Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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in the Great Windmill Street Association, seceded and set up a new Association with statutes drawn up by Marx. Its leader was Gottlieb Stechan, a tablemaker who had been one of the leaders of the Communist League in Hanover. Marx wrote to Weydemeyer:

You can announce that a new Workers' Association has been formed in London under the presidency of Stechan that will steer clear of the 'emigres', the 'agitators' and Great Windmill and pursue serious aims. You understand . . . that this Association belongs to us, although we are only sending our young people there; I am only speaking of our 'educated people', not of our workers who all go.85

This Association contained about sixty members and the organising committee was in the hands of the members of the 'Marx Society'. It met twice weekly in the Bull's Head Tavern, New Oxford Street, to discuss such questions as the influence of pauperism on revolution, whether a general war was in the interests of revolution, the advisability of cooperating with other revolutionary parties, and whether poverty could be abolished after the revolution. Pieper and Liebknecht took a leading part in the discussions, though their didactic views were occasionally challenged by some of the workers. The Association also provided English lessons and in June the political discussions were replaced by a course on medieval literature given by Wilhelm Wolff. The Association came to an end, however, in the late summer of 1852 when some of the workers, including Stechan himself, returned to the Great Windmill Street Association.86

During 1852 Marx was also occupied in writing a diatribe against his fellow exiles. Its history illustrates the bizarreness of refugee politics at this time. In February 1852 Marx was approached by a Hungarian colonel named Bangya whose acquaintance he had made two years previously when the Communist League was trying to enter into alliance with other revolutionary bodies. Bangya came from a minor aristocratic family, had become an Austrian spy in 1850 and then went to Paris where he became vice-president of a committee uniting Hungarian, Austrian and German political exiles - a committee of which five out of the seven members were professional spies! Bangya's contacts with Kinkel, Willich and Mazzini enabled him to keep Vienna very well informed and he was instrumental in the arrest of the Cologne communists. He was also involved in the arrest of Willich's Paris friends in the autumn of 1851, was later arrested himself and contrived an 'escape' to London. At his meeting with Marx there in February, Bangya avoided party politics and promised Hungarian help for Weydemeyer's paper. Marx was impressed and agreed to Bangya's request for some short biographical sketches of the German

refugee leaders to be used by the Hungarians in Paris. At the end of May Bangya informed Marx that he had found a German publisher willing to pay £25 for extended versions of the sketches. Marx did not suspect any trap (Bangya had recently refused his invitation to attend a meeting of the Communist League) and set to work. At first he was helped by Ernst Dronke, a former member of the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and later by Engels. Marx spent a month with Engels in Manchester in May when the final draft was composed. 'We are crying with laughter at the pickling of these blockheads,'87 Marx wrote to Jenny. Once the manuscript had been delivered, however, the publication date was repeatedly delayed; Bangya's excuses sounded more and more implausible and inquiries revealed that the publisher Bangya had mentioned did not exist. Finally Marx came to the conclusion that the manuscript had been sold to the authorities in Germany.88

In August 1852 a further episode occurred which showed to what lengths Marx was prepared to go in his vendettas against the refugees. The rumour had reached Marx that on his American trip Kinkel had referred to Engels and himself as 'two down-and-outs who had been thrown out of the London pubs by the workers'.89 He wrote to Kinkel: 'I await your explanation by return. Silence will be treated as an admission of guilt.'90 Kinkel did reply by return that he wanted nothing more to do with Marx in view of Marx's article in the Revue attacking him while still in gaol. Marx should not, he continued, trust hearsay, but if he chose to do so, the due processes of law were open to him. Convinced that Kinkel would not look at anything with a Soho postmark, Marx 'got Lupus in Windsor to post a letter to him, written on paper in the shape of a billet doux with a bunch of roses and forget-me-nots printed on it in colour'.91 The letter named Marx's sources of information for the American venture and claimed that Kinkel's letter provided 'a new and striking proof that the said Kinkel is a common and cowardly priest'.92

By the end of 1852 the feuds among the refugees began to cool off. Engels wrote that when he was with Marx at Christmas 'we made a point of going without any fuss into the middle of the crowds in the Kinkel- Willich-Ruge pubs, which we would not have been able to risk without a brawl six months previously'.93 Kinkel's popularity was on the decline since the relative failure of his American trip and the squabbles over the money. Willich's reputation was destroyed more swiftly: Baroness von Briiningk, who held a salon for the German refugee leaders in St John's Wood, alleged that Willich had made improper advances to her; he left for America very soon afterwards. His quarrel with Marx did not immediately cease, for Willich felt compelled to reply to the accusations against him in Marx's Revelations with a long article entitled, 'Doctor Marx and

his Revelations', to which Marx responded with a sarcastic pamphlet, The Knight of the Noble Mind. There the quarrel stopped. Willich became a journalist in Cincinnati, reviewed Marx's later writings favourably and studied Hegel. He was decorated during the Civil War, marched with Sherman to Atlanta and left with the rank of Major General. He finally settled in St Mary's, Ohio, where he became one of its most active and respected citizens, his funeral being attended by more than 2500 people. Marx was not a man to pursue a quarrel interminably. He hesitated before including the section on the Willich-Schapper faction in the second edition of the Revelations in 1875, and wrote in the Preface that 'in the American Civil War Willich demonstrated that he was something more than a weaver of fantastic projects'.94

Although the leaders of the different national refugee groups did (in contrast with the rank-and-file) mix quite freely with each other, Marx's contacts with them were very sparse. He had been in close touch with the Blanquists in 1850 but they sided with Willich when the Communist League split. Louis Blanc, whom Marx considered more or less an ally after 1843, had also gone over to Willich on the occasion of the February banquet. Marx did receive an invitation to a similar banquet the following year, but sent Jenny in his place. He was not impressed by her report of the 'dry meeting with the trappings of tea and sandwiches'.95 The Italian refugee leader Mazzini was dubbed by Marx 'the Pope of the Democratic Church in partibus,<>6 and he criticised his policies in a letter to Engels as follows:

