Karl Marx (39 page)

Two days before Christmas 1867, while Karl lay on the couch in carbuncular agony, Jenny was in the kitchen joylessly preparing the seasonal pudding – seeding raisins, chopping up almonds and orange peel, shredding suet, kneading eggs and flour – when a voice called down the stairs, ‘A great statue has arrived.’ It was the Kugelmanns’ bust of Zeus, sent from Germany as a Christmas gift and only slightly chipped from its long journey. ‘
You can have no idea of the delight
and surprise you occasioned us,’ she wrote to the Doctor. ‘My warmest thanks to you also for your great interest and indefatigable efforts on behalf of Karl’s book.’ The form of applause preferred by most Germans, she added bitterly, ‘is utter and complete silence’.

For the first three months of 1868 Marx was unable to work at all. If he walked to the British Museum, the carbuncle on his inner thigh rubbed against his trousers; if he sat at his desk, the carbuncle on his bottom soon forced him to retreat to a couch and lie on his side; if he tried to write, the carbuncle below his shoulder-blade took a painful revenge. Even his letters to Engels became noticeably shorter. ‘During the whole of last week I had many bleeding shingles; particularly obstinate and hard to obliterate the mess under my left armpit,’ he reported on 23 March. ‘But generally I feel much better …’ Not for long: the very next day, while he was reading a book, ‘there was something like a black veil before my eyes. In addition, a frightful headache and chest constriction.’ If only he didn’t have to produce the next ‘two damned volumes’ of
Capital
and seek out an English publisher, he would move to Switzerland forthwith. In London the Marxes’ living costs were between £400 and £500 a year, but in Geneva he reckoned they could muddle along quite comfortably on about £200.

The only reasons for staying in London were those two institutions that occupied so much of his time – the British Museum and the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association. However, one other consideration may have crossed his mind: Geneva was now the home of Michael Bakunin, whom Marx had already identified as the man most likely to destroy the International.

Michael Bakunin was a hairy Russian giant, the very model of a thunderbolt-hurling revolutionist, all impulse and passion and pure will. The composer Richard Wagner, a comrade-in-arms during the Dresden uprising of 1849, is said to have modelled the character of Siegfried on him; his presence can also be detected in Dostoyevsky’s novel
The Possessed
. Legends naturally attached themselves to such a figure, many of his own invention. There was the story of how, during a revolt in Italy, the fearless colossus marched out of a besieged house straight through a crowd of soldiers: none dared touch him. He roamed the world claiming to be the leader of vast insurrectionary Brotherhoods or Leagues, which usually turned out to be no more than a dozen cronies in a pub. He had a boyish enthusiasm for the paraphernalia of plotting – cyphers, passwords, invisible ink. Marx referred to him as the Russian hierophant (high priest), but Engels suggested that elephant would be more accurate: the gigantic frame, the lumbering gait, the habit of trampling anything that stood in his path.

Bakunin is often described as the Father of Modern Anarchism (Proudhon being his main rival for the title); but he bequeathed no great theoretical scripture. His legacy was the single idea that the state was evil and must be destroyed. Communist states were no better than capitalist: authority would still be centralised in the hands of the few, and even if the state were run by ‘workers’ they would soon become as corrupt and despotic as the tyrants they had overthrown. He proposed instead a form of federal
anarchy in which power was so widely dispersed that nobody could abuse it.

Or so his disciples would have you believe. It is remarkable how many of them there are: during his lifetime he may have been a general without an army or a Mohammed without a Koran, but in the twentieth century he acquired a legion of admirers – many not in the least revolutionary or anarchistic – who hailed him as the one person to foresee that Marx’s ideas could lead only to the Gulag. The two men are consistently juxtaposed, and always to Marx’s discredit. ‘
The struggle between the two lies at the very heart and core of all debates
about the history of the workers’ movement even to the present day,’ writes the German Marxologist Professor Fritz Raddatz. ‘There is no way of evading the answer … Marx and Bakunin = Stalin and Trotsky.’ The British historian E. H. Carr contrasts Bakunin and Marx as ‘
the man of generous, uncontrollable impulses
, and the man whose feelings were so perfectly subdued to his intellect that superficial observers disbelieved in their existence … the man of magnetic personal attraction, and the man who repelled and intimidated by his coldness’. True, Carr concedes that Bakunin was sometimes reckless and incoherent. But even these failings become virtues when set against the icy, inhuman discipline of a desiccated Marxist calculating machine.

