11. Record of Marx's Interview with The World Correspondent
London, July 3 [1871]
I (1) went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the dark about the International, hating it very much, but not able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared that they had made out a sort of Janus figure with a fair, honest workman's smile on one of its faces, and on the other a murderous, conspirator's scowl. Would he [Marx] light up the case of mystery in which the theory dwelt? The professor laughed, chuckled a little I fancied, at the thought that we were so frightened of him.
"There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir," he began, in a very polished form of the Hans Breitmann dialect,[394] "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(2) for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves.
R.—Almost — yes, perhaps so; but will not the something I shall not know constitute the all-important reservation? To be quite frank with you, and to put the case as it strikes an outside observer, this general claim of depreciation of you must mean something more than the ignorant ill-will of the multitude. And it is still pertinent to ask even after what you have told me, what is the International Society?
Dr. M.—You have only to look at the individuals of which it is composed — workmen.
R.—Yes, but the soldier need be no exponent of the statecraft that sets him in motion. I know some of your members, and I can believe that they are not of the stuff of which conspirators are made. Besides, a secret shared by a million men would be no secret at all. But what if these were only the instruments in the hands of a bold, and I hope you will forgive me for adding, not over-scrupulous conclave.
Dr. M.—There is nothing to prove it.
R.—The last Paris insurrection? Dr. M.— I demand firstly the proof that there was any plot at all — that anything happened that was not the legitimate effect of the circumstances of the moment; or the plot granted, I demand the proofs of the participation in it of the International Association.
R.—The presence in the communal body of so many members of the association.
Dr. M.—Then it was a plot of the Freemasons, too, for their share in the work as individuals was by no means a slight one. I should not be surprised, indeed, to find the Pope(3) setting down the whole insurrection to their account. But try another explanation. The insurrection in Paris was made by the workmen of Paris. The ablest of the workmen must necessarily have been its leaders and administrators; but the ablest of the workmen happen also to be members of the International Association. Yet the association as such may be in no way responsible for their action.
R.— It will still seem otherwise to the world. People talk of secret instructions from London, and even grants of money. Can it be affirmed that the alleged openness of the association's proceedings precludes all secrecy of communication?
Dr. M.—What association ever formed carried on its work without private as well as public agencies? But to talk of secret instruction from London, as of decrees in the matter of faith and morals from some centre of Papal domination and intrigue is wholly to misconceive the nature of the International. This would imply a centralized form of government for the International, whereas the real form is designedly that which gives the greatest play to local energy and independence. In fact the International is not properly a government for the working class at all. It is a bond of union rather than a controlling force.
R.—And of union to what end? Dr. M.—The economical emancipation of the working class by the conquest of political power. The use of that political power to the attainment of social ends. It is necessary that our aims should be thus comprehensive to include every form of working class activity. To have made them of a special character would have been to adapt them to the needs of one section — one nation of workmen alone. But how could all men be asked to unite to further the objects of a few. To have done that the association must have forfeited its title of International. The association does not dictate the form of political movements; it only requires a pledge as to their end. It is a network of affiliated societies spreading all over the world of labor. In each part of the world some special aspect of the problem presents itself, and the workmen there address themselves to its consideration in their own way. Combinations among workmen cannot be absolutely identical in detail in Newcastle and in Barcelona, in London and in Berlin. In England, for instance, the way to show political power lies open to the working class. Insurrection would be madness where peaceful agitation would more swiftly and surely do the work. In France a hundred laws of repression and a mortal antagonism between classes seem to necessitate the violent solution of social war. The choice of that solution is the affair of the working classes of that country. The International does not presume to dictate in the matter and hardly to advise. But to every movement it accords its sympathy and its aid within the limits assigned by its own laws.
R.—And what is the nature of that aid?
Dr. M.—To give an example, one of the commonest forms of the movement for emancipation is that of strikes. Formerly, when a strike took place in one country, it was defeated by the importation of workmen from another. The International has nearly stopped all that. It receives information of the intended strike, it spreads that information among its members, who at once see that for them the seat of the struggle must be forbidden ground. The masters are thus left alone to reckon with their men. In most cases the men require no other aid than that. Their own subscriptions or those of the societies to which they are more immediately affiliated supply them with funds, but should the pressure upon them become too heavy and the strike be one of which the association approves, their necessities are supplied out of the common purse. By these means a strike of the cigar-makers of Barcelona was brought to a victorious issue the other day.[395] But the society has no interest in strikes, though it supports them under certain conditions. It cannot possibly gain by them in a pecuniary point of view, but it may easily lose. Let us sum it all up in a word. The working classes remain poor amid the increase of wealth, wretched amid the increase of luxury. Their material privation dwarfs their moral as well as their physical stature. They cannot rely on others for a remedy. It has become then with them an imperative necessity to take their own case in hand. They must revise the relations between themselves and the capitalists and landlords, and that means they must transform society. This is the general end of every known workmen's organization; land and labor leagues,[350] trade and friendly societies, co-operative stores and co-operative production are but means towards it. To establish a perfect solidarity between these organizations is the business of the International Association. Its influence is beginning to be felt everywhere. Two papers spread its views in Spain, three in Germany, the same number in Austria and in Holland, six in Belgium, and six in Switzerland. And now that I have told you what the International is you may, perhaps, be in a position to form your own opinion as to its pretended plots.
