Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

Following this brief sketch of the mechanisms of the economic system in which they lived, Marx commented to the working men on the present efforts to ameliorate their lot under the obviously prejudicial capitalist organisation of labour. The fight for shorter working hours is not in vain, he said, but, rather, ‘a duty to themselves and to their race' (ibid., p. 397L), They must try to limit the tyranny of capital, which will otherwise reduce them to wretched beasts of burden, will break them in body and in spirit. Measures such as shorter working hours and higher wages are, however, only palliatives and not cures and do not take into account the fact that ‘the present social system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction: of society' (ibid., p. 404). Similarly, trade unions are effective in a limited guerrilla war against the system which they should be trying to change, ‘using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working dass, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system!’ (ibid., p. 404).

In late July Marx was forced to the painful and embarrassing confession that his inheritances had been consumed and the family was now living on pawnbroker's credit. He made a clean breast of affairs to Engels and admitted that the chief reason behind their rather high standard of living was the need to help the girls ‘establish relations and contacts which can secure their future ... even just from a commercial point-of-view, a purdy proletarian arrangement would be unsuitable here, although it would be perfectly fine if my wife and I were alone or if the girls were boys' (July 31). The thought which kept him going in all this renewed misery, Marx added, ‘was that we two are a company enterprise with me giving my time for the theoretical and party aspects of the business.’ As for his work on ‘Capital’, Marx announced that all three ‘books' of the theoretical first section were ready, excepting three chapters of book I. Then only the fourth book—the historic section—remained to be written. He was, moreover, determined not to let any of the manuscript out of his hands until the whole thing—and he termed it ‘an artistic whole’—was finished, espedally since he expected to condense and eliminate parts in order to keep within the maximum of sixty printer's sheets.

After a period of ill health, which Marx used to begin the study of astronomy, he partidpated in the reunions of the first


IWA conference (standing committee and continental delegates), held in London from September 26-29. Marx was responsible for the conference programme, the purpose of which was to plan the international congress for 1866. The Workman's Advocate was recognised as the IWA’s official organ and the following discussion topics, proposed by Marx and S. G. Fribourg of Paris, were adopted for the coming congress: co-operative labour; reduction of working hours; female and child labour; direct and indirect taxation; trade unions; standing armies; the problem of co-ordinating and combining national efforts in the struggle against capital; checking the Muscovite influence in Europe through national independence and the re-establishment of the Polish state. The French delegates also proposed the discussion of religious ideas and their socio-political effects. The first IWA congress was set for May 1866 in Geneva.

Despite his precarious financial situation Marx was unwilling to compromise himself or his work on the ‘Economics’: In October he received an offer from a dose collaborator of Bismarck’s, Lothar Bucher, to contribute monthly articles on economics to the Prussian state news organ, Der Staatsanzeiger; Three members of the Berlin working men’s assodation solidted Marx to assume the leadership of the ADAV as a member of a three-man directorate (Nov. 13). Marx turned down both offers.

After all the delays he had had with his ‘Economics’, Marx now found the International weighing on him like an ‘incubus’ and he would have been glad to get rid of it, according to a letter to Engels on December 26. As a director of The Workman's Advocate he was charged with turning it into a ‘respectable’ paper. The Reform League was enjoying enormous success and had recently held the largest working men's meeting since Marx had been in London. The various meetings of these organisations cost him three evenings per week and much writing on the side, yet Marx realised that if he were to withdraw, ‘the bourgeois dement which is now watching us (foreign infidels) with displeasure from behind the scenes would win the upper hand' (letter to Engels, Dec. 26).

Towards the end of the year Marx studied agricultural chemistry in connection with his discussion of ground rent and found that Liebig and Schonbein, in particular, were ‘more important for these matters than all economists put together’ (to Engels, Feb. 13, 1866). He now completed what he thought




was the definitive manuscript of Capital in draft. However, book II was in very rudimentary form and he was never to work on book III again to make it finally ready for publication. This last thick manuscript of book III (more than 850 printed pages) is of all his posthumous writings including the Grundrisse the smoothest and best written. In contrast to book I, written simultaneously, book III deals with the concrete side of the production of capital under real world conditions and is entitled ‘The Total Process of the Production of Capital’. Some of the problems touched upon there, still topics of debate today include : the average profit rate; the transformation of commodity values; the law of the tendency of falling profit rates; the role of credit in capitalist production; the transformation of surplus profit into ground rent. Whereas book I treats the production of capital from a purely abstract standpoint, the method of book III is empirical and approaches the production process from the actual situation of a market economy determining prices, etc. Contrary to what is frequently maintained, these two books complement rather than contradict one another: the harmonious relation between them Marx demonstrated in his lectures on ‘Wages, Price and Profit’.