According to Isaiah Berlin, ‘
Bakunin differed from Marx as poetry differs from prose
.’ The apparent implication that Bakunin was a lyrical free spirit and Marx a literal-minded plodder – is little more than a donnish rephrasing of that crude Trotsky/Stalin formula: the humane libertarian versus the ruthless authoritarian. It is a myth that has just enough truth to keep it alive. Bakunin was indeed a creature of pure emotion who despised Marx’s meticulous rationalism and attention to detail. His lack of interest in the complex mechanics of capital was matched or balanced by Marx’s contempt for cloak-and-dagger skulduggery. Beyond that, however, almost everything said and written about this battle of the giants is nonsense.

They had met in Paris in 1844 and then in Brussels shortly before the revolutions of 1848, at a time when Bakunin was still more of a communist than an anarchist. Though four years older than Marx, he acknowledged the young man’s superior learning (‘I knew nothing at that time of political economy’) while guessing that their irreconcilable temperaments would never permit ‘any frank intimacy’. That summer, Marx’s
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
published a gossip item from Paris, attributed to George Sand, alleging that Bakunin was a secret agent of the Tsar: Marx’s willingness to spread this rumour can probably be attributed to his instinctive mistrust of Russia and the Russians. Nevertheless, he happily printed a letter from George Sand denying that she had ever said anything of the sort, and appended a brief editorial note apologising for the mistake. A few weeks later the two men met by chance in Berlin. ‘You know,’ Marx revealed melodramatically, ‘
I am now at the head of a communist secret society
, so well disciplined that if I told one of its members, “Go kill Bakunin,” he would kill you.’ However, since the source of this alleged remark is Bakunin himself, an incorrigible fantasist, we should not necessarily believe it. If Marx really had issued such a threat, would the short-fused Russian ever have spoken to him again?

As it happened they didn’t see each other for another sixteen years, but this was a purely geographical estrangement. After his adventures with Richard Wagner in 1849, Bakunin spent the next eight years as a peripatetic prisoner in Dresden, Prague and St Petersburg. In 1857, following the death of Tsar Nicholas, his sentence was commuted to ‘exile for life’ in Siberia. Four years later he escaped by stowing away aboard a ship bound for San Francisco, whence he returned via New York to Europe.

As with Lassalle, Marx could recognise a big man when he saw one, however much he disliked the fellow’s airs and affectations. Engels made the point very well in 1849, when publicly denouncing Bakunin’s scheme to create a pan-Slavic nation: ‘
Bakunin is our friend
. That will not deter us from criticising his
pamphlet.’ Or mocking his habits, come to that. Like Lassalle, Bakunin was a regular comic butt in the Marx – Engels correspondence. ‘
Bakunin has become a monster
, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking any more,’ Marx noted merrily in 1863. ‘To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen-year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom. He is presently in Sweden, where he is hatching “revolution” with the Finns.’ At the time he wrote this Marx hadn’t actually set eyes on the monster since 1848, but they renewed their acquaintance in the autumn of 1864 when Bakunin stopped off in London, en route from Sweden to Italy, to order some bespoke suits from the socialist tailor Friedrich Lessner.

Some historians have claimed that Marx always hated Bakunin, but the facts of this encounter prove otherwise. For one thing, it was Marx who requested the meeting, having heard from Lessner (a fellow member of the International’s General Council) that Bakunin was in town. Why bother to seek out a man he despised? Marx’s letter to Engels the following day confirms that this was a comradely reunion. ‘
I must say I liked him very much
, more so than previously … On the whole, he is one of the few people whom after sixteen years I find to have moved forwards and not backwards.’ In a gushingly affectionate message from Florence a few weeks later, Bakunin addressed Marx as ‘my dearest friend’, praised his Inaugural Address for the International and begged for a signed photograph.

During their conversation in London, Bakunin said that he had now abandoned his juvenile obsession with furtive plots and secret societies: from now on, he vowed, he would involve himself only in the wider ‘socialist movement’, i.e. the International. But after arriving in Italy he soon reverted to his old conspiratorial capers – aided and abetted by a rich new Russian patron, the Princess Obolensky, who apparently found this fat, toothless giant irresistible. For the next three years or so he had no dealings with the International at all.

In 1867 the Princess and her pet anarchist moved to Switzerland, where Bakunin soon noticed that the International was establishing itself as a significant force. Making up for lost time, he determined to hijack the organisation for himself and devised what his biographer E. H. Carr calls a ‘bold plan’. Bold, but also utterly absurd. As the self-styled leader of the ‘International Alliance of Socialist Democracy’ – the latest of his many grand-sounding but tiny groupuscules – he wrote to the workers’ International proposing a merger, and a merger on equal terms. He would thus effectively become co-president of the new organisation. Naturally enough, Marx and his colleagues on the General Council scorned the idea: through their affiliated unions and associations they represented tens of thousands of workers, whereas the entire membership of Bakunin’s ‘International Alliance’ was probably no more than twenty. Having had his frontal assault rebuffed, Bakunin decided to tiptoe in through the back door instead. He informed the General Council that the International Alliance had been disbanded. But his new outfit, a mere ‘Alliance’ for Socialist Democracy, wished to become an ordinary, humble affiliate of the workers’ International, just like any other local section. Marx could see no harm in it, and recommended acceptance.

