Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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Germany. T h e Address warned: 'if the German working class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous'.88 However, Marx continued optimistically, 'the principles of the International are too widely spread and too firmly rooted amongst the German working class to apprehend such a sad consummation'. There was the inevitable reference to the 'dark figure of Russia' and the Address concluded with the assertion that the exchange of good-will messages between the French and German workers proved that 'in contrast to the old society, with its economic miseries and political delirium, a new

the Address was very well received in Britain: J o hn Stuart Mill sent a message of congratulation to the General Council, even Morley expressed his approval, and the Peace Society financed a print order of 30,000 copies.

Engels was more firmly on the German side than Marx and wrote to him in mid-August:

If Germany wins, then French Bonapartism has had it in any case, the eternal squabbling about the establishment of German unity will be ended at last, the German workers will be able to organise themselves on a far broader national basis than previously, and the French workers will also have much greater freedom of movement than under Bonapartism, no matter what sort of a government may follow there.90

Marx, too, had the impression that 'the definitive defeat of Bonaparte will probably provoke a revolution in France, whereas the definitive defeat of Germany would only perpetuate the present situation for another twenty years'.91 Events followed quickly: the French Emperor was completely outmanoeuvred and forced to surrender at Sedan. On the night of 4 September a republic had been proclaimed in Paris. T h e Brunswick Com - mittee issued an appeal for an honourable peace, and against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, but were immediately arrested and put in chains.

With Germany's adopting a less 'defensive' military posture, the G e n - eral Council issued a Second Address, also drafted by Marx. After noting that the prophecy of the First Address about the end of the Second Empire had been fulfilled, Marx protested that the defensive war had now

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IMM ome a war of aggression as envisaged by the demand for the annexation 11I Alsace and Lorraine. Borrowing from Engels' military expertise, Marx (minted out that there were no good military reasons for supposing that tinpossession of Alsace and Lorraine would enhance the safety of a united Germany and that such an annexation would only sow the seed of Iti'sh wars. With great prescience Marx continued:

If the fortune of her arms, the arrogance of success, and dynastic intrigue lead Germany to a dismemberment of France, there will then only remain two courses open to her. She must at all risks become the avowed tool of Russian aggrandisement, or, after some short respite, make again ready for another 'defensive' war, not one of those newfangled 'localised' wars, but a war of races - a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races.92

specific characteristics of Prussianism have never existed and can never exist other than in alliance with and submission to Russia. Moreover, this second war will bring to birth the inevitable social revolution in Russia.'9' Somewhat more realistically than in the First Address, Marx admitted the impotence of the working class. 'If the French workmen amid peace failed to stop the aggressor, are German workmen more likely to stop the victor amidst the clangour of arms?'94 In spite of the dubious alliance of Orleanists and professed Republicans in the provisional Government, he continued, 'any attempt to upset the new government in the present crisis, when the army is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly'.95

Following Sedan and the declaration of the Republic in France, Marx decided that the International had two immediate aims: to campaign for the recognition of the Republican Government by Britain and to prevent any revolutionary outbreak by the French working class. T h e first aim had widespread support among the workers in England, though Marx totally misjudged the situation when he talked of 'a powerful movement among the working class over here against Gladstone . . . which will probably bring about his downfall'.96 T h e General Council sent an emissary to Paris to prevent the London French committing 'stupidities there in the name of the International';97 and a government newspaper in Paris went as far as publishing, on the day of the proclamation of the C o m - mune, a letter (purporting to have come from Marx but in fact a complete forgery) which urged the Parisians to abstain from all political activity and confine themselves to the social aims of the International. Marx was exceedingly scornful of Bakunin's short-lived coup in Lyons when he seized

J 5 8 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

the town hall and immediately proclaimed the abolition of the state. Engels wrote to Marx in September 1870 that if the workers attempted a revolutionary rising they 'would be needlessly crushed by the German armies and set back another 20 years'.''8 Nevertheless, as the Provisional Government grew more reactionary Marx began to modify his views as to the advisability of revolt. In any case the General Council was once again reduced to the role of helpless spectator. Marx considered the outbreak of the Commune to be largely the result of the 'accident' that the Prussians were at the gates of Paris. 'History', he wrote to Kugelmann, 'would be of a very mystifying nature if "accidents" played no part in it.' But he was optimistic enough to think that 'with the struggle in Paris the struggle of the working class with the capitalist class and its state has entered a new phase. Whatever the immediate result of the affair, a new starting point of world-historical importance has been achieved.'99