1866 Marx began the year with a new spurt of energy. Determined to finish the final copy of his Capital manuscript as soon as possible, he edited and recopied the material written during the past two years, beginning with book I. In January he announced to Dr Kugelmann that he hoped to finish by March and then bring die text to Hamburg himself.

At the beginning of the year intrigues developed with the International which stemmed from the Proudhon-orientated members within the CC and in the Brussels IWA group. The ‘opposition party’ published ‘smears’ against the CC leadership and attacked various members, whom they accused of being Bonapartists. However, Marx saw that:

The real key to the dispute is the Polish Question. These fellows have attached everything to the Muscovitism of Proudhon-Herzen ... messieurs the Russians have found their latest allies in the Proudhonised section of the ‘Jeune France’ (letter to Engels, Jan. 5).

He suggested to Engels that he write an answer to the most recent anti-Poland publications of this group, especially since its




members were opposed to any discussion of the Polish Question at the IWA Congress. On January 22 Marx took part in a commemorative meeting, organised by the members of the Polish emigration and the IWA together, on the anniversary of the Polish revolt of 1863-64. Marx spoke in the name of the IWA, expressing their solidarity with the emancipatory cause in Poland. The IWA, Marx informed Kugelmann, had now made such great strides that, to the three existing journals which represented it in England, Belgium and French Switzerland, a fourth was being added : Der Vorbote, organ of the German speaking section in Switzerland. Moreover, the Reform League had had ai sensational effect in England with its recent labour meeting:^; The Times of London had devoted two successive leading articles to a discussion of this phenomenon.

By February excessive^ nightwork had undermined Marx’s health; his furunculosis returned and obliged him to stay in bed. While convalescing he was too weak to tackle theoretical material, he wrote Engels, and added instead a historical section to the part on the work day which he had already written—an addition not planned in the original concept (see letter to Engels, Feb. 10). Most concerned about Marx's recurrent disease, Engels conferred with his own doctor and then advised Marx to take small daily doses of arsenic. ‘This affair is truly getting too serious,’ he warned, ‘and if your head, as yoti' say yourself, is not up to the mark for the theoretical things, then let it rest a bit from higher theory. Stop the night-work and lead a more regular life’ (Feb. 10). He suggested that Marx give the publisher the first part of the manuscript, book I of the volume, for instance, to satisfy both public and publisher and not lose any time himself. Marx replied to Engels's proposals with a description of his latest furuncle and the doleful comment: ‘If I had enough money, that is to say, enough >—O for my family and if my hook were finished, I wouldn’t care a bit, were I to land up tomorrow in the knacker’s yard, alias kick the bucket. However, wider the aforementioned circumstances this is not yet possible'

(Feb. 13). He therefore agreed to follow the doctor’s orders with arsenic and also to deliver Meissner- the first volume of the conomics’ as soon as it was completed without waiting to finish ^e rest. Although the manuscript was ready, in its present form ^{1 Was} enormous and ‘cannot possibly be edited by anyone but me, ⁿ°t even you’, he wrote Engels (ibid.). 'J


214 Karl Marx, 1864-1872 During Marx’s illness the differences within the IWA led to a great crisis: bourgeois elements took over the Workingmen’s Advocate, turning it into the liberal Commonwealth. From his sick-bed Marx was able nevertheless to intervene to have Eccarius retained on the editorial staff. Liebknecht suggested that the IWA use the Social-Demokrat as its organ. But as Marx remarked to Engels, ‘What we want is just exactly the disappearance of the Social-Demokrat and of all Lassalleanism’ (Feb. 10). The commotion within the CC was intimately related to the rivalries and jealousies over the journal. The Frenchman Le Lubez used the opportunity to stir up animosity against the so-called ‘German influence’ within the Association. A pro-Mazzini faction led by Wolff tried to push through a resolution declaring the IWA’s solidarity with the Italian leader. To counter these moves, Marx, who was provisional secretary for Belgium, assembled a group of the IWA’s foreign secretaries at his home on March 10 to discuss a course of action. At the next meeting on March 13 they presented a united front in protest against the intrigues. As Marx later wrote to Engels, the English members saw clearly that ‘the whole continental element is associated with me to a man and there is nothing in the way of German influence, as M. Le Lubez insinuated’ hoping to prove that Marx as leader of the English faction kept down the continental members (March 24). Speaking in reference to the previous discussion of Mazzini and his merits as a working class leader, Marx pointed out that Mazzini’s interests were not compatible with those of the IWA, that he was a supporter or ‘centralist isolation' and understood working men’s associations to be a sort of ‘benefit society’. Marx subsequently explained the controversy to his cousin Nannette Philips in a letter written on March 18. Mazzini, jealous of the IWA’s success, had been stirring up discontent with the opposition to Marx’s leadership, although ‘leadership’ was not the object of his ambitions:

But having once fairly embarked in an enterprise which I consider of import, I certainly, ‘anxious’ man that I am, do not like to give way. Mazzini, a most decided hater of freethinking and socialism, watched the progress of our society with great jealousy.