Those who portray Bakunin as a heroic opponent of centralised power structures and rigid hierarchies find it difficult to explain his subsequent conduct – which may be why they often prefer to ignore it altogether. At the first and only International congress he attended (at Basle in 1869), he argued for ‘the construction of the international state of millions of workers, a state which it will be the role of the International to constitute’ – temporarily forgetting that ‘states’ of any and every kind were anathema to a true anarchist such as himself. During another debate, he actually proposed
strengthening
the power of the General Council to veto new applicants and expel existing members. And no wonder: as Carr admits, ‘Bakunin’s ambition at this stage was to capture the General Council, not destroy it.’ The closer one looks, the clearer
it becomes that his later rage against the General Council owed less to a high-minded dislike of authority than to sour grapes at his own failure to seize control of it.

Behind the scenes, he was scheming away as usual. A perfect example of Bakunin’s
modus operandi
can be found in a conversation with one of his acolytes, Charles Perron:

Bakunin assured him that the International was an excellent institution
in itself, but that there was something better which Perron should also join – the Alliance. Perron agreed. Then Bakunin said that, even in the Alliance, there might be some who were not genuine revolutionaries, and who were a drag on its activities, and it would therefore be a good thing to have at the back of the Alliance a group of ‘International Brothers’. Perron again agreed. When next they met a few days later, Bakunin told him that the ‘International Brothers’ were too wide an organisation, and that behind them there must be a Directorate or Bureau of three – of whom he, Perron, should be one. Perron laughed, and once more agreed.

Thus spake the great advocate of power to the people.

At the Basle congress of 1869 it was agreed that delegates should reconvene a year later in Paris. But the plan was overtaken by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in July 1870 – a last desperate attempt by Napoleon III to shore up his tottering Second Empire by challenging the mighty Bismarck. The International had long been preparing itself for this moment. Its 1868 congress in Brussels had passed a motion calling for a general strike the moment war began – though Marx dismissed the idea as ‘Belgian nonsense’, arguing that the working class ‘is not yet sufficiently organised to throw any decisive weight on to the scales’. All it should do, he believed, was issue some suitably ‘pompous declamations and high-faluting phrases’ to the effect that a war between France and Germany would be ruinous for both countries and for Europe as a whole.

This he duly did. On 23 July 1870, four days after the declaration of hostilities, the General Council approved an Address written by Marx. The defeat of his old
bête noire
, Louis Bonaparte, was cheerfully (and correctly) predicted. But he warned that if German workers allowed the war to lose ‘its strictly defensive character’ and to degenerate into an attack on the French people, victory and defeat alike would be equally disastrous. Fortunately, the German working classes were far too enlightened to permit any such outcome:

Whatever turn the impending horrid war may take
, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast to old society, with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up, whose International rule will be
Peace
, because its natural ruler will be everywhere the same –
Labour
! The Pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men’s Association.

All most inspiring.
John Stuart Mill sent a message of congratulation
, declaring himself ‘highly pleased with the Address. There was not one word in it that ought not to be there; it could not have been done with fewer words.’ While maintaining an official neutrality, however, Marx couldn’t resist privately calculating the odds and brooding on what result would best suit his purposes.

As long ago as February 1859 he had written to Lassalle that war between France and Germany ‘
would naturally have serious consequences
, and in the long run revolutionary ones for sure. But at the start it will bolster up Bonapartism in France, drive back the internal movement in England and Russia, arouse anew
the pettiest passions in regard to the nationality issue in Germany, and will therefore, in my opinion, have first and foremost a counter-revolutionary effect in every respect.’ Eleven years on, this game of consequences had become an obsession. ‘
I have been totally unable to sleep
for four nights now, on account of the rheumatism,’ he told Engels in August 1870, ‘and I spend this time in fantasies about Paris, etc.’ One beguiling fantasy was that the two sides would thrash each other alternately, thus weakening both Bonaparte and Bismarck. Then, ultimately, the Germans would win. ‘
I wish this because the definite defeat of Bonaparte
is likely to provoke Revolution in France, while the definite defeat of Germany would only protract the present state of things for twenty years.’