29. From a Letter by Jenny Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. On about October 5, 1867
29. From a Letter by Jenny Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. On about October 5, 1867[348][340]
"...You will simply not believe what a tremendous sensation the Lausanne Congress has caused here in all the papers. Once The Times had set the tone, by printing daily reports,[3] the other papers no longer considered it beneath their dignity to print not just short notices on the labour question, but even long editorials. There has been comment on the Congress not only in all the dailies, but the weeklies, too. It was, on occasion, quite naturally treated in a condescending and ironical way. After all, everything has a comical side, as well as a more lofty one, so why should our good Working Men's Congress, with its garrulous Frenchmen, be the exception? In spite of everything, however, generally it was treated quite properly and taken au sérieux. Even the Manchester Examiner, the organ of the Manchester school,[350] and John Bright himself, in an excellent leader presented it as important and epoch-making. When compared with its stepbrother, the Peace Congress, the advantage was always on the elder brother's side, one seen as a threatening tragedy of fate, while the other as merely farce and burlesque.
"If you have already acquired Karl Marx's book,[1]' and if, like me, you have not yet managed to work through the dialectical
;l "International Working Men's Congress", The Times, Nos. 25909, 2591 1-25913, September 6, 9-11, 1867. The author of the reports was Ecearius.— F.d.
h K. Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Erster Band, Hamburg , 1S(Î7.— Ed.
subtleties of the first chapters, I advise you to read those on the primitive accumulation of capital and the modern theory of colonisation first. I am sure that, like myself, you will obtain great satisfaction from this part. Marx does not, of course, have any specific remedy at hand, which the bourgeois world, that now also calls itself socialist, so violently cries out for, he has no tablets, no ointments, or lint, to heal the gaping, bleeding wounds of our society; but to me it seems that, basing himself on the natural historical rise and development of modern society he has indicated the results and their practical application, including even the most daring conclusions, and that it was no small matter to bring the astounded philistine to the giddy heights of the following problems by means of statistical data and dialectical reasoning:
"'Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power... A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children... If money "comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek", capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore with blood and dirt.' Or the whole passage from: 'The knell of capitalist private property sounds, etc.',(1) to the end.
"I must admit openly that I was gripped by this simple pathos and that history became as clear as daylight to me."
Endnotes
[348] See Note 294. The manuscript of this letter has not come down to us. Judging by a letter of October 5, 1867, which has survived, from Mrs. Marx to Becker and his reply to her on October 7, this material was sent by her to Geneva on about October 5.
[340] The special report by Peter Fox, the Corresponding Secretary for America at the time, was included, somewhat abridged, in the French version of the General Council's report to the Lausanne Congress. It has also survived as Fox's own manuscript, inserted into the Minute Book of the General Council (Fox read this special report at a Council meeting on August 27, 1867). Fox's report was published in English for the first time in the book The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868. Moscow, 1964, pp. 304-10. The manuscript version of the report stated, a m o n g other things, that Marx had given Fox a letter from F. A. Sorge, of July 10, 1867, written in the name of the Hoboken branch of the International Working Men's Association, and also the Statutes of the New York Communist Club, which had become affiliated to the Association.
[3] Garottes—robbers who strangled their victims. In the early 1860s such attacks often occurred in London and were a subject of special debate in Parliament.
[350] T h e Manchester School—a trend in political economy expressing the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie. It favoured free trade and non-interference by the state in the economy. The Free Traders' stronghold was Manchester, where the movement was led by Cobden and Bright, two textile manufacturers who founded the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. In the 1840s and 1850s the Free Traders were an independent political g r o u p which later formed the Left wing of the Liberal Party.
