Karl Marx (35 page)

Despite the years of seclusion, Marx had lost none of his old procedural guile. At its meeting of 1 November, partly at his suggestion, the General Council co-opted several new members. They included Karl Pfänder, the Communist League veteran who had once examined Wilhelm Liebknecht’s skull; Hermann Jung, a Swiss watchmaker; Eugène Dupont, a French musical-instrument maker; and Friedrich Lessner, the tailor who had rushed the manuscript of the
Communist Manifesto
to the printers in 1848. All were stalwart supporters of Marx – and he needed all the support he could get, since some of the English members were none too happy with his new text. One of the milder suggestions, as the minutes record, was that ‘some explanation should be given (in the form of a footnote) of the terms “nitrogen” and “carbon”’. (Marx thought this quite unnecessary. ‘We need hardly remind the reader,’ he commented wearily in the footnote, ‘that, apart from the elements of water and certain inorganic substances, carbon and nitrogen form the raw materials of human food.’) A more hostile complaint came from a printer, William Worley, who had made his opinions clear at the previous meeting
by objecting to the statement that ‘the capitalist was opposed to the labourer’. This time, his reformist conscience was outraged by Marx’s description of capitalists as ‘profitmongers’. By eleven votes to ten, the council agreed that the inflammatory word be erased. The address was then passed
nem. con
.

The unanimous acceptance of this ‘review of the adventures of the working class’ is a tribute to Marx’s skill in judging how far he could go. There were no revolutionary predictions, no spectres or hobgoblins stalking Europe – though he did his best to make the reader’s flesh creep with a description of British industry as a vampire which could survive only by sucking the blood of children. Mostly, he allowed the facts to speak for themselves, larding the document with official statistics plagiarised from his own work in progress,
Capital
, to justify his claim that ‘the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864’. But, as ever, his attempt to imagine an alternative was as formless if sweet as a bowl of blancmange: ‘Like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart.’

The address ended with the words ‘Proletarians of all countries, Unite!’; the equally familiar phrase encouraging them to throw off their chains was tactfully omitted. Even so, one can’t help wondering how closely his colleagues scrutinised the text before approving it. ‘The lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies,’ he announced in the final pages. ‘To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes.’ Such a notion was anathema to many of the English representatives on the General Council, who thought that the great duty of the working classes was to form trade unions which could bargain for better pay and conditions, while leaving politics to Members of Parliament. This was certainly the view of the impeccably moderate general secretary, William Randal Cremer, who later became a Liberal
MP and ended his career as a knight of the realm. The fact that even he voted for the address tells us much about Marx’s powers of persuasion. As old Communist Leaguers such as Pfänder and Lessner knew, Marx’s intimidating presence – his dark eyes, his slashing wit, his formidable analytical brain – would always dominate any committee. Scarcely a month after sitting silently on the stage at St Martin’s Hall, he was already taking charge.

But mere force of personality was not enough to quell the feuds and animosities that inevitably characterised such as incongruous hybrid as the International. Even the small French contingent on the General Council was itself split into two irreconcilable factions of republicans and Proudhonists. The republicans, represented by Le Lubez, were essentially middle-class radicals – red hot for
liberté, égalité
and
fraternité
but rather less excited by arguments about industry or property. Proudhon’s earnest disciples, led by the engraver Henri Louis Tolain, regarded republics and governments as centralised tyrannies that were inimical to the interests of the small shopkeepers and artisans whose cause they championed; all they wanted was a network of mutual-credit societies and small-scale co-operatives. Another Proudhonist, who joined the General Council in 1866, was the young medical student Paul Lafargue, later to become the husband of Laura Marx. His first encounters with his future father-in-law were unpromising. ‘
That damned boy Lafargue
pesters me with his Proudhonism,’ Karl complained to Laura, ‘and will not rest, it seems, until I have administered to him a sound cudgelling.’ After one of Lafargue’s many speeches declaring nations and nationalities to be the purest moonshine, Marx raised a laugh among his English colleagues by pointing out that ‘
our friend Lafargue, and others who had abolished nationalities
, had addressed us in “French”, i.e. in a language which nine-tenths of the audience did not understand’. He added mischievously that by denying the existence of nationalities the young zealot ‘seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation’.

If the doughty English trade unionists were incredulously amused by these Gallic squabbles, they were downright astonished to learn that the great Mazzini – a heroic figure in London – was regarded by the Germans and French as a posturing ninny whose passion for national liberation had quite eclipsed any awareness of the central importance of class. ‘The position is difficult now,’ Marx admitted after another bruising session at Greek Street, ‘because one must oppose the silly Italianism of the English, on the one hand, and the mistaken polemic of the French, on the other.’

It was a time-consuming business. In a letter to Engels of March 1865 he described a fairly typical week’s work. Tuesday evening was given over to the General Council, at which Tolain and Le Lubez bickered until midnight, after which he had to adjourn to a nearby pub and sign 200 membership cards. The next day he attended a meeting at St Martin’s Hall to mark the anniversary of the Polish insurrection. On Saturday and Monday there were subcommittee meetings devoted to ‘the French question’, both of which raged on until one in the morning. And so to Tuesday, when another stormy session of the General Council ‘left the English in particular with the impression that the Frenchmen stand really in need of a Bonaparte!’ In between all these meetings, there were ‘people dashing this way and that to see me’ in connection with a conference on household suffrage which was to be held the following weekend. ‘
What a waste of time!
’ he groaned.

Engels thought so too. After Marx’s death he said that ‘
Moor’s life without the International would be a diamond ring
with the diamond broken out’, but at first he simply couldn’t understand why his friend wished to spend hours suffering in dingy Soho back rooms when he could be at his desk in Hampstead writing
Capital
. ‘
I have always half-expected that the naïve
fraternité
in the International Association would not last long,’ he commented smugly in 1865, after another bout of internecine squabbling among the French. ‘It will pass through a lot more such phases
and will take up a great deal of your time.’ Until he retired to London in 1870 Engels played no part in the association.

