Routledge Library Editions karl marx

The Breach with Schweitzer

It is a legend, but neither a true nor an agreeable one, that the German Lassalleans refused to affiliate to the International and took up a hostile attitude towards it from the beginning.

In the first place, it is quite impossible to find any reason which might have caused them to take up such an attitude. It is true that they attached great importance to strict discipline in their own ranks, but the Provisional Rules of the International threatened no sort of interference and, above all, they could subscribe to the Inaugural Address from beginning to end, and with particular satisfaction to that section which declared that only the development of the co-operatives to national dimensions and their furtherance by State means could save the working masses.

The truth is that from the very, beginning the Lassalleans




in Germany took up a friendly attitude towards the International, although at the time of its foundation they were deeply engrossed in their own troubles. After the death of Lassalle, and at his testamentary recommendation, Bernhard Becker was elected President of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeite'1Verein, but he soon proved himself so incompetent that hopeless confusion resulted and all that held the organization together was its organ the Sozialdemokrat, which had been appearing since the end of 1864 under the intellectual leadership of J. B. von Schweitzer, an energetic and capable man who had done his best to secure the co-operation of Marx and Engels. Without any pressure having been exerted on him he made Liebknecht a member of the editorial board and in the second and third numbers of the papers he published the Inaugural Address.

The Paris correspondent of the paper, Moses Hess, cast suspicion on Tolain, declaring him to be a friend of the Palais Royal, in which Jerome Bonaparte was playing the role of red demagogue, but Schweitzer published the letter only after having secured the express agreement of Liebknecht, and when Marx complained he did his utmost to settle the affair amicably and ordered that Liebknecht should first edit everything the paper published concerning the International. On the 15 th of February 1865 Schweitzer wrote to Marx informing him that he intended to put forward a resolution declaring his organization completely in agreement with the principles of the International and deciding to send delegates to its congresses. His organization would not, however, affiliate formally to the International, but solely on account of the German federal laws which prohibited the establishment of any connections between working-class organizations. Schweitzer received no answer to this letterand instead Marxand Engels issued a public declaration breaking off all connections with the Sozialdemokrat.

These facts show clearly enough that the unfortunate breach had nothing whatever to do with disagreements in connection with the International, and its real cause is explained quite frankly by Marx and Engels in their declaration. They had never failed to take the difficult situation of the Sozialdemokrat into consideration, they declared, and they had never put forward any demands unsuited to the Berlin meridian, but they had repeatedly demanded that the paper should not be less audacious towards the government and the feudal-absolutist party than towards the Progressives. The tactics pursued by the Sozialdemokrat made it impossible for them to contribute any further to it. They still subscribed word for word to what they had once written in the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung on royal Prussian govern




mental socialism and the attitude of a working-class party to such a tawdry deception when answering the Rheinischer Beobachter, which had proposed “ an alliance of the proletariat with the government against the liberal bourgeoisie ”.

As a matter of fact, the tactics pursued by the Sozialdemokrat had nothing to do with any such “ alliance ” or with any “ royal Prussian governmental socialism ”. When Lassalle’s first hope of arousing the German working class in one powerful onset proved to be a vain one, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein with its few thousand members found itself wedged in between two opponents, each of which was strong enough to crush it. From the bourgeoisie the young workers’ party had nothing to expect but stupid hatred, whereas it might reasonably expect that the cunning diplomat Bismarck would not be able to carry out his Greater Prussia policy without making certain concessions to the masses of the people. Schweitzer never harboured any illusions about the value or the aim of such concessions, but at a time when the German working class was practically deprived of the right to organize, when it enjoyed no effective franchise, and when the freedom of the press, of association and of meeting was at the mercy of bureaucratic arbitrariness, the Social Democracy could not hope to make progress by attacking both its opponents simultaneously and with equal energy, but only by playing one off against the other, though naturally an absolutely necessary condition for such a policy was the complete independence of the young workers’ party towards both sides and a firm consciousness of this independence amongst the working masses.

