Karl Marx: Man and Fighter Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen

Chapter 21: The Last Ten Years

Marx was so identified with the International in the public eye that people refused to believe that the chief of the general staff would remain in London after the general staff had been transferred to New York. English newspapers announced that Marx was preparing to emigrate to America. In 1876 Professor Funck Brentano actually told the Le Play Society in Paris that Marx had been living in the United States ever since the Hague Congress.

Marx, however, remained in London, still occupied with work for the International, though to a smaller extent than before. His first task was to supervise the publication of the decisions of the Hague Congress. His friend Sorge kept plying him from New York with requests for instructions. The furious attacks of the Bakuninists, who now shrank at nothing, had at least occasionally to be answered with a few sharp blows. A split occurred in the British Regional Council and Marx had passages of arms with Hales, Mottershead, Jung and Eccarius.

From the spring of 1873 onwards it became clearer every month that what had at first appeared to be only the liquidation of a phase in the life of the International culminating in the Hague Congress was in fact the liquidation of the International itself. In September Marx advised Sorge to 'let the formal organisation of the International recede into the background for the time being, but not to let the headquarters at New York out of his hands, in order to prevent idiots or adventurers from gaining control and compromising the cause.' Events and the inevitable evolution of things would lead to the resurrection of the International in an improved form; for the time being it was sufficient not to let the connections with the best men in the various countries lapse. Marx summed up the situation in a letter to Sorge in April, 1874. He said there could be no question at the moment of the working classes playing a decisive rôle in Europe. In England the International was for the time being (once more 'for the time being') as good as dead, the new French trade unions were but points of departure from which development would take place when freer movement became possible again, and in Spain, Italy and Belgium the proletariat was to all intents and purposes impotent. Germany, practically the only country in which the workers' movement was in the ascendant, did not count in the International. Contrary to his hopes, for practically a year after the Hague Congress Marx had no time to resume his theoretical work but had to devote himself almost entirely to International affairs; and what time was left to him he had to devote to the settling of matters he believed to have been settled already.

Das Kapital was to have been translated into French at the end of 1867. Elie Reclus, brother of Elisée Reclus, an anarchist who subsequently became a well-known geographer, undertook the task, but soon abandoned it. Two years later another Frenchman undertook it but did not get very far. Not till the winter of 1871 was a French publisher found who was willing to take the risk (for a risk it was at that time). There were difficulties of all kinds from the first. The publisher, a bookseller named Lachâtre, lived abroad, having been condemned to twenty years' imprisonment for his part in the Commune, and his business was managed by a legal administrator. Next there was a shortage of funds. Marx invited his cousin, August Philips, who lived in Amsterdam, to share in the cost of publication, but Philips said he would not think of furthering Marx's revolutionary aims. In the end Das Kapital was published in French, though it only came out in instalments published at intervals. Marx wrote to Lachâtre that this method of publication gave him particular satisfaction. 'The work will be more accessible to the working classes in this form, and for me that consideration takes precedence of all others.'1 Roy, the translator, did his work well, but Marx had 'the deuce of an amount' to do all the same; not only had he to revise the translation, which was no light task in view of the condensed style of the original and the play made with Hegelian phraseology in the chapter on the theory of value, but he simplified passages here and expanded passages there, amplifying the statistical data and indulging in controversies with French economists. The final instalment did not appear till May, 1875, for there were periods when he had to stop work on it altogether and others when he could only continue by exerting himself to the utmost, for he was a sick man.

