“Socialist” – the word turns up everywhere, from the course and schizoid ramblings of AMERICAMAN1776 on Yahoo’s comments section to the meant-to-be-profound speeches of GOP presidential hopefuls (in 2009, Mike Huckabee told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “Lenin and Stalin would love” Obama’s stimulus plans). While the word has seemingly displaced half of the average conservative’s vocabulary, we would do well to remember that liberals were the first to employ the term in the current debate, using it to disparage President Bush at the end of his term.

In October 2008 the liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson accused the Bush administration of “tossing aside ‘Atlas Shrugged‘ and speed-reading ‘Das Kapital.’” A day later in a column entitled “In Bush’s bailout, echoes of Marx,” Star Ledger columnist John Farmer declared that “the Bush administration has come full circle — from Karl Rove to Karl Marx.” By the middle of the February of ’09, this prognosis was confirmed when the cover of Newsweek declared “we’re all socialist now” (a play on Nixon’s statement “we are all Keynesians now”). If America has become socialist, the converse implication, of course, is that America is no longer capitalist. Once again this was not an opinion of fanatical conservatives. Dean Takahashi, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, mused in VentureBeat in October of 2008 that “when they write the textbooks when this is all over, I’d like to see how they describe the U.S. economic system. Is it capitalist? Not at the moment.”

Underlying all of these proclamations, whether uttered by the left or right, is a very superficial understanding of what constitutes the totality of a society’s economic activity. For, if the United States suddenly became a “socialist” country with the passage of a few bailout bills, then it’s clear that in most eyes capitalism and socialism are seen as virtually identical economies, differentiated only by the level of state intervention. If the state intervenes little, the economy is capitalist. If the state intervenes more than a little, this economy immediately becomes socialist. Thus Hugo Chavez only half-jokingly called Bush a “comrade.” Even sophisticated definitions of capitalism (i.e., the kinds you find in textbooks, not internet comments) fall into this same trap, as Dobb notes:

According to this, capitalism is identified with a system of unfettered individual enterprise: a system where economic and social relations are ruled by contract, where men are free agents in seeking their livelihood, and legal compulsions and restrictions are absent. Thereby Capitalism is made virtually synonymous with a regime of laissez-faire and in some usages of the term with a regime of free competition.¹

In an extreme example of this line of thought, one conservative on Amazon writes that “capitalism can only exist when the State exerts no influence over the market. It is impossible for a country to be capitalist and have a government that exerts control over the market, for instance via environmental regulation, minimum wage laws, etc etc etc.” One problem with this reasoning is pointed out by Dobb:

Few countries other than Britain and U.S.A. in the nineteenth century conformed at all closely to a regime of “pure individualism” of the classic Manchester type; and even Britain and U.S.A. were soon to pass out of it into an age of corporate enterprise and monopoly or quasi-monopoly, when laissez-faire as a policy has been in decline.²

Other scholars concur. Supple writes:

Indeed, in the context of modern world history, a laissez-faire economic policy seems less like an orthodoxy than a brief aberration from a norm of detailed government intervention in economic affairs.³

This is a point we shall elaborate on later. For now, let us take it for granted that capitalism with strict laissez-faire policies means that one must be willing to concede that capitalism existed only for a brief spell in the 19th century. The absurdity of this position is evident, but absurdity has never deterred defenders of capitalism! Moreover, one could easily argue that is not complete non-intervention, but some relative measure of non-intervention, that is an inherent characteristic of capitalism. In either case, those arguing at just what size or reach a state becomes capable of transmogrifying a capitalist economy into a socialist economy are wasting their time, as far as we’re concerned, for what really sets capitalism apart from previous – and future – economies, what defines it, has nothing to do with non-intervention.

After all, the state didn’t even exist for the vast majority of our history as a species, yet we don’t speak of hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists as living in capitalist societies. In antiquity, the almighty slave-owners were virtually unchecked by the power of the state – but no one would call them capitalists. Neither was the Feudal baron a capitalist merely because he was free to dispose of the products of his peasants labor as he wished.