[1] On September 28, 1864 an international meeting was held at St. Martin's Hall,. Long Acre, London. It was organised by the London trade-union leaders and a group of Paris Proudhonist workers jointly with the representatives of German, Italian and other foreign workers then living in London and a number of prominent European democratic émigrés. The meeting resolved to found an International Working Men's Association (later known as the First International) and elected a Provisional Committee which shortly afterwards constituted itself as the leading body of the Association. This body, known as the General Council of the International, was mainly called the Central Council until the end of 1866. Karl Marx was elected to this Committee and later to the Sub-Committee appointed at its first meeting on October 5 to draw up the Association's programme documents. The Sub-Committee, or Standing Committee, subsequently functioned as an executive body and included the President of the Central (General) Council (until autumn 1867, when this post was abolished), the General Secretary and the corresponding secretaries for different countries. Marx did not attend its first meetings, when the Sub-Committee drew up a document consisting of an introductory declaration of principles, written by the Owenite John Weston and edited by the French petty-bourgeois democrat Victor Le Lubez, and the Rules of the Italian workers' societies, drawn up by Mazzini and translated into English by the Italian Luigi Wolff. This document, edited by Le Lubez, was discussed at the Sub-Committee meeting on October 15 about which Marx was informed too late for him to attend, and at the Provisional Committee meeting on October 18, when Marx first familiarised himself with this material. His critical assessment of it is to be found in his letter to Engels of November 4, 1864 (see present edition, Vol. 42). Circumstances did not allow Marx to prevent the Provisional Committee's approval of the declaration of principles and the Rules, but he convinced the Committee members that the document needed polishing and insisted on referring it back to the Sub-Committee for final editing. On October 20 the Sub-Committee met at Marx's house; at that meeting th^7 managed to edit only the first point of the Rules. By the next meeting of the Sub-Committee on October 27 Marx had completely revised the submitted document. He wrote a new document — the Inaugural Address of the 17* he altered the Preamble to the Rules, discarding the loosely-phrased declaration of principles, reduced the 40 points of the Rules to 10, and formulated them in a way which expressed the proletarian nature of the organisation then being founded, and eliminated all Mazzinian organisational principles (petty regulation typical of secret societies, etc.). The Sub-Committee approved the Address and the Rules as drawn up by Marx, stipulating, however, that two declarative phrases on "rights and duties" and "truth, justice, and morality" be inserted in the Preamble to the Rules. On November 1, 1864 both documents were unanimously approved by the Provisional Committee. On the proposal of a Committee member, Whitlock, Marx supplemented the Inaugural Address with a note on carbon and nitrogen as most important elements of food. The Inaugural Address was first published by The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 160, November 5, 1864 without the sanction of the Central Council and as an offprint to be sent to various newspapers. Marx strongly disapproved of this publication which contained a number of misprints (see this volume, p. 353). In November 1864 the Address and the Rules were published in London as a pamphlet Address and Provisional Rules of the Working Men's International Association, Established September 28, 1864, at a Public Meeting Held at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, London. On the decision of the Central Council of May 9, 1866 the English version of the Inaugural Address, the Provisional Rules and some other documents were again published as a pamphlet in London in August that year. The Address was also published in The Miner & Workman's Advocate, No. 93, December 10, 1864. The German authorised translation entitled "Manifest an die arbeitende Klasse Europa's" was published in Der Social-Demokrat, Nos. 2 and 3, December 21 and 30, 1864. During 1865, 1866 and later, various translations of the Inaugural Address appeared: into French in Paris, Geneva and Brussels; into Italian in Genoa and Naples; into German in Leipzig, Geneva, Berlin and Vienna in 1866 and 1868; into Hungarian in Pest in 1868; into Russian in Geneva in 1871; into Spanish and Portuguese in Madrid and Lisbon in 1873. Various German translations continued to be published in Germany and Switzerland (Zurich) in the early 1870s as well. The Inaugural Address has survived in two manuscript copies written by Mrs. Marx and Jenny Marx (Marx's daughter), and copies of pamphlets with Marx's corrections. In this volume the document is published according to the English pamphlet of 1864. The most important differences between the English version and the German authorised translation are given in footnotes. At the end of the pamphlet there was a list of the Central Council members: "Names and Nationalities of the Central Provisional Council. "English: Longmaid, Worley, Leno, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Shearman, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Odger, Howell, Osborne, Carter, Gray, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Cremer, Dick. "French: Dénouai, Le Lubez, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont. "Italian: L. Wolff, Fontana, Setacci, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri. "Swiss: Nusperli, Jung. "German: Eccarius, Wolff, Otto, Lessner, Pfänder, Lochner, Marx, Kaub, Bolleter. "Polish: Holtorp, Rybczinski. George Odger, President of the Central Council. George W. Wheeler, Honorary Treasurer. Karl Marx, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Germany. G. P. Fontana, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Italy. /. E. Holtorp, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Poland. Hermann F. Jung, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland. V. Le Lubez, Honorary Corresponding Secretary for France. William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.»