In autumn, 1873, he broke down altogether. He had been suffering from headaches and insomnia during the summer and was ordered by his doctor not to work more than four hours a day. Then his health improved somewhat, but in November it grew worse again. The 'chronic mental depression' grew worse and worse. The doctor ordered complete cessation of work, and his friends feared the worst. Once more he recovered, but in the summer of 1874 he again had to take a 'complete rest.' After years of superhuman toil on Das Kapital, carried out under the most adverse circumstances in the hunger and poverty of exile, harassed by cares about to-morrow's bread to feed his wife and children, followed by the work of building up the International and the exhausting struggle to hold it together into which he cast the last ounce of his resources, his old liver trouble broke out again. He never again shook it off completely, though three visits to Carlsbad and a cure at the German resort of Neuenahr caused such an improvement that it never became threatening again. His first visit to Carlsbad in the summer of 1874 was somewhat risky, as it was by no means certain that the German and Austrian police would allow the 'chief of the Red International' to go unmolested. In August, 1874, Marx applied to the Home Office for British citizenship, but the application for naturalisation was refused on the grounds (which of course Marx never knew) that 'this man was not loyal to his king.' In Carlsbad, as the police boasted, he was 'continually and uninterruptedly watched,' but gave 'cause for no suspicion,' so they did not trouble him any more. After the enactment of the Socialist law of 1878 the route through Germany was closed to him, but he no longer needed the German and Bohemian watering places. The headaches and insomnia, the 'nervous exhaustion' as Engels called it, remained.

After 1873 Marx never regained his old capacity for work. He remained the insatiable reader that he had always been; he continued indefatigably making extracts from what he read, he went on collecting material, but he no longer had the capacity to organise it. Again and again he sat down and started and in the autumn of 1878 believed that be second volume of Das Kapital would be finished within a year but he never completed more than a few pages of the fair copy. Marx had learned Russian. England had served as the main illustration of theoretical development in the first volume of Das Kapital, and he intended to use Russia as the basis of his treatment of ground rent in the second volume. Marx could not get enough Russian literature. After his death Engels found two whole cubic metres of Russian statistical material. It was not conscientiousness alone that drove Marx on in his everlasting search for new material. He used it also to hide from himself the crippling of his creative powers. Engels hated those piles of Russian books and once said to Lafargue that he would have liked to burn them. For he suspected Marx of sheltering behind them in order to find peace from the pricks of his own conscience and the urging of his friends. But Engels did not discover how little had been completed of what he had believed to have been completed, in spite of all his suspicions, until after Marx's death, when he examined his manuscripts. 'If I had known,' he wrote to Bebel in the late summer of 1883, 'I would have given him no peace by day or night until the whole thing had been finished and printed. Marx himself knew this better than anyone, and he also knew that if it came to the worst, as it has, the manuscript could be edited by me in his spirit. He actually said so to Tussy.' The second volume of Das Kapital was completed by Engels and published in 1885. The third volume appeared in 1894. After 1877, when he wrote a contribution to Engels's attack on Eugen Dühring, as well as a few articles opposing Gladstone's Russian policy, Marx published practically nothing.

The latter appeared in Conservative newspapers. There was no Socialist Press in England, but when it came to attacking Russia Marx was willing to enter into alliance with the devil himself. The Franco-Prussian War had enormously strengthened Russia's position in Europe, and Russia remained the 'so far unassailed bulwark and reserve army of the counter-revolution.' Russia was still an oppressive nightmare over Europe. Anyone who fought Russia was objectively fighting in the service of the revolution.

The International was broken. In the middle of the seventies there was no proletarian army anywhere but in Germany. Under Marx's leadership it did all in its power to denounce Bismarck's servility towards the Tsar, in the Reichstag, in its newspapers, in pamphlets, like Liebknecht's The Oriental Question, or shall Europe become Cossack? which Marx approved of, although he usually did not see eye to eye with Liebknecht. But the German Party was far too weak to affect German foreign policy in the slightest degree. The European proletariat, split, scattered or not organised at all, was powerless. Marx was convinced that the future belonged to it, and whatever happened in Europe nothing could shake his conviction of its ultimate victory. 'So far I have always found,' he once wrote to Johann Philipp Becker, 'that all really sound men who have once taken the revolutionary road invariably draw new strength from defeat and become ever more resolute the longer they swim in the stream of events.' The bourgeois world was destined to destruction, though how and when was uncertain, for it depended on factors over which the proletariat so far had no control. 'General conditions in Europe are of such a kind that they are heading more and more towards a European war. We must go through it before there can be any thought of the European working classes having decisive influence.' That was what Marx thought in the spring of 1874. War might advance the rise of the proletariat to power or might impede it. Marx closely followed the foreign politics of the great European countries. In February, 1878, when his wife was ill and he was suffering from headaches by day, insomnia by night, and bad fits of coughing, he wrote two long letters to Liebknecht which show how carefully he followed political and military events during the Russo-Turkish war, which ended with the preliminary peace of Adrianople at the end of January.