If capitalism isn’t an economic system defined by the absence of state intervention, what is it? For Marx and those following his method, what distinguishes capitalism from previous economic formations is that for the first time in history the majority of what is produced are commodities — items produced to be sold — and that the human capacity to labor is the foremost of those commodities. In short, to quote Fine and Saad-Fihlo, “what characterises capitalism is … the purchase and sale of the workers’ capacity to labour and its use in commodity production for profit.”⁴ Buick and Crump offer a six-point definition of capitalism that’s more detailed, but emphasizes essentially the same thing. In their view, capitalism consists of:

1. Generalised commodity production, nearly all wealth being produced for sale on a market.
2. The investment of capital in production with a view to obtaining a monetary profit.
3. The exploitation of wage labour, the source of profit being the unpaid labour of the producers.
4. The regulation of production by the market via a competitive struggle for profits.
5. The accumulation of capital out of profits, leading to the expansion and development of the forces of production.
6. A single world economy.⁵

In such a view, the involvement — or non-involvement — of the state is of little consequence.

Using such a conception, we can turn to the history of capitalism — having secured our flanks against the objection that talking about state intervention and capitalism is a contradiction in terms — to see that the state played a central role in introducing, developing, expanding, and maintaining the system of wage labor, i.e. capitalism.

The state and the ‘invention’ of capitalism

In feudal society, those who worked and those who exploited had a very different relationship than those classes today. The serf toiled on the lord’s manor, handing over a portion of his production, not in money, but in kind. If the serf reaped 100 bushels, perhaps the feudal lord received 50 or 70 or however many. This was, by and large, a moneyless economy, one in which production for the market barely existed; what the serfs produced, they themselves ate for their sustenance or was eaten by the parasitic landlords. Consequently, production was for need. Eventually, however, the market economy intruded. Lords turned their fields into pastures and pushed off the small farmers. The state assisted in this process, with vast areas being closed off to peasants, the land that was once held in common being forcibly divided, and heavy punishments being imposed on those who were made homeless through this process but which didn’t find wage-labor in the cities or on other farms (vagabonds).

Later, a world market emerged. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

This “trade with the colonies,” this “open[ing] up [of] fresh ground” was accomplished by the state. The journeys of Columbus, Magellan, Cabot, Cartier, et al., were financed by Europe’s monarchs; later, the British state played an instrumental role in making that country the center of the capitalist world economy. As Supple writes,

Perhaps the most striking indication of this is the powerful role which the state played in the creation and defence of the Empire, in the extension of an international trading network of which Britain was the centre, and the regulation of commercial and imperial relations so as to benefit the domestic economy and British businessmen. This was, in fact, ‘mercantilism’ of a different sort: navigation laws which attempted to monopolize imperial trade for British and colonial business interests; which obliged colonial imports to pass through Britain; and which stipulated the use of British or colonial ships. It also meant wars which were ultimately successfully fought to expand and defend Britain’s colonial possessions and trade. If by the 1760s Britain was indeed the centre of the world’s biggest free trade area, if her trade and shipping enjoyed a worldwide dominance, if her merchants and manufacturers had privileged access to large markets in Asia and America, if she was a major entrpôt for Europe, and if, as seems likely, these developments were critical components of her ‘readiness’ for industrialisation — then the state did play an important, albeit indirect, role in the pioneer Industrial Revolution.⁶

Turning to Supple once again, we find that he contends that “historically, the most important way in which the state stimulated industrial growth in a capitalist setting was through its ability to create a capitalist setting in the first instance.” Sometimes this involved a monarch or a parliament legislating away age-old laws that hindered the development of capitalism, or preventing any burdensome legislation from affecting the financial and mercantile classes, but in other cases the state played a more coercive and active role in clearing away the choking vines of feudalism.

