Karl Marx (42 page)

The interview itself scarcely lived up to the elaborate
mise en scène
. Was Marx the shadowy puppetmaster behind the International? ‘There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir,’ he chuckled, ‘except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that our Association is a public one and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves.’ The American newsman was unconvinced. The International might be a society of genuine working men, but were they not mere instruments in the hands of an evil genius masquerading as a respectable middle-class citizen of north-west London? ‘There is,’ Marx answered curtly, ‘nothing to prove it.’

He grew weary of refuting the sensational rumours that were surfacing all over western Europe and beyond. A French newspaper,
L’Avenir Libéral
, reported that he had died; he then read his own obituary in the New York
World
, which eulogised ‘one of the most devoted, most fearless and most selfless defenders of all oppressed classes and peoples’. Quite gratifying, perhaps – but also an unwelcome reminder of mortality, since he was indeed in feeble health. By mid-August his doctor diagnosed ‘overstrain’
and recommended two weeks of rest and sea air. ‘I have not brought my liver medicine with me,’ Marx wrote to Engels from the Globe Hotel, Brighton, ‘but the air does me a world of good.’ He neglected to add that it was raining continuously and he had caught a beastly cold.

Notoriety followed him everywhere. Shortly after arriving in Brighton he recognised a man lurking on the street corner as a rather inept spy who had often tailed him and Engels in London. A few days later, fed up with having his every footstep dogged, Marx stopped in mid-stride, turned round and fixed his pursuer with a menacing glare. The snoop humbly doffed his hat and scarpered, never to be seen again.

Had they known the truth, these sleuth hounds could have saved themselves much wasted shoe leather. Marx’s vast, disciplined army of revolutionists existed only in the imagination of excitable politicians and editors. Once the Commune had been crushed, the International itself soon began to disintegrate. The French section was outlawed, its members either killed or transported to the distant colony of New Caledonia; the English trade-union leaders fell into the embrace of Gladstone’s Liberal Party; and many of the American branches were hijacked by middle-class disciples of the weird sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, who advocated spiritualism, necromancy, free love, teetotalism and a Universal Language. (Woodhull, who used her undoubted seductive charms to con large sums of money from the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, had begun her career as a snake-oil saleswoman in the travelling medicine-shows. She was a beneficiary of Marx’s open-door policy, which held that anyone who roughly subscribed to the Association’s statement of aims should be allowed in; but even his patience ran out when she announced her intention to stand for the American presidency as the candidate of the International Working Men’s Association and the National Society of Spiritualists.) During Marx’s absence at the seaside, several Parisian refugees in London were co-opted on to the General Council, but since most of them were
Proudhonist windbags the old factional squabbles began all over again.

And, of course, there was still the menace of Michael Bakunin, who observed the wounded and limping International like a hungry hyena eyeing up its lunch. He was now intriguing more ruthlessly than ever with his new henchman Sergei Nechayev, a deranged Russian anarcho-terrorist who had come to Switzerland in 1869. Bakunin, no mean fantasist himself, was awestruck by Nechayev’s boast of having organised a network of revolutionary cells across Russia, and the dramatic account of his jailbreak from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. Although most of these tales were pure fiction, Nechayev’s appetite for violence was real enough: before fleeing from Russia he had murdered a fellow student in St Petersburg, apparently for no better reason than to prove that he could do it. Having teamed up with Bakunin he published a series of incendiary articles and proclamations, ostensibly from ‘the International’, warning of the wrath to come.

The antics of the Bakuninists split the Federation Romande, the International’s Swiss section, down the middle and caused endless confusion – not least because both factions continued to issue statements in the name of the Federation. To settle the dispute the London HQ called a special conference in September 1871, held at the Blue Posts pub off Tottenham Court Road. ‘
It was hard work
,’ Marx wrote to his wife, who wisely took herself off to Ramsgate for the duration. ‘Morning and evening sessions, commission sessions in between, hearing of witnesses, reports to be drawn up and so forth. But more was done than at all the previous Congresses put together, because there was no audience in front of which to stage rhetorical comedies.’