In 1874 Marx still expected a resurrection of the European workers' movement as a result of a general European war. For as long as the stronghold of the counter-revolution had not fallen, as long as its shadow still lay over Europe, all hope of a victory for the revolution was in vain. The movement might gain success in one or other or all the countries of Central and Western Europe, but the last word would still be spoken by the Tsar. And the Tsar could only be overthrown in a war with another Great Power. The foundations on which Russian absolutism rested were still too strong to be shaken by anything less than a European war. Up to the middle of the seventies Marx was extremely sceptical of all news of revolutionary movements in Russia, and the Nechaiev affair was not calculated to make him change his mind.

But the more thoroughly he studied Russia, the more Russian literature he read, the more Russian statistics he examined, the more probable it began to appear to him that this colossus with feet of clay only needed a slight blow from without to cause it to collapse. When Russia declared war on Turkey in 1877 he felt practically certain of a Turkish victory, which would be followed by a Russian revolution. And when the Turks really did gain a victory he believed revolution in St. Petersburg to be at hand. 'All classes of Russian society are economically, morally, intellectually in complete decay,' he wrote to Sorge at the end of September, 1877. 'This time the revolution will begin in the East.' On February 4, 1878, he explained to Liebknecht that 'we are definitely on the side of the Turks for two reasons: (1) Because we have studied the Turkish peasant, i.e. the Turkish masses, and we have learnt that the Turkish peasant is without doubt one of the most capable and moral representatives of European peasantry (this argument could of course also have been used of the Serbian and Bulgarian peasants whom the Turks oppressed); (2) because the defeat of the Russians will considerably hasten the social revolution in Russia, the elements of which already to a great extent exist, and thereby also hasten the revolution in all Europe.' When Marx wrote this Turkey had already been defeated. But Marx did not abandon his idea of the necessity of a European war.

There was now a revolutionary movement in Russia that was incomparably stronger than could have been hoped for two years previously. The Narodnaya Volya ('People's Will') Party attacked absolutism with the only weapon the revolutionaries had. That weapon was Terrorism. In 1879 and 1880 members of this Party made several abortive attempts on the life of the Tsar. Many paid for them with their lives. Those who managed to escape abroad (Leo Hartman, N. Morosov, and others) were received by Marx as friends. Alexander II was assassinated by a member of the Narodnaya Volya Party in March, 1881. On April 11 Marx wrote to his daughter Jenny that the Terror was 'a historically inevitable means of action, the morality or immorality of which it was as useless to discuss as that of the earthquake at Chios.' The Russian Terrorists were 'excellent people through and through, sans phrase mélodramatique, simple, straightforward, heroic.' It was no longer necessary for the fortress to be stormed from without, for it was crumbling by itself. War had become superfluous. Nay more, it would actually be harmful now.

Engels wrote to Bebel in the middle of December, 1879: 'In a few months things in Russia are bound to come to a head. Either absolutism will be overthrown, after which, the stronghold of reaction having collapsed, a wind of a different kind will blow through Europe, or there will be a European war which will bury the present German Party in the struggle which every country will have to fight for its national existence.' On September 12, 1880, Marx wrote to Danielson that he hoped that there would be no general European war. 'Although in the long run it could not hold up social development, and in that I include economic development, but would rather intensify it, it would undoubtedly involve a futile exhaustion of forces for a longer or shorter period.' Three months before Marx's death Engels wrote to Bebel, repeating Marx's views as follows: 'I would consider a European war a misfortune; this time a terrible misfortune. It would inflame chauvinism everywhere for years, as every country would have to fight for its existence. The whole work of the revolutionaries in Russia, who stand on the eve of victory, would be annihilated and made in vain, our party in Germany would be temporarily swamped and broken up in the chauvinist flood, and the same thing would happen in France.'