The French Revolution is the example par excellence of a bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, first rising and then victorious, decimated the reactionary aristocracy. As Soboul wrote, a capitalist transformation of French society

required that the individual laborer be free, and therefore that serfdom be abolished; it required freedom of production and hence the destruction of seigneurial monopolies like the banalities; it required the free disposal of property, and hence the suppression of primogeniture, of the feudal right of repurchase, and of the franc-fief; it demanded the formation of a unified national market, and hence the abolition of internal tolls and tariffs.⁷

But even as the French Bourgeoisie’s hour of the victory was rung in with the execution of its enemies by grapeshot and the guillotine, a tendency towards state ownership and intervention was evident. In the first place, the state was happy to set maximums on the price which could be charged for goods like bread — not out of any sort of Bolshevism, as some have later alleged, but as a necessary measure for keeping the ‘rabble’ in line. More dramatically, after the French Republic declared war on Old Europe, the French state pressed nearly every man who wasn’t at the front into munitions factories operated by the state. These factories might not have been capitalist enterprises, as they weren’t producing commodities for exchange. On the other hand, the discipline imposed by the overseers was identical to that being imposed on the early factory workers in England at the time. Moreover, the French soldier and his musket, sent to the front by the state, were essential for defending democracy — and as one member of the Committee of Public Safety said, “democratic government is always more favorable than the monarchy to the prosperity of commerce and merchants.”⁸

But however much the state did to get the ball rolling and to protect the trade on which the fledgling capitalist economy survived, it wasn’t until the 19th century that the state actively applied its lucre and energy to clearing the way for a modern economy based on wage labor and industry. These efforts of the state were so extensive and so universally applied that it is impossible to write a short narrative history of government aid to industry in the 19th century that includes each country; instead, I will point out a examples from England and America. This is in no way comprehensive — there’s a wealth of literature on the subject that can provide more details — but it does provide enough to demolish the myth that equates capitalism with laissez-faire.

Britain

Even though Britain was one of the most ‘liberal’ capitalist societies of the 19th century, with a state that did little to intervene, it is clear that the state set the stage for the development of capitalism. To Supple, recall, “the most important way in which the state stimulated industrial growth in a capitalist setting was through its ability to create a capitalist setting in the first instance.” As regards Britain, he suggests that

it is worth remembering that the very characteristics of the market environment which distinguished Britain’s position from that of the other European countries were in large part a function of state action. Thus, the whole evolution of government since the civil strife of the seventeenth century had resulted in an unmatched degree of political stability and social harmony, while the early political and administrative unification of the country helped create a relatively compact and unified market. In addition, compared with its neighbors, Britain enjoyed the benefits of a standard currency, tax and tariff system, and a sound structure of commercial law. Finally, and in some respects most significantly, the governing classes in what was still a heavily landed society were broadly sympathetic to, and indeed, representative of, the commercial and financial interests which helped transform Britain’s economic institutions and opportunities from the late seventeenth century onwards.⁹

At the end of the Napoleonic wars, government action consisted primarily of removing as many barriers to capitalist development as possible. In a sense, this trend towards laissez-faire paradoxically demonstrates the role of the state in the development of capitalist society; after all, laissez-faire was a policy dictated by the state, not some “natural state” that exists precisely because of the state’s non-intervention.