Schweitzer pursued this policy with vigour and success, and it is impossible to find anything in the columns of the Sozialdemokrat which savours of an “ alliance ” with the government against the Progressives. An examination of his activities against the general political background of the day will reveal some mistakes—admitted by himself—but on the whole a sagacious and logical policy guided exclusively by the interests of the working class, and certainly not dictated by Bismarck or any other reactionary.

Although in other respects Schweitzer was not the equal of Marx and Engels, he had at least one advaitage over them and that was a thorough knowledge of conditions in Prussia. They had no first-hand knowledge of the situation, whilst Liebknecht, upon whom the task of making good this deficiency naturally devolved, did not perform it at al satisfactorily. Liebknecht had returned to Germany in 1862 to found the NorddeVtscke Allgemeine Zeitung, together with the red republican Brass, but




hardly had his editorial work begun when he discovered that Brass had sold the paper to Bismarck. He immediately parted company with the paper, but this first experience on German territory was unfortunate not only in the sense that it left him once again in a critical financial situation reminiscent of the days of his exile, though this did not worry him unduly because he was accustomed to placing the cause above his own personal interests, but also because it prevented him from obtaining an unprejudiced view of the new conditions he found in Germany.

^^en he returned he was fundamentally still the old ^8er in the spirit of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which paid much less attention to socialist theory and even to the class struggle than it did to the revolutionary struggle of the nation against the rule of the reactionary classes. Although he was well versed in the fundamental ideas of socialist theory, Liebknecht was never a profound socialist theorist, and the chief thing he had learned from Marx during the years of exile was the latter’s tendency to search the wide fields of international politics for any signs of revolutionary developments. As Rhinelanders Marx and Engels were inclined to regard everything East Elbian too contemptuously, and they therefore underestimated the importance of the Prussian State ; but Liebknecht was still worse, for he had been born in South Germany, and in the early years of the movement he had been either in Baden or in Switzerland, the two strongholds of particularism. He regarded Prussia as the Russian vassal of pre-March days, as a reactionary State which fought against historical progress with the contemptible weapon of corruption, a State which must be defeated before it would be possible to think of any modern class struggle in Germany. He failed to recognize how much the economic development of the ’fifties had changed the Prussian State and created circumstances which made the separation of the working class from bourgeois democracy a historical necessity.

In consequence any permanent understanding between Liebknecht and Schweitzer was impossible, and in the eyes of the former it was the last straw when the latter published a series of five articles on Bismarck’s Ministry, drawing a masterly parallel between the Greater Prussia policy and the proletarian revolutionary policy in the question of German unity, but committing the “ error ” of describing the dangerous energy of Bismarck’s policy so eloquently that the description seemed almost a glorification. On the other hand, in a letter to Schweitzer on the 13th of February, Marx committed the “error” of declaring that although the Prussian government might adopt all sorts of frivolous experiments with the idea of productive co-operatives,




it would not repeal the anti-combination laws and curb bureaucracy and police arbitrariness. However, Marx was inclined to overlook what he had so eloquently put forward against Proudhon, namely that governments could not control economic circumstances but were themselves controlled by them, and a few years later the Bismarck Ministry was compelled willy-nilly to repeal the anti-combination laws. In his answering letter of the 15th of February, the letter in which he promised to work (or the International in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein and again informed Marx that Liebknecht was being entrusted with the editorship of all matters relating to the International, Schweitzer declared that he would gladly listen to any theoretical advice Marx might have to give, but that in order to decide on practical questions and immediate tactics one must be in the centre of the movement itself and have a thorough knowledge of existing conditions. Marx and Engels then broke with him.

