notes to the Marxism of the First International

[Christopher Cutrone]

This week's readings, on the Marxism of the First International Workingmen's Association, take us into the final three weeks of the summer reading group on Marx and Marxism. These readings, including Marx's Inaugural Address to the 1st Intl. and his critique of the German Social Democratic Party's (SPD) founding program at their 1875 conference in Goth, comprise what we can term instantiations of Marx's "late" politics -- and, in our final week's reading, its echo in the 20th century, with Max Horkheimers' 1940 essay "The Authoritarian State."

Our previous readings, on the 1848 Revolutions' aftermath and long echo in the denouement of the French Second Empire and the Paris Commune 1870-71, highlighted the crisis of the modern, "bourgeois" society of capital, and the emergence of its "proletarian" challenge -- would social democracy push beyond capitalism? Or would modern society continue, but in a regressive, "authoritarian" manner. Although subsequent history has proven the latter rather than the former, we need to consider Marx's own political response to the ambivalent progress/regress that characterized history after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848.

The issue raised by Engels's 1895 Introduction to the republication of Marx's 1850 pamphlet The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50, of the apparent obsolescence of Marx and Engels's perspective in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, comes back to the fore in Marx's writings from the period of the 1st Intl. and the later founding of the SPD.

In his 1895 Introduction, Engels emphasized the "progress" that had taken place since 1848. But, as I wrote in my notes to this previously, Engels is careful to mark such progress by reference to the growth of the (German) workers' movement in the interim. In other words, the development of capitalism since 1848 could only be considered progressive the degree to which it entailed the political maturation and struggle for power of the working class.

As Marx put it in The Civil War in France 1870-71, about the period of capitalist development during the preceding Second Empire,

"Under [the Bonapartist rule of the authoritarian state], bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury."

This was due to the peculiar form of politics in the historical crisis of capital (after 1848):

"The [Bonapartist] empire, with the coup d’etat for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class by breaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory."

This was because "it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling."

Ultimately,

"Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

Marx begins his Inaugural address to the First International in a similar vein:

"It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce."

Marx proceeds to open his Address with a detailed argument about the simultaneous of capitalist productivity with the impoverishment of the working class.

Marx soon comes to an important political point regarding the current state of the working class in Britain:

"When, consequent upon the Civil War in America, the operatives of Lancashire and Cheshire were thrown upon the streets, the same House of Lords sent to the manufacturing districts a physician commissioned to investigate into the smallest possible amount of carbon and nitrogen, to be administered in the cheapest and plainest form, which on an average might just suffice to “avert starvation diseases”."

The Union had blockaded the cotton-producing Confederacy, resulting in the idling of the textile manufacturing industry in Europe, throwing workers into unemployment and starvation.

Why does Marx go on at such length painting this grim picture? To contrast it again with the undoubted development of capitalism:

"Dazzled by the “Progress of the Nation” statistics dancing before his eyes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: “From 1842 to 1852, the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent; in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing to be almost incredible! ... This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,” adds Mr. Gladstone, “is entirely confined to classes of property.”"

Marx continued,

"After the failure of the Revolution of 1848, all party organizations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labor fled in despair to the transatlantic republic [in the U.S.], and the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasm, and political reaction. The defeat of the continental working classes, partly owed to the diplomacy of the English government, acting then as now in fraternal solidarity with the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, soon spread its contagious effects to this side of the Channel. While the rout of their continental brethren unmanned the English working classes, and broke their faith in their own cause, it restored to the landlord and the money lord their somewhat shaken confidence. . . . [The working class's] formerly active members were caught by the temporary bribe of greater work and wages, and turned
into “political blacks”. All the efforts made at keeping up, of remodeling, the Chartist movement failed signally; the press organs of the working class died one by one of the apathy of the masses, and in point of fact never before seemed the English working class so thoroughly reconciled to a state of political nullity. If, then, there had been no solidarity of action between the British and the continental working classes, there was, at all events, a solidarity of defeat.

"And yet the period passed since the Revolutions of 1848 has not been without its compensating features."

What were these "compensating features?" The winning of the 10 hours working day and the Factory Acts regulating working conditions. Of the latter Marx said, "Most of the continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action.

These were singular historical achievements, because, as Marx put it,

"This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class."

Another feature of this history was highlighted by Marx:

"But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by
Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848."

However,

"At the same time the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however, excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries."

Karl Korsch, writing 60 years after Marx, on "The Marxism of the First International" (1924), emphasized the point with which Marx concluded his Address:

"If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic [in the U.S. Civil War 1861-65]. . . .

"The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes."

Marx concluded with the same sentence he and Engels had written as the final slogan of the 1848 Communist Manifesto:

"Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

Marx was encouraged in the founding of the First International because, despite the misery of unemployment owing to the Union cause in the U.S. Civil War, the workers of Britain and Western Europe refused to support and actively fought against their governments' attempts to aid the Confederacy slavocracy.

The development of capitalism since 1848 had given a new lease on life for slavery in the U.S., as the source of the world's cotton textile production. Far from doing away with slavery, capitalism had reinforced it. Such was the kind of contradiction Marx had elucidated about the simultaneous progression and regression inherent in the history of the crisis of humanity in capital after the Industrial Revolution.

As Korsch put it in 1924,

"[T]he Third International has before it the task laid down by Lenin of fulfilling Marx’s legacy and translating it into life. It has undertaken this historical task in a situation which, after the Russian Revolution, reproduces all the political and economic effects that an event like the American Civil War of 1861-5 had on the European working class. These are now being felt by the exploited classes and oppressed people of Europe, America, Asia and the whole world on a far broader scale and with unparalleled intensity. The tocsin of world revolution is sounding from Soviet Russia."

-- Chris