Still, there was some direct intervention. In 1844, the Railway Act gave the British state the option of buying out the railroads after 21 years. The state passed up on this option, but it did buy the telegraph system in 1868 and hand it over to the Post Office. Between 1892 and 1911, the telephone system was also nationalized. According to Buick and Crump, “the reason for these nationalisation measures was clear: the state, acting on behalf of the private capitalist class as a whole, bought up an industry of use to all enterprises in order to ensure that its product was made available to them on a uniform basis and prevent a particular group of private capitalists from holding the rest of the private capitalist class to ransom.”¹⁰

The British state also funded technological developments. Between 1823 and 1834, William Stanley Jevons was given over 17,000 pounds by the state to further development of his Difference Engine.¹¹

The Factory Acts provide were one of most important examples of direct state intervention in 19th century Britain. Enacted over the entire course of the 19th century, these acts limited the number of hours workers could work in certain industries and set other rules for safety and working conditions in factories. While it is tempting to view these as an obvious attempt to improve the situation of the working class (or placate it) and to leave them at that, in an interesting debate debate by Booth and Lawrence that took place in the pages of the Review of Social Economy, Booth argued that Karl Marx viewed the laws as an effort by British capitalists to ensure that the working class was not depleted in a literal sense. (It must be remembered that the life expectancy of industrial workers in 19th century England was quite low; in 1842, the average age at death for laborers was estimated to be 15 in Liverpool and 17 in Manchester!)¹² Lowering the hours of work would increase life expectancy and prevent wages from skyrocketing. Booth explains the need to impose these laws society-wide thusly:

In modern terminology, a limitation on the working day is a public good for the capitalist. If such a limitation is imposed on all capitalists, the result will be a larger and more productive supply of labor power. Without such a limitation, the working day would be excessive, threatening the labor reproduction process. No single capitalist can gain very much by voluntarily limiting the working day. The limiting of the working day for a relatively few workers would have little impact on the reproduction of the total working class population, and it is the totality of that population that determines supply conditions in the market for labor power. Moreover, if capitalists of today are unconcerned with labor supply conditions faced by capitalists in the future, then there is an absence of either a private or collective incentive to pursue limitations on the working day. Hence there is a need for state intervention.¹³

Lawrence disagreed (this is a debate after all) that a strategic, class-based interest for the preservation of the the working class’s ability to reproduce its labor power was the motive force behind the Factory Acts; instead, he attributed the legislation to an attempt by the largest factory owners to drive their smaller competitors out of business by increasing costs.¹⁴ Booth himself also suggested that one reason the acts managed to get passed was because the smarting aristocracy sought revenge for the the repeal of the Corn Laws, a move which benefited the factory owners (who benefited from cheaper foreign corn, as it lowered wages) while harming the landed aristocracy (who now had to compete with cheaper foreign corn).

America

In the United States in the 19th century the military played a much more aggressive role in exporting and defending American commerce than it does today, if you can believe it. In the entire period 1789 to 1993, American military power was “used” abroad 234 times.¹⁵ Contrary to the notion that the U.S. only entered the arena of imperialist struggle with the acquisition of Hawaii or the war with Spain in the 1890s, over 100 of the 234 instances of military use abroad occurred in the 19th century — and were usually undertaken in order to defend maritime commerce by combating pirates or to “defend American interests,” then as now a euphemism for protecting the property of the wealthy. Indeed, as the Secretary of the Navy said in 1853, “it is very desirable to make our navy an efficient branch of the government, both in extending and protecting commerce and trade.”16 To “extended commerce” was often obviously synonymous with rapaciousness, such as when “Commodore Perry on three visits before going to Japan and while waiting for a reply from Japan made a naval demonstration, landing marines twice, and secured a coaling concession from the ruler of Naha on Okinawa; he also demonstrated in the Bonin Islands with the purpose of securing facilities for commerce.”¹⁷