These misunderstandings and complications can be fully understood only in connection with the unfortunate activities of Countess Hatzfeldt, who sinned grievously against the memory of the man who had once saved her name from obloquy. She sought to turn Lassalle’s creation into an orthodox sect honouring the word of the master as its supreme law, but even then it was not so much the word of the master as the interpretation Countess Hatzfeldt put upon it which was to be the supreme law. The mischief she did can be seen from a letter written by Engels to Weydemeyer on the loth of March in which after a few words on the founding of the Sozialdemokrat he declares : “ An intolerable Lassalle cult developed in the paper, and in the meantime we learned definitely (old Countess Hatzfeldt informed Liebknecht and appealed to him to act in the same spirit) that Lassalle was much more deeply involved with Bismarck than we had thought. A formal alliance existed between the two and things had gone so far that Lassalle was to go to Sleswig-Holstein to support the annexation of the Duchies whilst in return Bismarck made a vague promise to introduce a sort of general franchise and a rather more definite promise to grant the right to organize, to make social concessions, to give State support to the workers organizations, etc. The foolish Lassalle had no guarantees at all that Bismarck would keep his part of the agreement and he would certainly have been packed off to gaol the moment he made himself a nuisance. The editors of the Sozialdemokrat know this perfectly well, and yet they are keeping up the Lassalle cult more vigorously than ever. In addition, they let themselves be intimidated by Wagener (of the Kreuz-Zeitung) and paid court to Bismarck, flirted with his ideas, etc., etc. We published a




declaration and broke off relations and Liebknecht did the same.” It is difficult 10 understand how Marx and Engels, who both knew Lassalle well and both read the Sozialdemokrat, could have been taken in by the fantastic stories of Countess Hatzfeldt, but as they were it is only logical that they broke off all relations with the movement which Lassalle had founded.

However, their action had no practical effects on that movement and even old members of the Communist League like Roser, who had defended the principles of The Communist Manifesto so brilliantly before the Cologne Assizes, declared themselves in favour of Schweitzer's tactics.

2. 
   The First Conference in London
   

The German Lassalleans were thus excluded from the sphere of the International from the beginning and at first the propaganda amongst the English trade unionists and the French Proudhonists made very slow progress.

Mter all, it was only a small circle of trade-union leaders who had realized the necessity of the political struggle and even they regarded the International more as a means to attain trade- union ends than anything else. But at least they possessed a great amount of practical experience in organizational questions, whereas the French Proudhonists had neither this nor any insight into the historical character of the working-class movement. The new organization had, in fact, set itself a tremendous task, and it needed both tremendous energy and tremendous industry to perform it.

Although Marx was plagued again and again by painful illnesses, and although he was itching to complete his scientific work, he spared neither energy nor industry in the cause of the International. On one occasion he sighed : “ The worst part about such agitation is that it disturbs one’s work,” and on another occasion he declared that the International and everything connected with it weighed on him “ like an incubus ” and he would be glad to shake it off. However, he realized that once having put his hand to the plough he could not look back, and in reality it would not have been Marx had not the carrying of this burden made him happier and more hopeful than its abandonment could possibly have done.

It soon became clear that Marx was the actual “ head ” of the movement. Not that he pushed himself forward in any way,




for he had an unlimited contempt for all cheap popularity, and unlike those Democrats who made themselves look important in public whilst in reality doing nothing, he did a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes whilst at the same time keeping himself well out of the public view. However, there was not another man in the organization who possessed the unusual qualities necessary for its great tasks : the clear and deep insight into the laws of historical development, the energy to pursue the necessary unswervingly, the patience to be satisfied within the limits of the possible, the forbearance with honest error and the masterful ruthlessness with obstinate ignorance. To a far greater extent than in Cologne Marx was now in a position to exercise his incomparable gift of mastering men by teaching and leading them.

The personal disputes and quarrels which are inevitably part and parcel of the beginnings of all such movements cost him “ an enormous amount of time ”, and the Italian and in particular the French members caused him a lot of unnecessary difficulties. Since the revolutionary years there had existed a deep antipathy between the “ hand and brain workers ” in Paris. The proletarians found it difficult to forget the all too frequent treachery of the intellectuals, and the latter decried all working-class movements which wanted to have nothing to do with them, whilst under the stiffling pressure of Bonapartist military despotism, which made every means of contact through newspapers or organizations impossible, the suspicion of Bonapartist trickery was rife even in the ranks of the working class itself. The bubbling and simmering of this “ French stew ” cost the General Council many a valuable evening and the adoption of many a long-winded resolution.