Russia was 'sinking into a morass.' Tsarism was succumbing in peaceful putrefaction and its last supports were being smashed by the revolutionaries' bombs. Marx over-estimated the disintegration of Russian society and the strength of the revolutionary movement. The power of absolutism, though weakened, was not shaken nearly to the extent that Marx believed. It had become improbable that Russia would actively intervene as in 1849 and give military aid in suppressing a Central European revolution. The weight with which Russia had overlain Europe for decades had become lighter. Europe could go its own way without the fear of finding it barred at all decisive points by Russian troops--but only if peace were kept, and a struggle of warring peoples did not come to bar the way and hold up the struggle of the rising proletarian class and throw it back for ten, twenty years or even more.

In the seventies and the beginning of the eighties the European workers' movement took great steps forward and advanced faster than Marx expected after the death of the International; and it did so without passing through a general European war. True, it did not always take the path that Marx considered the right one. He found much to criticise in the German Party, and later in the French. But in spite of its faltering and its uncertainties and all its temporary deviations it was on the right track.

The 1874 elections showed that the 'Eisenacher,' the followers of Liebknecht and Bebel, and the followers of Lassalle were practically equal in strength. During the decade that followed Lassalle's death the movement he had founded lost a great deal of its sectarian character. The specific Lassallean demands still remained on its programme, but they were not believed in with much conviction and in the end survived practically only out of sheer tradition. The two German workers' parties grew nearer and nearer to each other. They both fought the same enemy, they were both persecuted alike, and gradually the wish to surmount the breach and unite became so strong that towards the end of 1874 amalgamation into one great German workers' party was decided on. Marx and Engels were indignant at the news. When Marx was sent a draft of the programme of the new party, he wrote his observations on it and sent them to the 'Eisenacher.' He took the programme point by point, subjecting each to devastating criticism, proving the whole to be a hash of ill-understood scientific Socialism, vulgar Democratic phraseology and long-obsolete Lassallean demands, and he ended by threatening to attack it publicly if it were adopted. It was adopted, and became the programme of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party, founded at Gotha at the end of May, 1875. Marx, in spite of his threat, made no public attack on it, because the programme was regarded as Communistic by workers and bourgeoisie alike. Nor did the split, which Marx regarded as inevitable, occur. The Party remained united, and in 1891, at Erfurt, adopted a pure Marxist programme.

Marx had made a mistake and recognised it. He never regarded himself as infallible. Engels, in a letter to Bebel of November 4, 1875, described the place that Marx and he assigned themselves in the international workers' movement. Their task, he said, was 'uninfluenced by details and distracting local conditions of the struggle, from time to time to measure what had been said and done by the theoretical principles that are valid for all modern proletarian movements.' They demanded one thing only from the Party; that it remain true to itself. Bakuninists and bourgeois politicians accused Marx of enthroning himself as Red Tsar in London, sending out ukases for which implicit obedience was required; and they said that these often led to prison, death and destruction. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. 'It is easy for us to criticise,' Engels acknowledged in a letter to Frau Liebknecht, when Wilhelm Liebknecht was once again in prison, 'while in Germany every imprudent or thoughtless word may lead to imprisonment and a temporary interruption of family life.' Another time he wrote to Bebel: 'It is easy for us to talk, but we know that your position is far more difficult than ours.'

After the enactment of Bismarck's Socialist law in 1878, when the Party spent some time in hesitating uncertainty and many thought that the right policy was to be absolutely loyal and not provoke the enemy, in the hope of causing him to moderate his severity, Marx attacked them furiously. Though once more he threatened to attack them publicly, he did not do so. On November 5, 1881, he wrote to Sorge that the 'wretched' attitude of the Sozialdemokrat, the paper the Party published at Zurich and smuggled into Germany, led to constant disputes with Liebknecht and Bebel in Leipzig, and that these disputes often became very violent indeed. 'But we have avoided intervening publicly in any way,' the letter continued. 'It would not be decent for people living abroad in comparative peace to provide an edifying spectacle for the bourgeoisie and the Government by aggravating the position of men working in the most difficult conditions and at great personal sacrifice.' The same trust in the logic of development that had guided Marx as leader of the General Council of the International determined his attitude to the growing German, Party now.