Domestically, the military ruthlessly exterminated native Americans, opening up the way for settlement and commerce, and defended slavery where the whip of the overseer could not reach. For instance, an escaped slave named Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston after living there for a few years. To return him to slavery, 300 soldiers and deputies escorted him to the harbor, where another 250 soldiers were there to load him on to a ship back to Georgia. (In another similar case, the Pierce administration spent 100,000 dollars — 2 million dollars in 1987 dollars — to return to slavery another escaped slave called Anthony Burn).¹⁸ These cases were both symbolic ‘shows of force,’ but the armed might of the state was there when force was really needed. During Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, two U.S. Navy ships delivered soldiers to help suppress the insurrection, though they arrived after the militia had defeated the insurgent slaves. At Harpers Ferry in 1859 Robert E. Lee led the detachment of Marines that suppressed Brown’s brave insurrection. If a larger slave rebellion had ever broken out, there is no doubt that the full force of the army would have been brought to bear. Slavery, of course, wasn’t quite synonymous with capitalist production, though the profits of it often went to northern bankers and capitalists. (See Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom for more on the link between American prosperity and democracy, on one hand, and slavery on the other.)

The military also explored and surveyed the interior of the country. The Corps of Discovery, under whose aegis the interior of the continent was traversed by U.S. Army Captain Merriwether Lewis, his partner William Clark, and their party, was commissioned in 1803 by President Jefferson. (This expedition was partially conceived with the improvement of the fur trade in mind.)¹⁹ Later expeditions sent by the government surveyed rivers and resources, dug wells, built wagon-roads, and made maps, all of which were invaluable for later settlement and for the construction of railroads.²⁰

Once the state mapped the interior and subdued its original inhabitants, the state further effected settlement by the vast interior and the return of produce to the eastern markets through internal improvement projects. Between 1783 and 1861, government investment accounted for 70% of the total investment in canals and 30% of the investment in railroads.²¹ One of the largest and famous of these projects was the Erie Canal, which was funded by the state of New York. At the time it was the world’s largest canal. It opened the Great Lakes region to settlement and reduced shipping costs by 95 percent, thus making participating in the market economy feasible for hundreds of thousands of farmers. The famous National Road, or Cumberland Pike, connected the Potomac with the interior of the country. It was financed by the federal government beginning in 1806 and continuing until the late 1830s. Of course, the most famous 19th century mode of transportation was the railroad, and the benevolent hand of the state is seen here as well. Very few of the early railroads going from the seaboard to the interior were made without government aid. The government assisted railroad construction by providing large grants of land to railroad companies in exchange for some say in the routes of the rails. Between 1823 and 1869, 129 million acres were given by the government to railroad companies. (129 million acres equates to around 200,000 square miles, or an area four times as large as Alabama.)²² Beginning in the 1860s, direct financial support was also given to railroad companies. The import of governmental financing of these ventures cannot be overstated. One scholar, Carter Goodrich, questions whether without government funds the Erie Canal would’ve ever been constructed or railroads would have crossed the Appalachians. In turn, he questions whether a unified national market could have been created without state assistance.²³

Broude notes that one important activity of the state was to remove “roadblocks” to commerce. Such measures were extremely inexpensive relative to their outcomes. Examples of removing roadblocks cited by Broude include clearing rivers of raft, making piers, improving harbors, and building particular roads. Broude also suggests that the state had important psychological benefits for the development of commerce.²⁴ On one hand, it is hard to imagine that even the hardy settlers of America would brave the hostile interior without some modicum of military protection. On the other, government support for individual businesses increased investors’ confidence in a market where most businesses was young and unknown; in Pennsylvania in 1844, government was involved in 150 corporations, whether owning just a few shares or several thousand.²⁵ Virginia had a similarly extensive system of “mixed enterprises.” Between 1790 and 1820, New York State provided loans to 48 enterprises.²⁶

A panoply of other governmental aids to the development of American capitalism should be noted. Broude begins a list by saying “government effected a land tenure policy for the country, controlled immigration policy (conditioning the supply of labor), maintained intervention in the banking system (varied of the period), established protection of trade through tariff and patent legislation, performed the roster of services rightfully’ governmental, and represented and strengthened the particular legal framework within which Private business was organized.”²⁷ One might also add that the state aided business through the establishment of the merchant marine; the establishment of schools, universities, and military universities where engineers were trained, and so on.