M:1rx’s activities in connection with the English section of the International were more agreeable and fruitful. The English workers had strenuously opposed the intention of their government to intervene in the American Civil War on the side of the rebellious Southern States, and when Abraham Lincoln was re-elected President they sent him a message of greetings and congratulation. Marx drew up this address to the “ son of the working class ” who had been entrusted with the task of leading his country in a noble struggle to emancipate an enslaved race. So long as the white workers of America failed to realize that the existence of human slavery was a shame to the republic, so long as they boasted to the Negro, who was sold without his previous agreement, of their own inestimable privilege of selling themselves and choosing their masters, they would be incapable of winning real freedom or of supporting the struggle of their European




brothers for freedom. However, the sea of bloodshed during the civil war had swept away this barrier.

Like Lessing, Marx always spoke of his own work in derogatory terms, but he obviously put his whole heart into this address, although writing to Engels he declared that he had been instructed to give the address its form, which was a more difficult task than if he had been made responsible for the content as well, and that he had done so in order that the phrases which were the usual stock-in-trade of such documents should at least be different from the usual vulgar democratic phraseology. Lincoln did not fail to observe the difference and, much to the surprise of the London newspapers, for “ the old man ” invariably replied to all congratulations from bourgeois democratic circles with a few formal compliments, he answered the address in a warm and friendly tone.

In view of its content an address read by Marx on “ Value, Price and Profit ” on the 26th ofJune 1865 to the General Council of the International was much more important. Its aim was to refute the contention of a number of members of the council that a general rise in wages could be of no real use to the workers and that therefore the trade unions were harmful. This was based on the erroneous assumption that wages determined the value of commodities and that if the capitalists pay 5 instead of 4 shillings in wages to-day, they will sell their commodities for 5 instead of 4 shillings to-morrow, as a result of the increased demand. Marx declared that although this was very shallow reasoning and took only the most superficial appearance of things into account, it was nevertheless not easy to explain all the economic questions involved to ignoramuses. It was impossible to compress a course of political economy into one hour. However, he in fact succeeded in doing so admirably and he was thanked by the trade unions for having rendered them a valuable service.

It was chiefly the growing movement for a reform of the franchise which brought the International its first signal successes, and on the 1st of May 1865 Marx reported to Engels : “The Reform League is our work. In the inner committee of twelve (six representatives each of the middle class and the working class) all the working-class representatives are members of our General Council, including Eccarius. We have foiled all the middle-class attempts to deceive the workers. ... If this attempt to regenerate the political working-class movement in England succeeds then our association will have done more for the European working class than would have been possible in any other fashion, and without making a noise about it. And




there is every prospect of success.” On the 3rd of May Engels answered : “In a very short space of time and with very

little to-do the international association has really won a tremendous amount of ground. It is a good thing that it is now so busily engaged in England instead of bothering its head with French cliquism. At least you have some compensation for your lost time.” However, it was soon to become evident that even this success had its unsatisfactory side.

Marx considered that on the whole the political situation was not yet mature enough tojustify the holding of the public congress which had been arranged to take place in Brussels in 1865, and he feared, not without good reason, that it would degenerate into a Babel of tongues. With great difficulty and against particularly energetic opposition from the French he succeeded in securing agreement for the holding of an internal conference in London instead of the public congress in Brussels, a conference to be attended only by the representatives of the leading committees and to be no more than a preliminary to the future congress. In support of his standpoint Marx advanced the following reasons: the necessity of previous agreement and discussion, the reform movement in England, the wave of strikes springing up in France, and finally the legislation against foreigners being introduced in Belgium, which would make it impossible to hold the congress there.