R.— I do not quite understand you. Dr. M.—Do you not see that the old society, wanting the strength to meet it with its own weapons of discussion and combination, is obliged to resort to the fraud of fixing upon it the imputation of conspiracy?
R.— But the French police declare that they are in a position to prove its complicity in the late affair, to say nothing of preceding attempts.
Dr. M.—But we will say something of those attempts, if you please, because they best serve to test the gravity of all the charges of conspiracy brought against the International. You remember the last "plot" but one. A plebiscite had been announced.[396] Many of the electors were known to be wavering. They had no longer a keen sense of the value of the imperial rule, having come to disbelieve in those threatened dangers of society from which it was supposed to have saved them. A new bugbear was wanted. The police undertook to find one. All combinations of workmen being hateful to them, they naturally owed the International an ill-turn. A happy thought inspired them. What if they should select the International for their bugbear, and thus at one stroke discredit that society and curry favor for the imperial cause? Out of that happy thought came the ridiculous "plot" against the Emperor's life — as if we wanted to kill the wretched old fellow. They seized the leading members of the International. They manufactured evidence. They prepared their case for trial, and in the meantime they had their plebiscite. But the intended comedy was too obviously but a broad, coarse farce. Intelligent Europe, which witnessed the spectacle, was not deceived for a moment as to its character, and only the French peasant elector was befooled. Your English papers reported the beginnings of the miserable affair; they forgot to notice the end. The French judges admitting the existence of the plot by official courtesy were obliged to declare that there was nothing to show the complicity of the International. Believe me, the second plot is like the first. The French functionary is again in business. He is called in to account for the biggest civil movement the world has ever seen. A hundred signs of the times ought to suggest the right explanation — the growth of intelligence among the workmen, of luxury and incompetence among their rulers, the historical process now going on of that final transfer of power from a class to the people, the apparent fitness of time, place, and circumstance for the great movement of emancipation. But to have seen these the functionary must have been a philosopher, and he is only a mouchard.(4) By the law of his being, therefore, he has fallen back upon the mouchard's explanation — a "conspiracy". His old portfolio of forged documents will supply him with the proofs, and this time Europe in its scare will believe the tale.
R.—Europe can scarcely help itself, seeing that every French newspaper spreads the report.
Dr. M.—Every French newspaper! See, here is one of them (taking up La Situation), and judge for yourself of the value of its evidence as to a matter of fact. (Reads0 "Dr. Karl Marx, of the International, has been arrested in Belgium, trying to make his way to France. The police of London have long had their eye on the society with which he is connected, and are now taking active measures for its suppression."(5)
Two sentences and two lies. You can test the truth of one story by the evidence of your own senses. You see that instead of being in prison in Belgium I am at home in England. You must also know that the police in England are as powerless to interfere with the International Society as the society with them. Yet what is most regular in all this is that the report will go the round of the continental press without a contradiction, and could continue to do so if I were to circularize every journal in Europe from this place.
R.— Have you attempted to contradict many of these false reports?
Dr. M.— I have done so till I have grown weary of the labor. To show the gross carelessness with which they are concocted I may mention that in one of them I saw Felix Pyat set down as a member of the International.
R.—And he is not so? Dr. Marx — The association could hardly have found room for such a wild man. He was once presumptuous enough to issue a rash proclamation in our name, but it was instantly disavowed,[397]
though, to do them justice, the press of course ignored the disavowal.
R.—And Mazzini, is he a member of your body? Dr. Marx (laughing)—Ah, no. We should have made but little progress if we had not got beyond the range of his ideas.
R.—You surprise me. I should certainly have thought that he represented the most advanced views.
Dr. M.— He represents nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic. We seek no part with the middle class. He has fallen as far to the rear of the modern movement as the German professors, who, nevertheless, are still considered in Europe as the apostles of the cultured democratism of the future. They were so at one time — before '48, perhaps, when the German middle class, in the English sense, had scarcely attained its proper development. But now they have gone over bodily to the reaction, and the proletariat knows them no more.