Contrary to widespread public opinion after the fall of the Commune, the International had very little influence either on its origins or on its policies; and when Marx referred to the Commune as 'the greatest achievement of our party since the June revolt',100 he was using the word 'party' very loosely; and Engels was speaking even more loosely when he

of the void left in Paris when Thiers withdrew all government officials, local and central, to Versailles. This left the Central Committee of the

assumed the title Commune de Paris after the title of the Council set up

the Commune; it had been crushed by Napoleon's police shortly before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and was only just beginning to reorganise itself. Of the ninety-two members on the Council of the Commune only seventeen were members of the International. Contact between Paris and the General Council was difficult, though Marx received letters from some of the leaders of the Commune. Lafargue even suggested that Engels go over to help.104 N o r was the social and political structure of the Commune of a nature to favour the policies of the

actual measures passed by the Commune were reformist rather than revolutionary, with no attack on private property: employers were forbid-

den on the penalty of fines to reduce wages; there was to be no more night-working in bakeries, rents were suspended, and all abandoned businesses were transferred to co-operative associations. These measures were lar from being socialist. In fact the Commune had such a short life, was composed of such disparate elements and operated under such exceptional circumstances that it is difficult to ascribe any coherent policy to it.

Virtually from the outset Marx was pessimistic about the success of the Commune. According to the Austrian socialist Oberwinder, 'two days after the beginning of the insurrection, Marx wrote to Vienna that it had no chance of success'.105 'It looks as though the Parisians are succumbing', he wrote to Liebknecht on 6 April. 'It is their own fault, that in fact

he considered that they had allowed Thiers to regain the initiative and concentrate his forces. A few days later Marx expressed to Kugelmann his admiration for the boldness of the Communards:

What resilience, what historic initiative and what self-sacrifice these Parisians are showing! After six months of starvation and ruin brought about more by internal treachery than by external enemies, they rise in revolt under Prussian bayonets as though there had never been a war between France and Germany, as though the enemy were not still at the gates. History can show no similar example of such magnificence.107

But he repeated his views that they should have marched on Versailles immediately and that the Central Committee of the National Guard gave up its power too soon. And in 1881 he declared that 'with a modicum of common sense the Commune could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people - the only thing that could have been reached at the time'.108 There are only two surviving letters from Marx to the leaders of the Commune. He had been asked for specific advice by Frankel who was in charge of labour and commerce, but his reply has been lost; in the letters that survive Marx offered no specific advice, confining himself to the observation that 'the Commune seems to me to waste too much of its time with trivialities and personal nvalries'.109

Marx's personal ambivalence to the Commune goes a long way to explaining the otherwise curious fact that, throughout the two months of the Commune's existence, the General Council remained absolutely silent. On 28 March, the day after the establishment of the Commune, Marx himself had proposed that an Address to the People of Paris be drawn up and the Council had charged him with the drafting. A week later he stated in the Council that an Address 'would now be out of place'.110 On

18 April he declared that an Address to the International about the struggle in France might be appropriate; but the members of the General Council agreed that since the only information to date was based on false newspaper reports, no detailed comment was possible. Marx was very assiduous in collating different press reports, though it is a pity that he does not seem to have used The Times correspondent who was, in fact, the best placed. Marx wrote to Frankel at the end of April: 'The General Council will publish shortly an address on the Commune. It has till now postponed the publication of this because it counted from day to day on receiving more precise information from the Paris Section.'"1 Marx had to apologise to the three subsequent meetings for not having completed the Address; at the last two sessions Engels explained Marx's absence on the grounds of ill health. However, this did not prevent Marx from telling Frankel in mid-May that he had written 'several hundred letters . ..

to every corner of the world'.1 1 2 Subsequent deadlines were again broken and the Address was not presented to the Council until 30 May, three days after the collapse of the Commune.

T h e Address, subtitled 'The Civil War in France', that Marx did eventually present to the General Council was some forty pages long and had been preceded by at least two full-length drafts that were noticeably different. These drafts, among other things, show how little sympathy Marx had for the Jacobin violence of some of the Communards. In the first of the four sections of the final and published version, Marx analysed the Republican Government under Thiers and concluded that it was more concerned to suppress working-class activities than to defeat the Prussians, since 'Paris armed was the revolution armed', and the first priority of the so-called Government of National Defence was capitulation. Marx characterised the leading members of the Government in a series of vicious sketches. Of Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister, for example, Marx wrote:

Living in concubinage with the wife of a drunkard resident in Algiers, he had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man. In a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals.11'

And of Thiers, the President:

A master in small state roguery, a virtuoso in perjury and treason, a craftsman in all the petty stratagems, cunning devices, and base perfidies of parliamentary party-warfare; never scrupling, when out of office, to fan a revolution, and to stifle it in blood when at the helm of the state;