The conference took place in London from the 25th to the 29th of September 1865. The General Council was represented by its President Odger, its General Secretary Cremer, a number of English members, and Marx and his two chief assistants in the affairs of the International, Eccarius and Jung, a Swiss watchmaker who lived in London and spoke English, German and French equally well. France was represented by Tolain, Fribourg and Limousin, all of whom were to abandon the International, Marx’s old friend Schily of 1848 and Varlin, who was later to be one of the heroes and martyrs of the Paris Commune. Switzerland sent two representatives, the bookbinder Dupleix for the Franco-Italian Swiss workers and Johann Philipp Becker, a former brush-maker and now a tireless revolutionary agitator, for the German Swiss workers. Belgium was represented by Ccesar de Paepe, who had begun to study medicine as a compositor’s apprentice and had succeeded in becoming a doctor.

The conference dealt first of all with the finances of the association, and it was revealed that the total income for the first year had been about 33 pounds. No agreement was come to with regard to regular membership subscriptions, but it was agreed to raise 150 pounds for propaganda purposes and to cover




the expenses in connection with the forthcoming congress: 80 pounds to be raised in England, 40 pounds in France and 10 pounds each in Belgium and Switzerland. The budget of the International was neverits most impressive feature nor did money ever represent the sinews of its war. Years later Marx declared with grim humour that the finances of the International had always been steadily growing negative quantities, and still later Engels wrote that the famous “ millions of the International ” had been chiefly debts, and that in all probability so much had never been achieved with so little money.

The report on the situation in England was delivered by the General Secretary Cremer, who declared that although it was generally believed on the Continent that the English trade unions were very rich and well able to support a cause they felt to be their own, they were in fact bound down by petty statutes which kept their expenditure within very narrow limits. With very few exceptions English trade unionists knew nothing about politics and it was very difficult to enlighten them. However, a certain amount of progress was being made. A few years ago representatives of the International would have been unable to obtain even a hearing, whereas to-day they received a friendly reception and their principles met with approval. It was the first time that an organization connected with politics had succeeded in establishing such relations with the trade unions.

Fribourg and Tolain reported that the International was meeting with a good reception in France. Apart from Paris, members had been won in Rouen, Nantes, Elbeuf, Caen and other places, and a considerable number of membership cards had been sold at 1.25 francs for the annual subscription. Unfortunately the proceeds had been exhausted by the setting up of a bureau in Paris and by the expenses of the delegates to the conference. However, the General Council was offered the consoling prospect of the sale of the remaining 400 membership cards. The French delegates complained that the postponement of the congress had been a great hindrance to the development of the movement. The French workers were intimidated by the Bonapartist police regime and one met continually with the objection : show us what you can do first of all, and then we will join you.

The reports which Becker and Dupleix made for Switzerland were very favourable, although the agitation there had been going on only for six months. In Geneva there were 400 members and in Lausanne and Vevey 150 members each. The monthly membership subscription had been fixed at 50 pence, but the members would gladly pay double that amount because they




were thoroughly convinced of the necessity of supporting the General Council financially also. Despite this the Swiss delegates also brought no money, and instead they offered the conference the consoling reflection that there would have been a nice round sum available if the delegates had not had to pay the expenses of their journey to England.

The agitation in Belgium had been going on for a month only, but de Paepe reported that 60 members had already been won and that an agreement had been made for an annual membership subscription of at least 3 francs, of which one-third would go to the General Council.

In the name of the General Council Marx proposed that the congress should be held in Geneva in September or October 1866. The place of the congress was agreed to unanimously, but at the vigorous insistence of the French delegates the date was put forward to the last week in May. The French delegates also demanded that anyone in possession of a membership card of the International should be given a seat and a vote at the congress, declaring that this was a matter of principle and the real meaning of the general franchise. Exclusively delegate representation at the congress, as demanded by Cremer and Eccarius, was secured only after a lively debate.