Marx, always a good performer in pubs, dominated the proceedings. He pointed out that although Bakunin had promised to disband his so-called Alliance of Socialist Democracy as a condition of admission to the International, ‘the Alliance was never really dissolved; it has always maintained a sort of organisation’. There was no direct condemnation of Bakunin but
the delegates passed a motion noting that Nechayev, who had never been a member or agent of the International, ‘has fraudulently used the name of the International Working Men’s Association in order to make dupes and victims in Russia’. The Bakuninists were also ordered to stop using the name of the Federation Romande; as a sop, they were allowed to form a separate Swiss section to be known as the Jurassian Federation.

Bakunin had been let off quite lightly. But he knew that Marx was preparing for a final showdown, since the International clearly wasn’t big enough for both of them. Soon after the London conference the new Jurassian Federation held a congress of its own, at the Swiss town of Sonvillier, where there was much huffing and puffing about the ‘unrepresentative’ nature of the London conference. True enough: at the Blue Posts there had been thirteen members of the General Council but just ten delegates from the rest of the world – two from Switzerland (both anti-Bakunin), one each from France and Spain, and no fewer than six from Belgium. The Sonvillier gathering was, however, even less representative: sixteen delegates and every one a Bakuninist. They produced a circular which was distributed to International branches throughout the Continent: ‘If there is an undeniable fact, attested a thousand times by experience, it is the corrupting effect of authority on those in whose hands it is placed … The functions of members of the General Council have come to be regarded as the private property of a few individuals … They have become in their own eyes a sort of government; and it was natural that their own particular ideas should seem to them to be the official and only authorised doctrine of the Association, while divergent ideas expressed by other groups seemed no longer a legitimate expression of opinion equal in value to their own, but a veritable heresy.’ The only cure for rampant authoritiarianism, they said, was to strip the General Council of its powers and reduce it to a mere ‘letter-box’.

Over the next few months Bakunin issued a series of increasingly hysterical, phlegm-spattered circulars to International
members in Spain and Italy, presenting himself as the victim of ‘a dire conspiracy of German and Russian Jews’ who were ‘fanatically devoted to their dictator-messiah Marx’. Only the ‘Latin race’, he added flatteringly, could foil the Hebrews’ secret plans for world domination.

This whole Jewish world which constitutes a single exploiting sect
, a sort of bloodsucker people, a collective parasite, voracious, organised in itself, not only across the frontiers of states but even across all the differences of political opinion – this world is presently, at least in great part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand and of the Rothschilds on the other. I know that the Rothschilds, reactionaries as they are and should be, highly appreciate the merits of the communist Marx; and that in his turn the communist Marx feels irresistibly drawn, by instinctive attraction and respectful admiration, to the financial genius of Rothschild. Jewish solidarity, that powerful solidarity that has maintained itself through all history, united them.

These putrid ravings were at least sincere, if nothing else. Back in 1869 he had written a lengthy tirade against the Jews (‘devoid of all moral sense and all personal dignity’) in which he named only five exceptions to the rule: Jesus Christ, St Paul, Spinoza, Lassalle and Marx. When a friend asked why Marx had been granted absolution, Bakunin explained that he wanted to put the enemy off guard: ‘It could happen, even in a short time, that I will begin a battle with him … But there is a time for everything, and the hour for the struggle has not yet sounded.’ Now that battle had commenced, he no longer needed to hide his true feelings.

