changed by 1865. In November 1864 Tolain is described to Engels as
‘the real worker’s candidate at the last election in Paris, a very nice
fellow (his companions too were quite nice lads)’ (emphases in original);
in January 1865 we have ‘Tolain, etc., who are Plon-Plonists’,⁴⁶ i.e.
Bonapartists. By 1866 Marx writes to Engels about a meeting of ‘this
Babylon’, the General Council, in the following manner:

The representatives of ‘Jeune France’.. .came out with the
announcement that all nationalities and even nations were
‘antiquated prejudices.’ Proudhonized Stirnerism. Everything
is to be dissolved into small ‘groups’ or ‘communes’ which in
turn are to form an ‘association’ but no state. And this
‘individualization’ of humanity and the corresponding
‘mutualism’ are to go on while history comes to a stop in all
other countries and the whole world waits till the French are
ripe for a social revolution. Then they will demonstrate the
experiment to us, and the rest of the world, overwhelmed by
the force of their example, will follow suit. Exactly what
Fourier expected of his model phalanstery. Moreover, whoever
encumbers the ‘social’ question with the ‘superstitions’ of the
old world is a ‘reactionary.’

The English laughed a lot when I began my speech by saying
that my friend Lafargue, etc., who had abolished nationalities,
had spoken French to us, i.e. a language which nine tenths of
the audience did not understand. I also suggested that by the
negation of nationalities he appeared, quite unconsciously, to
assume their absorption into the model French nation ⁴⁷

The trouble with such Proudhonist formulations was that they com-
bined a French-centred approach to international revolution with a
denial of the legitimacy of any other nationalism. The rest of Europe
according to this recipe is breathlessly to await the outcome of certain
confected French developments, in the light of which movements of
national liberation are to be disparaged. ‘The essential nerve of the
polemic’, Marx had already pointed out to Engels, ‘is the Polish ques-
tion. The [French] fellows have all tied up with the Proudhon-Herzen
Muscovitism . . . The Russian gentlemen have found their newest allies
in the Proudhonized portion of “Jeune France”.’⁴⁸

Yet Marx found much to reject in Proudhonist programmes even
apart from their ethnocentrism. Reporting to Engels on their showing


at the Geneva Congress of 1866, Marx sounds a familiar strain:

The Parisian gentlemen had their heads filled with the emptiest
Proudhonian phraseology. They babble about science and know
nothing of it. They scorn all revolutionary action, that is to say,
action arising out of the class struggle itself, all concentrated
social movements, every social movement that is centralized and
therefore [they oppose] all action that can be carried through by
legal, political means (as, for example, the legal shortening of
the working day). Under the pretext of freedom, and of anti-
governmentalism or anti-authoritarianism, these gentlemen - who
for sixteen years have so calmly endured the most miserable
despotism, and still endure it - actually preach ordinary bourgeois
science, only Proudhonistically idealized! Proudhon has done
enormous mischief. His sham criticism and sham opposition to
the Utopians (he himself is a philistine utopian, whereas in the
utopias of a Fourier, an Owen, etc. there is the presentiment and
imaginative expression of a new world) attracted and corrupted
the ‘jeunesse brillante’ [glittering youth] and the students, then
the workers, particularly those of Paris, who, as workers in
luxury trades, are strongly attached to the old muck, without
knowing it [Die als Luxusarbeiter, ohne es zu wissen, ‘sehre’ dem
alten Dreck angehoren]. Ignorant, vain, pretentious, gossipy,
emphatically arrogant, they were on the verge of spoiling
everything, since they rushed to the Congress in large numbers
which had no relation to the number of their members. In my
report, I shall rap their knuckles.⁴⁹

The arrogance of Marx’s post-mortem is unmistakable; though his
public comments were (from all accounts) more restrained and measured,
his letter to Kugelmann is of considerable interest, not least because it
brings out into the open Marx’s impatience. Many of his claims are
disingenuous as well as immoderate. The Proudhonists, after all, had
every right to rush to the Congress, even ‘in large numbers which had
no relation to the number of their members’; disproportionate repre-
sentation would have been a fatal argument for Marx to have openly
used against them. The Proudhonists, like the representatives of the
General Council, were well briefed for the Geneva Congress (indeed,
their programme, which contains quotations from Exodus and Lucan,
is by far the best piece of writing the International has to offer);⁵⁰
the idea that they ‘packed’ the Congress is, however, quite false, particu-
larly as it comes from someone who was not to be averse to similar
techniques in the future. To scan the attendance records of national
delegations at successive Congresses of the International is to see that
the French Proudhonists, in making a good showing at Geneva (and, as




we shall see, at Lausanne the following year, 1867), were acting no
differently from any other group faced with a Congress in an adjacent
country which could be reached with relative ease. (It is quite safe to
surmise that had The Hague Congress of 1872 been held at Geneva
or Lausanne its outcome, following from its composition, would have
been quite different.)

What of the Geneva Congress itself? Marx subsequently was to indicate
that he

had great fears about the first Congress at Geneva. But in general
it has come out well, beyond my expectations. Its effect in
France, England and America was unhoped-for. I could not and
would not attend myself but it was I who wrote the programme
of the London delegates. I limited it on purpose to points which
admit of an immediate understanding and common action by the
working men, and which immediately give strength and impetus
to the needs of the class struggle and to the organization of the
workers as a class.⁵¹

The programme⁵² is evidence of how meticulously the English del-
egation was briefed for its first real stand-off with the Proudhonists;
indeed it is much more than this, since Marx’s instructions amount to
a concrete programme of action for the International. They emphasize
the importance of winning reforms from the existing bourgeois state
wherever this was possible - reforms which would include labour
legislation of the kind that had been embodied in the Ten Hours Act.
Marx’s instructions, by also singling out the importance of trade union
activity, insist in effect that worthwhile reforms can and should be won
by the working class, if possible, before the attainment of socialism in
its full notion. The only possible way of doing so, for the time being,
was through ‘general laws, enforced by the power of the state’.

Two points are important here. First, an explicitly anti-Proudhonian
one: that ‘in enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify
government power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now
used against them, into their own agency’. Second, an implicitly anti-
Proudhonian point is made, that if state power is to be transformed
by the workers in this way, ‘into their own agency’, it has to be state
power of a certain type. States like ‘imperialist’ (Bonapartist) France,
or Bismarckian Germany may be appropriate to Proudhonian and
Lassallean socialism respectively, but they are for this very reason
not appropriate to the kind of reforms the working class could use
to turn the state into its own agency. Proudhonian and Lassallean
socialism are in reality opposite sides of the same coin, because neither
sees fit to distinguish between different kinds of state; Marx was
attempting to make the distinction they had a certain vested interest




in not making, by insisting - and here we cannot avoid recalling his
early essay, ‘On the Jewish Question’ - that progress in the direction of
liberal democracy, however ‘bourgeois’ it may be, really is progress; it
signifies and embodies something the working class can make use of,
on its own terms, to the general good of society at large. The reason
why the working class, in putting to good use what is progressive about
liberal regimes, will not ‘fortify’ governmental power but ‘transform’
it, is that the state power in question is quite simply less autocratic in
the first place. Marx in framing this argument-an argument important
to an understanding of his works and career, and one we have en-
countered before - was unavoidably leaning in an English direction,
away from the unsavoury possibilities presented by France and Ger-
many, Bonaparte and Bismarck; and this means, of course, that his
instructions for the Geneva Congress lay themselves open to a straight-
forwardly reformist interpretation - an interpretation that they actually
received when the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands,
after Marx’s death, used them and suppressed (for a time) The Critique