Finally, we may add that there was as lively a debate about the role of the state in the economy in the 19th century as there is now in the 21st. Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” contained the familiar claim that already industrialized nations had made it difficult for young nations like the U.S. to compete; therefore, like so many 20th century leftists in the third world, Hamilton called for trade protections, subsidies (which Hamilton preferred), and the importation of skilled laborers and modern machinery. In 1808, Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin proposed a 20 million dollar program of internal improvements. Though rejected, most of the proposed projects were eventually carried out. Presidents Madison, Monroe, and Quincy Adams were all favorable towards funding internal improvements, but were each held back by their own doubts as to the constitutionality of such measures. By the 1830s, President Jackson killed off federal funding for development. Two decades later, concern with the “malign influence” of state funding of these improvements and projects led to a backlash ably described by Goodrich:

In Pennsylvania, as Professor Hartz has pointed out, the reaction was marked in the year 1857 by the sale of the ‘Main Line’ of the Public Works to the Pennsylvania Railroad and by the adoption of a constitutional amendment forbidding either the state or local governments to invest in the stock of improvement companies. By 1860 seventeen other states had adopted similar provisions against aiding companies by at least one of the three methods of loan, subscription, or donation, although most of them did not extend the prohibitions to local authorities. … These decisions reflected widespread disillusion with government support of improvements, and particularly with the failures and financial losses in the years following the crisis of 1837, although some states like Virginia were still expanding their programs and others would do so after the Civil War.²⁸

This heated debated is proof enough that governmental involvement in the economy was hardly incidental or unimportant. Despite these tensions, Broude concludes that “the record does indicate that at the end of the century calls for governmental aid had resulted in the holding by government of approximately 7 percent of the nation’s capital assets and the employment of approximately 4 percent of the national labor force.”²⁹

Conclusion

Compared to the United States and Great Britain,state intervention and assistance played an even larger role in the 19th century in countries like Russia, Germany, France, and Belgium. In the 20th century the phenomenon reached grotesque new heights, with the state actually assuming the role of the entire capitalist class in countries like Stalinist Russia and its so-called “Socialist” descendants in the third world. Elsewhere the state took a more active role in suppressing the rapacity of the individual capitalist through legislation, though only because, as Marx and Engels noted in the 1840s, “a part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.” Today the “socialism” of the bourgeoisie plays the same role.

Hastily Compiled List of Sources

1. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, pages 3-4.

2. Ibid.

3. Supple, “The State and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1914,” in The Industrial Revoltuion 1700-1914, edited by Carlo M. Cipolla. Volume 3 of the Fontana Economic History of Europe. Page 302.

4. Fine and Saad-Filho, Marx’s Capital. 4th Edition, 2003. Page 22.

5. Buick and Crump, State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management, 1986.

6. Supple, 314-316.

7. Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799, 1977. Page 59.

8. Robert Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, page 230.

9. Supple, 314-315.

10. Buick and Crump, 25.

11. Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the making of modern economics, page 100.

12. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1966. Page 330.

13. Booth, “Marx on State Regulation,” from the October 1978 issue of Review of Social Economy, page 142.

14. Lawrence, “A Rejoinder to Booth,” from the April 1980 issue of Review of Social Economy

15. http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm

16. Carter Goodrich, Government and the economy, 1783-1861.

17. http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm

18. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom.

19. Goodrich.

20. Henry W. Broude, “The Role of the State in American Economic Development, 1820-1890,” in The State in Economic Growth, edited by Aitken, 1959.