In a countermove, staged by Marx, Orsini declared that Mazzini was utterly without significance in the Italian workers’ movement, and was incapable of understanding the goals of the IWA:


'As it was, I carried a complete victory over this redoubtable adversary. I think that Mazzini has now had enough of me and will make bonne mine a mauvaise jeu’ (letter written in Eng., quoted in IRSH I, 1956, pp. 108-111).

The day after this confrontation in the CC, Marx left London under doctor’s orders for a stay by the sea in Margate. Lodged in a private boarding house fronting the sea, Marx was rid of all company; he even abandoned his books. T have become myself a sort of walking stick/ he wrote to Nannette, ‘running up and down the whole day, and keeping my mind in that state of nothingness which Buddhaism considers the climax of human bliss.’ ‘In the evenings one is too tired to do anything but sleep,’ he added to Engels (March 24). He still found time, however, to tend to some of his correspondence. Writing to Dr Kugelmann on April 6, he reported that he would soon be returning to London, where he hoped to get on with the neglected ‘Capital’ manuscript. As for current political affairs in Germany, Marx remarked that the situation looked ‘rather discouraging': ‘If our philistines would only realise that without a revolution which would do away with the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns ... there is finally going to be a new thirty-years' war and another division of Germany!'

Marx's prolonged absence and the passivity of the English leaders in the IWA had permitted a new round of plotting and intriguing in the meantime. Marx felt that under the circumstances it would be too soon to hold the IWA congress in May: ‘Even if the congress should be a failure, the English wouldn’t care a rap. But for us it would be a European disgrace! ! ’ (April 6). However, after his return from Margate on April 10 Marx succeeded through letters and personal appeal in forcing through a resolution, in the teeth of French opposition, which fixed a new date for the congress in September (May 1).

Information reached Marx through Engels and others that a shipload of German tailors had been imported to Edinburgh as strike breakers in a local movement to attain higher wages and that two further shiploads were on their way. In early May Marx wrote ‘A Warning’ addressed to the German tailors, which was printed in several German newspapers and distributed as a hand-bill. In it Marx condemned the lack of solidarity between brothers in the struggle against capital and appealed to the honour of the Germans:




to prove to foreigners that they, together with their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, know how to defend their common class interests and do not lend themselves to being weak stooges of capital in its fight against labour (Documents 1:3 3 5k).

As Marx reported to Engels (April 23) and to Liebknecht (May

3. 
   , the Commonwealth was having trouble making ends meet although its circle of readers was growing steadily. Penny-paper as it was, it needed more capital behind it in order to become self-supporting. ‘If in the meanwhile the paper is not worse than it is, this is the merit of Fox who is forced to carry on a continual struggle,’ he explained to Engels. In March and May the Commonwealth published a series of three articles by Engels on ‘What does the working class have to do with Poland?’ These articles, inspired by Marx in January, caused quite a sensation among the paper’s readership in suggesting that war against Russia was a precondition for the reconstruction of Poland. In the CC Fox criticised Engels for stating that the division of Poland was due to the corruption of the Polish aristocracy. Although the Poles expressed the desire to see Engels continue the series, the project was never realised.
   

On May 4 Marx informed Liebknecht that the IWA’s move to aid the striking tailors and wireworkers by preventing the importation of strikebreakers from the Continent had succeeded. The IWA was an international force and ‘This proof of its immediate practical importance has struck the practical English mind’. In answer to the IWA’s challenge Mazzini now formed an ‘International Republican Committee’. Despite his gesture, Marx reported to Engels, ‘our Association is gaining ground every day. Only in Germany on account of that ass Liebknecht (good fellow as he is!) is there nothing to be done’ (May 17).

Again ill, and plagued by heavy financial debts into the bargain, Marx was absent from the CC meetings in late May and early June when the group discussed the adjournment of the Congress, the admission of new English members and an appeal to the Paris students and the workers of all countries, which had been written by Paul Lafargue and published in Le Courier frangais on June xo.

In his June correspondence with Engels Marx gave a detailed account of the ‘Jeune France’ movement: It seemed that among the French students a kind of Proudhonism reigned; they were