Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

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honour to be at this moment the most abused and threatened man in

the more lurid of the rumours about the Commune. He said that the International 'does not impose any particular form on political move-

and he claimed to be under police surveillance even when he spent a few days at Brighton. On the Marx household the Commune had a profoundly depressing effect: many of their closest friends were involved in the

than five months the International supported, that is to say held between life and death, the great mass of the exiles'.132 In addition to all the business of the International, Marx found that he 'not only had to fight against all the governments of the ruling classes, but also wage hand-to- hand battles with fat, forty-year-old landladies who attacked him when one or other communard would be late with his rent'.133

For all its notoriety, the International after the Commune was a spent

the impetus towards internationalism declined. Reaction could only be met by better political organisation, and this could only be carried on within national boundaries. T h e hope of revolution in France had been destroyed and, with it, all chance of revolution in Europe. Moreover, although men like Varlin had helped defeat Proudhonist views in the International, their syndicalist opposition to political action was soon to bring them into conflict with the General Council. T h e General Council itself was much weakened by co-opting a large number of French refugees who soon began to bicker among themselves in the same way as after 1848.

All three Marx daughters were intimately involved in the aftermath of the Commune. Laura and Paul had just got out of Paris before it was

the Commune and both Jenny and Eleanor set off to help Laura, arriving on 1 May. On the fall of the Commune the four adults and two children

into Spain. Laura joined him there, her only remaining child ill with dysentery. Jenny and Eleanor left to return to London but were arrested on the frontier, submitted to a lengthy interrogation and spent the night 111 gaol. Jenny only just managed to get rid of an incriminating letter from Flourens, one of the Commune leaders. T h ey were deported to Spain, and after further difficulties with the Spanish police managed to sail from St Sebastian, with Laura, at the end of August.1 34

In Germany, now the main centre of European socialism, the Eisenach party could not associate itself publicly with the International and anyway no longer needed its support against the A D A V with whom the old rivalry was beginning to decline. Although the Eisenach leaders were still loyal to Marx and Engels, appeals from London showed that (unlike the pre-1871 years) the General Council needed the support of the Germans more than they needed it. In fact, Lassalleanism continued to be the main force in German socialism; and though Marx's prestige remained high, it was more for personal than doctrinal reasons. In Britain, the publication of the Civil War occasioned the resignation of Odger and Lucraft from the General Council, but no trade union disaffiliated and the General Council continued to be active in assisting strikers. Nevertheless, British trade unions generally were becoming less radical: since the Reform Bill of 1867 and the failure of their candidates in 1868, they were looking to an alliance with the Liberals as the most effective means of securing their ends; and their support for Gladstone's pro-Russian policy made them even less congenial to Marx. Apart from Belgium, the only areas where the International made progress after the Commune were strongholds of anarchism: Spain and Italy.

But this situation was only slowly perceived by Marx who, for almost a year after the Commune, was imbued with a thoroughgoing revolutionary optimism and saw a parallel between the harassment of the International and the persecutions suffered by the first Christians which had failed to save the Roman Empire.1 3 5 By the autumn of 1871 there had been no congress of the International for two years. On the General Council Marx was instrumental in changing a proposal to hold a congress in Amsterdam into a decision to convene a private conference in London similar to the one held in 1865. T h e conference was to concern itself solely with organisational questions, and Marx's intention was that it should check the growing influence of Bakunin; indeed, he had already proposed a conference to this end a year earlier, in August 1870. Bakunin's influence was centred mainly on Switzerland where the Geneva section had split

4 52 K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

and his supporters had set up a Jura Federation - with a Bakuninist group

the differences between Bakunin and Marx: Marx gradually gave up expecting a quick revolution and was unwilling to have the International committed to the support of spasmodic risings in Italy, Spain and Russia (the countries chiefly susceptible to anarchist doctrines). T h e anarchists considered any revolutionary uprising to be justified as a step towards the total destruction of contemporary society. To them, the General Council was an authoritarian irrelevance.136

T h e inevitable clash provoked by divergent assessments of the political situation was aggravated by more personal factors: extraordinary though it seems, Bakunin had undertaken in 1869 to translate Capital into Russian. About the same time Bakunin had had the misfortune to meet and trust a young psychopathic revolutionary, named Netchayev, who had just escaped from Russia with fabricated stories of widespread revolutionary activities among the students. Netchayev was utterly ruthless in his methods and when Bakunin - predictably in one who never completed any of his own works let alone the translation of those of others - wished to suspend his labours on Capital and pay back the advance, Netchayev wrote to Bakunin's agent threatening him with death if so much as asked for the money back. Marx attributed Netchayev's reported activities to Bakunin's hatred for him, and his unreasonable suspicion of Bakunin was fed by his Russophobe friend Borkheim and by Nicholas Utin, both of whom continually worked on Marx with tales of Bakunin's intrigues. Utin, a Russian exile who had collaborated and then quarrelled with Bakunin in Switzerland, had started a Russian section of the International in Geneva in opposition to Bakunin.137 This section - which numbered only half-a-dozen members and was purely ephemeral - asked Marx to represent them on the General Council - a tribute which Marx accepted, remarking to Engels:

A funny position for me, functioning as a representative of young Russia! A man can never tell what he is capable of and what strange bedfellows he may have to accept. In the official reply I praise Flerowski and emphasise that the main task of the Russian branch is to work for Poland (i.e. help Europe dispense with having Russia as a neighbour). I considered it safer to say no word about Bakunin, either in the official or in the confidential reply.138

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Switzerland simply two ex-supporters of Bakunin, including Utin.1 39 T h e only strong delegation was the six-man group from Belgium where the

International was flourishing. This group mediated between Marx,

and dominant participant, began by recommending the General Council to limit its numbers and not to take its members too exclusively from one nationality. It then forbade the use of the title General Council by national committees, renewed the efforts of the Geneva Congress to obtain comprehensive working-class statistics, discussed ways of attracting peasants to membership of the International, and in general attempted to tighten discipline and make the International more of a political party than a forum for discussion: the London Conference resolutions are the first documents of the International to speak specifically of a 'workers' party'. But the main business was the dispute with the Bakuninists. T h e Conference re-emphasised the commitment to political action by declaring that 'in the militant state of the working class, its economic movement and its political action are indissolubly united'. This political action might well be within the framework of parliamentary democracy, for Marx declared: 'the governments are opposed to us: we must answer them with all the means that are at our disposal. To get workers into parliament is equivalent to a victory over the governments, but one must choose the right man.'140 Yet the onus of deciding whether the revolution would be violent or not lay with those who held power: 'we must declare to the governments: we will proceed against you peaceably where it is possible and by force of arms when it may be necessary'.141 T h e Conference dissociated itself from the activities of Netchayev, though Marx did not manage to implicate Bakunin. Marx also wished to get a condemnation of Bakunin's Alliance, but Belgian mediation persuaded the conference to consider the matter of the Alliance closed by remarking that it appeared to have dissolved itself and that the International would henceforth only admit sections or federations to membership. In Switzerland the dissident

also agreed to set up an English Federal Council. Marx moved this motion himself: he had at last given up his opposition to its establishment, realising that it was impossible for the General Council to infuse the English workers with internationalism and the revolutionary spirit. Marx also criticised the trade unions for being an 'aristocratic minority'1 42 and not involving lower-paid workers, to whom, together with the Irish, Marx increasingly looked for support.

In spite of Marx's view that it had 'achieved more than all the earlier

Congresses put together',143 the London Conference rendered more acute the divisions in the International, and there was almost immediate opposition to its decisions - opposition that very soon quenched for ever the optimism that Marx enjoyed throughout 1871.1 4 4 The Germans were as apathetic as ever (they had paid no financial contributions since September 1869) and Marx took the unprecedented step of asking all their sections to correspond directly with him.145 T he French section in London opposed the decisions of the Conference, as did the followers of Victoria Woodhull in America and the sections in Italy and Spain. This opposition was voiced by the Jura Federation which in November 1871 issued a circular denouncing authoritarianism and hierarchy in the International, accusing the General Council of being a kind of government and proposing that it be replaced by a correspondence bureau linking a free association of national sections. Marx wrote a reply for the General Council entitled The Alleged Splits in the International. Here he rightly exposed the futility of many of the anarchist doctrines, but also repeated the charges against Bakunin arising out of the Netchayev affair, made much of the fact that two of Bakunin's followers had turned out to be Bonapartist spies, and finally dismissed the followers of both Lassalle and Bakunin as sects which

have a justifiable existence at a time when the proletariat is not sufficiently developed to act as a class. Individual thinkers begin to criticize social contradictions and seek to overcome them by fantastic solutions which the masses of the workers have only to accept, propagate and carry out. By their very nature the sects which form around such pioneers are exclusive and hold themselves aloof from all practical activities, from politics, strikes, trade unions, in a word from every form of mass movement. The masses of the workers remain indifferent, or even hostile to their propaganda. Originally one of the levers of the working-class movement, they become a hindrance and reactionary immediately the movement overtakes them. Examples of this are the sects in France and England, and later on the Lassalleans in Germany, who, after having hampered the organization of the proletariat for years, have finally become simply tools in the hands of the police.146

What finally destroyed Marx's influence in the International were the increasing difficulties he had to face even in the bastion of Britain. At first the establishment of the English Federal Council created no problems: Hales, its Secretary, continued to support Marx and it managed to create numerous branches. T h e first sign of revolt came over the groups in America, known as Section 12, founded by Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin whose membership was middle class (and whose main energies were devoted to such causes as free love and spiritualism) in