By 1865 Marx was the
de facto
leader of the International, though his official title was ‘corresponding secretary for Germany’. Even this was a misnomer: the death of Lassalle left him with only a couple of friends in the whole of Germany – Wilhelm Liebknecht and the gynaecologist Ludwig Kugelmann – and most of his ‘corresponding’ took the form of sniggers about the alleged homosexuality of Lassalle’s successor, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, plus a few dismissive remarks about the appalling political backwardness of the Teutonic race. ‘
There is
nothing
I can do in Prussia at the moment
,’ he wrote to Dr Kugelmann. ‘I prefer my agitation here through the “International Association” a hundred times. The effect on the English proletariat is direct and of the greatest importance. We are now stirring the General Suffrage Question here, which is, naturally, of quite different significance here than in Prussia.’

Extending the franchise was the dominant parliamentary issue of the moment – though it should be added that the various proposals for reform put forward by Tories and Whigs in the mid-1860s owed less to high principle than to the jostle for party advantage. There were debates galore, which today seem as remote and incomprehensible as the Schleswig-Holstein question, about the voting rights of ‘copyholders’, ‘£6 ratepayers’ and ‘£50 tenants-at-will’. But amid all the arcane arguments over fancy franchises and plural voting, one point was accepted by all peers and MPs: there must be some sort of property qualification to prevent the great unwashed from having any say in the nation’s affairs. ‘What I fear,’ Walter Bagehot wrote in his
English Constitution
, ‘is that both our political parties will bid for the support of the working man; that both of them will promise to do as he likes …’ Even the National Reform Union, a supposedly radical pressure group, desired only the enfranchisement of householders and ratepaying lodgers.

In the spring of 1865, after a packed meeting at St Martin’s
Hall, a Reform League was founded to campaign for universal manhood suffrage. (The possibility that women might be either willing or able to vote was, apparently, too far-fetched to merit consideration.) Marx and his colleagues from the International took charge: ‘The whole leadership is in our hands,’ he revealed triumphantly to Engels. For the next year or so he threw himself into the crusade with gusto while also attending to the International, the manuscript of
Capital
, the demands of his family and creditors – and, of course, those blossoming boils on his bum, which were more prolific than ever. He hacked away at them with a cut-throat razor, watching with vicious satisfaction as the bad blood spurted over the carpet. Sometimes, having staggered to bed at 4 a.m. several nights running, he felt ‘infernally harassed’ and wished he had never emerged from hibernation.

Was the game worth so many late-night candles? He convinced himself that it was. ‘
If we succeed in re-electrifying the political movement
of the English working class,’ he wrote after launching the Reform League, ‘our Association will already have done more for the European working class, without making any fuss, than was possible in any other way. And there is every prospect of success.’ Not so. Reformist trade union leaders such as Cremer and Odger soon made concessions, deciding that they would be quite content with household suffrage rather than one man one vote. And that, more or less, is what they got. In the summer of 1867, Parliament approved Disraeli’s Reform Bill, which lowered the property qualification for county voters and extended the franchise to all urban householders – thus doubling the size of the electorate. But the vast majority of the working population remained as voteless as ever.

The International, too, never quite lived up to Marx’s hyperbole. There were some early successes, notably in sabotaging attempts by English employers to recruit foreign workers as strike-breakers, and the ensuing notoriety persuaded several small craft societies to affiliate – among them such exotic bodies as the Amalgamated Cordwainers of Darlington, the Hand-in-Hand
Society of Coopers, the West-End Cabinet Makers, the Day-Working Bookbinders, the English Journeymen Hairdressers, the Elastic Web Weavers’ Society and the Cigar Makers. But the big industrial unions stayed aloof. William Allen, general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, refused even to meet a deputation from the International. More galling still was the failure to enrol the London Trades Council, even though its secretary, George Odger, was also president of the International. By the time of the Association’s first pan-European Congress, held in Geneva during the summer of 1866, the total number of members in affiliated societies was 25,173 – by no means negligible, but hardly proof that the English proletariat had been ‘reelectrified’. If the International was to expand any further it would have to live up to its name and broaden its horizons far beyond the Cordwainers of Darlington.

Marx himself missed the Geneva Congress, yet still managed to dominate the proceedings. When the French Proudhonists issued their well-rehearsed protest against middle-class socialists (‘all men who have the duty of representing working-class groups should be workers’), William Randal Cremer defended the record of the few non-manual workers on the General Council. ‘Among those members I will mention one only, Citizen Marx, who has devoted his life to the triumph of the working classes.’ The baton was then taken up by James Carter of the Journeymen Hairdressers:

Citizen Marx has just been mentioned; he has perfectly understood the importance of this first congress, where there should be only working-class delegates; therefore he refused the delegateship he was offered in the General Council. But this is not the reason to prevent him or anyone else from coming into our midst; on the contrary, men who devote themselves completely to the proletarian cause are too rare for us to push them aside. The middle class only triumphed when, rich and powerful as it was in numbers, it allied itself with men of science …

After this barber-shop testimonial even the leader of the Proudhon faction, Henri Tolain, felt obliged to congratulate the absent hero. ‘As a worker, I thank Citizen Marx for not accepting the delegateship offered him. In doing that, Citizen Marx showed that workers’ congresses should be made up only of manual workers.’ Citizen Marx had not intended to show anything of the kind, and there is no evidence that he stayed away from Geneva to avoid offending proletarian sensibilities. A more likely explanation is that he didn’t wish to endure tedious harangues from the French exclusionists when he could have a few days’ uninterrupted work on
Capital
.