Mazzini knows only the towns with their liberal aristocracy and their enlightened citizens. The material needs of the Italian agricultural population - as exploited and as systematically emasculated and held in stupidity as the Irish - are naturally too low for the phraseological heaven of his cosmopolitan, neo-Catholic ideological manifestos. It needs courage, however, to inform the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy that the first step towards the independence of Italy is the complete emancipation of the peasants and the transformation of their semitenant system into free bourgeois property.97

As for the other prominent refugee leader, the Hungarian Kossuth, Marx considered him a representative of 'an obscure and semi-barbarous people still stuck in the semi-civilisation of the sixteenth century'.98

The only national group with which Marx had any prolonged contact were the Chartists. By 1850 the slow process of disintegration that had affected the Chartist movement after its climax and failure in 1848 was already well advanced. At the same time repressive government measures had radicalised Chartism; and among the two most influential of its radical leaders in the early 1850s were George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones.

2 3 4 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Harney was the orphaned son of a Kentish sailor and had been in Chartist journalism all his life. Engels had met him as early as 1843 when Harney was editing The Northern Star. He was the most internationallyminded of the Chartist leaders and this, together with his republicanism, led to his forced resignation from the Star in 1850. He then started his own paper, The Red Republican, later renamed The Friend of the People, which in November 1850 published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto of 'citizens Charles Marx and Frederic Engels'. A similarity in outlook, combined with the fact that Harney had a mass following and a newspaper, induced Marx to attempt a close collaboration with him. But Harney was above all a pragmatist and, while willing to join Marx and the Blanquists in the World Society of Communist Revolutionaries, he was at the same time embarking on a course that was bound to estrange him from Marx. By the summer of 1850 Harney had become convinced of the necessity of allying the National Charter Association with the expanding, but not so radical, Co-operatives and Trade Unions. The immediate cause of their estrangement was Harney's indiscriminate enthusiasm for the various refugee groups in London who could all rely on getting their views published in The Friend of the People. In February 1851 Harney's catholicity went further: he attended an international meeting to commemorate the Polish patriot Bern and gave the best speech of the evening. The meeting was supported by Louis Blanc and the Blanquists and held under the presidency of Schapper. Other incidents followed. On 24 February Harney contrived to be present at banquets organised by the rival French factions and failed to protest energetically enough when Schramm and Pieper, two of Marx's young hangers-on, were expelled from the one organised by Louis Blanc, a large affair with more than 700 present, mostly Germans. Marx professed to be tired of 'the public incense with which Harney indefatigably covers les petits grands hommesand described Harney, with that touch of snobbery which he sometimes found impossible to suppress, as 'a very impressionable plebeian'.100 And concerning the 24 February banquet he wrote to Engels:

Harney has got himself involved in this affair, first because of his need to have great men to admire, which we have often made fun of in the past. Then, he loves theatrical effects. He is stuck deeper in the democratic mud than he wishes to admit. He has a double spirit:

one which Friedrich Engels made for him and another which is his own.101

This disagreement (which Engels partly ascribed to his own departure from London and Marx's poor command of English)102 marked a definite

estrangement between Marx and the Chartist movement as a whole. Marx met Harney three months later at a tea party to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Robert Owen. Although they corresponded from time to time, a quarter of a century was to pass before their next meeting (a brief encounter on Waterloo Station).103 In 1852 Harney resigned from the (Chartist executive, moved to the North of England, thence to Jersey and eventually to the United States where he continued a correspondence with Engels to whom he was always more attached than to Marx.

As Marx's enthusiasm for Harney waned, so his relations with Ernest Jones, the other leader of the Chartist Left, increased. Engels wrote to Marx on Jones's death in 1869 that he had been 'the only educated Englishman among the politicians who was, at bottom, completely on our side'.104 Jones, the son of a cavalry officer, was a barrister by profession and a novelist and poet in his spare time. He was born to wealth and high social standing, all of which he threw away on his conversion to Chartism in 1846. He had been imprisoned for two years in 1848 and on his release was tireless in trying to keep the Chartist movement alive

through lecture tours (he was a very effective speaker) and through the paper which he started in 1851 and which continued until 1858, called originally Notes to the People and later The People's Paper. In the early 1850s Jones, unlike Harney, emphasised the doctrines of class struggle, the incompatibility of interests between capital and labour, and the necessity of the conquest of political power by the working class - views which his close association with Marx and Engels did much to reinforce. Although he was the only notable Chartist, once Harney had retired from active politics his influence steadily declined. The workers did not welcome a doctrine of class war and were more concerned to defend their own interests inside the capitalist system. Marx kept up a regular contact with Jones during the 1850s and attended his public lectures, some of which he found 'great stuff (though Jenny Marx considered his lecture on the I listory of the Popes to be 'very fine and advanced for the English, but for us Germans who have run the gauntlet of Hegel, Feuerbach, etc., not quite a la hauteur).105

Marx at first suspected Jones of siding with Harney; later, however, he came to regard Jones as 'the most talented of the representatives of Chartism'106 and approved of the tone of The People's Paper. This he contrasted favourably with Harney's criticism of Chartism as a 'class movement' which had not yet become 'a general and national movement',107 expressions that particularly annoyed Marx in that they reminded him of Mazzini's phraseology. Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1852 Marx considered that Jones was making far too much use of him as a source of information on foreign affairs and for general editorial support. 'I told