In France the Socialist ranks that had been scattered by the Commune gradually re-formed towards the end of the seventies. A fair number of them were former Bakuninists who drew nearer and nearer to Marxism. Prominent among them were Jules Guesde and Benoît Malon. In November, 1877, Guesde founded L'Egalité, a weekly to which Bebel and Liebknecht contributed from Germany. Although not at all clear in its views, the circle grouped round L'Egalité nevertheless contributed substantially towards the propagation of the basic ideas of modern Socialism. So rapidly did the movement grow that in October, 1879, the Fédération du Parti des Travailleurs Socialistes was founded at a Congress at Marseilles. Its programme, adopted at a Congress at Le Havre in November, 1880, was fundamentally based on Marx. Guesde visited London and the new party's minimum programme was the joint labour of Marx, Engels, Guesde and Lafargue. It did not correspond with the wishes of Marx and Engels in every way. Among other things Guesde insisted on inserting a demand for a minimum legal wage. Marx opposed this, saying that if the French proletariat were still childish enough to need such a bait it was not worth while drawing up a programme for them at all. But Guesde insisted and the demand remained in the programme. But this did not cause Marx to withdraw his advice and help from the new Party, any more than he had done in the case of the German Party when it drew up its Gotha programme. He knew that it would overcome these infantile ailments. He did not believe the young party to be united enough to survive for long. This time he was right. No sooner had it been founded when it split into two. Marx's connection with the Parti Ouvrier, led by Guesde, was a very slender one. Engels wrote to Bernstein in October, 1881, that Marx had given Guesde advice from time to time through Lafargue, but it was scarcely ever followed. In the violent dispute that broke out between the two groups after the split at the Congress at St. Etienne in September, 1882, Guesde and his friends were continually attacked for 'submitting to the will of a man who lived in London outside any party control.' They did not submit to his control and had no justification whatever for their claim that theirs was the scientific Socialism that Marx had founded. A remark that Marx once made to Lafargue has often been quoted. 'What is quite certain is that I am not a Marxist.'2

Nevertheless the movement in France made progress while working classes in England, the most industrialised country in the world and the country in which Marx lived, remained silent and inactive. Occasionally the British working classes seemed to stir, but no attempt to form a proletarian party ever got beyond the preliminary stages. In the spring of 1881 Marx tried to bring the trade union leaders into contact with the radical politicians. Engels, optimistic as ever, already visualised a 'Proletarian-Radical Party' led by Joseph Cowen, M.P. for Newcastle, 'an old Chartist, half, if not a whole Communist and a very fine fellow.' A year later he wrote to Kautsky 'There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals.' Yet Marx's ideas gradually penetrated even in England. The first and by far the most important English Marxist was H. M. Hyndman. He had read Das Kapital in French and was converted at once. He attached himself to Marx, they frequently exchanged visits, and at Marx's quiet retreat in Maitland Park Road, they would often talk till late into the night. But in the summer of 1881 the friendship abruptly terminated. Hyndman wrote a book, England for All, in which he popularised Das Kapital and did so very well. But he did not mention Marx's name, though he incidentally remarked that he owed a great deal to an important thinker. Marx took this seriously amiss and refused to accept the excuse that Englishmen did not like being taught by foreigners. Hyndman was a vain man, with a strong inclination to political adventurism, and his silence about Marx was not due to objective reasons alone. Hyndman's alleged sole motive for silence about Marx was paralleled by Guesde, who gave the same reason for asking Malon to give out his programme, which Marx had co-operated in drafting, as his own. Hyndman said that Engels's jealousy was to blame for the breach. Objective and personal reasons may have been, combined. To the end Marx remained practically unknown in England.