There is an important distinction to be made here. Until the Second World War, popular novelists such as Agatha Christie sometimes included throwaway anti-Semitic remarks in their books (‘He’s a Jew, of course, but an awfully nice one’); no one, however, has ever accused Christie of wanting to round up six million Jews and slaughter them. Similarly, the stereotype of the
‘economic Jew’ was almost universal in the nineteenth century: Marx himself used it in his early essay
On the Jewish Question
. But Bakunin directed his vicious diatribes at ‘blood Jews’, regardless of their actual religious observances, business methods, social class or political ideology. Where Marx had argued that the emancipation of mankind would free Jews from the tyranny of Judaism, Bakunin wished only to annihilate them. ‘In all countries the people detest the Jews,’ he wrote in a circular letter to the Bologna section of the International. ‘They detest them so much that every popular revolution is accompanied by a massacre of Jews: a natural consequence …’

Understandably, the General Council felt obliged to distance itself from these genocidal rants, especially at a time when every editor in Europe was looking for mud to throw at the International Working Men’s Association. In June 1872 it issued a pamphlet written by Marx,
The Fictitious Splits in the International
, whose very first page served only to disprove the title by confirming that there was indeed a split as big as the English Channel: ‘
The International is undergoing the most serious crisis
since its foundation.’ Bakunin was accused of inciting ‘racial war’ and organising secret societies as part of his anarchistic master plan to wreck the working-class movement.

He retaliated by demanding that a full congress should be summoned to settle the dispute once and for all. As there had been no congress since 1869 – first because of the Franco-Prussian war and then because of police persecution following the Paris Commune – the General Council could hardly refuse. It duly announced that a plenary assembly would open at the Hague on 2 September 1872. This was the cue for yet more howls of protest from Bakunin, who wanted it held in his own stronghold of Geneva, but the Council pointed out that Switzerland had already been the location for three of the International’s four congresses and one could have too much of a good thing. Bakunin decided to boycott the event altogether, while instructing his followers ‘to send their delegates to the Hague, but with
imperative mandates
,
clearly set forth, ordering them to walk out of the congress in solidarity as soon as the majority has declared itself in the Marxian direction on any question whatever’.

After these preliminary skirmishes the Hague congress opened in a mood of conspiratorial frenzy at the inappropriately named Concordia Hall. There were sixty-five delegates but many more reporters, spies and curious sightseers who came to gaze at the dangerous revolutionaries as if they were lions in a circus. A Belgian newspaper broke the sad news to its readers that Dr Marx, godfather of terrorism and chaos, looked like a ‘gentleman farmer’. The liberal Dutch journalist S. M. N. Calisch noted that Marx was said to have relations in Amsterdam: ‘
If that is correct, then his family will have no worries
about introducing him to society or drinking tea with him in the Zoo Café. The impression he makes in his grey suit is exactly
comme il faut
. Anyone who did not know him and had no connection with the nightmare of the feared International would take him for a tourist making a sortie on foot.’ Even so, jewellers locked and barred their shops for fear that the communists would otherwise smash the windows and steal all the trinkets. A local paper, the
Haager Dagblaad
, advised women and children to stay indoors.

To the dismay of police agents and pressmen, the congress immediately went into closed session while delegates’ bona fides were checked. A spy from Berlin wrote dejectedly to his masters that ‘
the public is not even allowed a look
into the ground floor where the meetings are held, or even so much as make an attempt to overhear through the open window a single word of what is taking place within’.
The Times
’s correspondent did manage to press his ear to a keyhole, but heard only ‘
the tinkling of the President’s bell
, rising now and again above a storm of angry voices’. The arguments were both angry and prolonged: for three days the rival factions jostled for advantage by challenging the credentials of almost all their opponents. When someone pointed out that Maltman Barry, present on behalf of the German workers in Chicago, was in fact a Tory from London and ‘not a recognised
leader of English working men’, Marx replied that this was no disgrace since ‘almost every recognised leader of English working men was sold to Gladstone’ – a remark scarcely calculated to win the other English representatives to his side. Still, at least he could rely on the Germans and the French, who included Jennychen’s fiancé, Charles Longuet. Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue had cunningly smuggled himself into the Spanish delegation, the rest of which was solidly pro-Bakunin.