The General Council had drawn up a very big agenda for the congress : co-operative work, the shortening of working hours, female and child-labour, the past and future of the trade unions, the influence of the standing army on the interests of the working classes, etc., but only two points produced differences of opinion, and one of them was not put forward by the General Council at all, but by the French delegates. They demanded that “ Religious ideas and their influence on the social, political and cultural movement ” should be made a special point on the agenda. How they came to put forward this suggestion, and what attitude Marx took up towards it, can perhaps best be seen in a few sentences in the obituary article on Proudhon written by Marx a few months later and published in Schweitzer’s Sozialdemokrat, the only contribution he ever made to the latter paper, by the way. “ Proudhon’s attack on religion and on the churches, etc., rendered a great local service at a time when the French socialists considered it necessary to prove their superiority to the bourgeois Voltairism of the eighteenth century and the German Godlessness of the nineteenth century by their religiousness. Peter the Great defeated Russian barbarism with barbarism, and Proudhon did his best to defeat French phraseology with the phrase.” The English delegates also warned the conference against having anything to do with this “ apple of dis




cord ”, but the French delegates insisted and their motion was adopted with 18 against I 3 votes.

The other point on the agenda which produced disagreement was put forward by the General Council and dealt with a question of European politics which Marx considered of particular importance, namely “ the necessity of opposing the growing influence of Russia in European affairs by re-establishing the independence of Poland on a democratic and socialist basis in accordance with the right of self-determination for all nationalities ”. The French delegates in particular were opposed to this : Why mix up political with social questions ? Why wander so far afield when there was so much oppression to be fought at home ? Why bother so much about the influence of the Russian government when that of the Prussian, Austrian, French and English governments was no less evil ? The Belgian delegate Cresar de Paepe was particularly energetic in his opposition, declaring that the restoration of an independent Poland would benefit three classes only : the higher aristocracy, the lower aristocracy and the clerics.

Proudhon’s influence made itself clearly felt here. He had repeatedly opposed the restoration of Polish independence, the last occasion having been in connection with the Polish insurrection in 1863 when, as Marx pointed out frankly in the obituary article, he indulged in idiotic cynicism to the advantage of the Tsar. At the same time the insurrection had awakened all the old sympathies of Marx and Engels in the revolutionary years for the Polish cause and they had intended to issue a joint manifesto on the insurrection, but in the end this intention was not carried out.

Their sympathy for Poland was certainly not uncritical. On the 21st of April 1863 Engels had written to Marx : “ I must say that to summon up any enthusiasm for the Polacks of 1772 needs a hide like an ox. In the greater part of Europe the aristocracy of the day went down decently and even with wit, although its general maxim was that materialism represented what one ate, on what one slept, what one gained at the gaming tables or received for hard work,. but no aristocracy was quite so stupid as the Polish in the way it sold itself to the Russians.” However, so long as there was no possibility of a revolution in Russia itself the restoration of Polish independence offered the only possibility of checking Russian influence in Europe and therefore Marx regarded the brutal suppression of the Polish insurrection and the simultaneous drive of Tsarism into Caucasia as the most important events in Europe since 1815. In that part of The Inaugural Address which dealt with the




foreign policy of the proletariat he had laid the greatest stress on the Polish question, and the resistance put up by Tolain, Fribourg and others on just this point caused him to refer with bitterness to their opposition for a long time afterwards. However, with the assistance of the English delegates he succeeded in breaking down the opposition and the item remained on the agenda.

The conference held private sessions in the morning, under the chairmanship of Jung, and semi-public meetings in the evening, under the chairmanship of Odger. Those questions which had already been thrashed out and agreed upon in the private sessions were then brought up for discussion in these evening meetings before a larger audience which consisted chiefly of workers. On their return to Paris the French delegates published a report of the conference and the agenda which had been drawn up for the congress, and this met with a lively echo in the Paris press. Marx observed with obvious satisfaction : “ Our Parisians have been somewhat surprised to discover that just the paragraphs on Russia and Poland which they wanted to have deleted created the biggest sensation.” And many years afterwards he still recalled with lively satisfaction “ the enthusiastic comments ” which these passages in particular and the congress agenda general had produced from the famous French historian Henri Martin.

5.