R.—Some people have thought they saw signs of a positivist element in your organization.
Dr. M.—No such thing. We have positivists among us, and others not of our body who work as well. But this is not by virtue of their philosophy, which will have nothing to do with popular government, as we understand it, and which seeks only to put a new hierarchy in place of the old one.a
R.— It seems to me, then, that the leaders of the new international movement have had to form a philosophy as well as an association for themselves.
Dr. M.— Precisely. It is hardly likely, for instance, that we could hope to prosper in our war against capital if we derive our tactics, say from the political economy of Mill. He has traced one kind of relationship between labor and capital. We hope to show that it is possible to establish another.
R.—And as to religion? Dr. M.—On that point I cannot speak in the name of the society. I myself am an atheist. It is startling, no doubt, to hear such an avowal in England, but there is some comfort in the thought that it need not be made in a whisper in either Germany or France?
R.—And yet you make your headquarters in this country? Dr. M.—For obvious reasons; the right of association is here an established thing. It exists, indeed, in Germany, but it is beset with innumerable difficulties; in France for many years it has not existed at all.
R.—And the United States? Dr. M.—The chief centres of our activity are for the present among the old societies of Europe. Many circumstances have hitherto tended to prevent the labor problem from assuming an all-absorbing importance in the United States. But they are rapidly disappearing, and it is rapidly coming to the front there with the growth as in Europe of a laboring class distinct from the rest of the community and divorced from capital.
R.— It would seem that in this country the hoped for solution, whatever it may be, will be attained without the violent means of revolution. The English system of agitating by platform and press until minorities become converted into majorities is a hopeful sign.
Dr. M.— I am not so sanguine on that point as you. The English middle class has always shown itself willing enough to accept the verdict of the majority so long as it enjoyed the monopoly of the voting power. But mark me, as soon as it finds itself outvoted on what it considers vital questions we shall see here a new slave-owner's war."[398]
Endnotes
[394] Hans Breitmann's Ballads by the American humorous author Ch. G. Leland were written in a peculiar Anglo-German dialect.
[395] The correspondent's record is inaccurate. It was the textile workers who went on strike in Barcelona in the spring of 1871, while the cigar-makers' strike occurred at the same time in Antwerp (see this volume, pp. 294-96). p. 602
[350] Yhe Land and Labour League was set up in London in October 1869 with the participation of the General Council. The League's programme was drawn up by Eccarius with Marx's help (see Address of the Land and Labour League to the Working Men and Women of Great Britain and Ireland, present edition, Vol. 21). Marx held that the League could play a certain role in revolutionising the working class and regarded it as a means for establishing an independent proletarian party in England. pp. 561, 603, 610
[396] In an attempt to strengthen its weakened positions, the government of Napoleon III scheduled a plebiscite for the spring of 1871. The questions were formulated in such a way that it was impossible to express disapproval of the Second Empire's policy without simultaneously opposing all democratic reforms. Along with this demagogic address to the popular (mostly peasant) masses, repressions were taken against the proletarian and left-wing republican movements (see present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 127-28).
[397] The public meeting to celebrate the anniversary of the June 1848 insurrection of the Paris workers was held on June 29, 1868 at Cleveland Hall in London. The French petty-bourgeois democrat Félix Pyat delivered a speech and moved a provocative resolution urging terroristic acts against Napoleon III (the resolution was published in The Bee-Hive, No. 351, July 4, 1868). The Brussels L'Espiègle, No. 25 on July 5, 1868 published a report on the meeting describing it as a meeting of International members, with Pyat as one of its leaders. This statement was repeated in other newspapers. The General Council held that this might discredit the International in the eyes of the workers and serve the Bonapartist government as a pretext for persecuting its members in France and Belgium. Consequently, at its meeting on July 7 the Council resolved, on Marx's proposal, to disavow Pyat's behaviour in a resolution to this effect (see present edition, Vol. 21). Pyat's group lost its ties with the International, but continued to act in its name and repeatedly supported antiproletarian groups opposing Marx's line in the General Council. On May 10, 1870, the General Council officially dissociated itself from this group (see present edition, Vol. 21).
[398] The interview ended as follows: "I have here given you as well as I can remember them the heads of my conversation with this remarkable man. I shall leave you to form your own conclusions. Whatever may be said for or against the probability of its complicity with the movement of the Commune we may be assured that in the International Association the civilized world has a new power in its midst with which it must come to a reckoning for good o'r ill."