21. Goodrich, XVI.

22. Goodrich.

23. Goodrich, XVIII.

24. Broude.

25. Broude, 13.

26. Goodrich, 196.

27. Broude, 9-10.

28. Goodrich, 95.

29. Broude, 9-10.

The personal lives of revolutionaries aren’t usually of much interest — even Lenin’s personal life has largely escaped hyperanalysis — but with Marx it’s different. Generations of anarchist and bourgeois critics, perhaps despairing of any other route of attack, have painted Marx as a veritable monster. One such accusation paints Marx as a hypocrite who was contemptuous of the class he claimed to champion. The authors make it clear that such criticism has no basis in fact. Marx’s ties to the working class were real, meaningful, and went in both directions. For instance, when Marx was called before a court in Cologne in 1849, local workers gathered outside the courthouse and refused to disperse until Marx reappeared. By the same token, when police framed the Cologne branch of the Communist League, Marx worked tirelessly in defense of the accused workers. Despite Marx’s defense, seven of the eleven defendants were convicted and endured tremendous hardship in a fortress-prison. Marx afterward forever steered clear of secret organizations which endangered others. Another blow is struck against the mythical elitist Marx when the authors demonstrate time and time again Marx’s dedication to the education of the working class. Men like Willich and Bakunin after him wanted to turn the Communist League into an organization of plotters whose conspiracies would ignite the revolt of the working class, but Marx instead fought to preserve this organization and the others he belonged to as means for educating and organizing the working class. (Those who fetishize the vanguard party would do well to remember this — as would those who accuse Marx of fetishizing it). To this end he invested considerable time in lecturing, particularly on economics, of which he always was careful to speak clearly. Knowing that clear speaking wouldn’t always be enough, Marx quizzed his audience to make sure that they considered and understood the material. He did all of this even though he routinely spent the better part of his day in the reading room of the National Library! And when the publication of the French translation of Das Kapital had to be delivered to the public in installments due to the financial difficulties of the publisher, Marx remarked that this work will be more accessible to the working class in this form, and for me that consideration takes precedence of all others.

A second pair of charges hurled against Marx are even more remarkable for the fact that they completely contradict each other: on the one hand, it’s sometimes said that Marx allowed his family to languish in poverty while he diligently avoided work. On the other hand, it’s occasionally claimed that Marx and his family lived a proper Victorian life of opulence while the workers he cared so much for starved and shivered. Indeed, the authors of the volume under consideration have a good deal to say about the dire straits the Marx family found itself in when living in London. We are told that their poverty was so great that several of the children died (as was common in proletarian families of the day), meat was a rarity, and at one point Karl Marx was forced to stay indoors all winter because he had to sell his coat! Marx made a living at times by writing on foreign affairs for the capitalist press, but their interest in the matters Marx knew most about was not always long-lived. Consequently, for many years Marx’s financial security, such as it was, depended on Engels, who was forced to work a job he despised in order to ensure that his compatriot could at least count on having the merest sustenance. Nicolaievsky and his co-author make it obvious that Marx was a loving, dedicated father and husband who did his utmost to support his family. His failing, such as it was, was the inability to find work; those who fault him for this reveal their own inability to understand the misery of 19th-century England or the fact that some men, such as Marx, will not abandon their convictions for lucre (as Marx probably could’ve done by writing handsome lies).

Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen also meld the political and the personal in instances where the political implications of the personal are obvious. For instance, they demolish the undying misconception that Marx was the first communist, or even the first communist to strike out in the vein he did. Even as late as 1842 Marx vehemently denied accusations that he was a communist. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen point to Ludwig Gall as a forerunner of Marx; Gall was particularly exceptional in that he anticipated the language of the Communist Manifesto in 1835, 13 years before that seminal rallying-cry of the exploited was put to paper. In charting the personal and political development of Marx in the 30s and 40s, our authors clearly evince that Marx, far from inventing communism in his own prodigious mind, was merely the best of an entire generation of men and women who revolted against the degrading and impoverishing tendencies of capitalism.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest value of the present volume is that its authors prove that the ideas of Marx and his compatriots were not derived from some Utopian vision or eternal, unchanging sense of justice or rights, but rather from the process of attempting to answer a question they constantly posed: what will hasten the development of the working class as a revolutionary class that can smash capitalism and destroy class society once and for all?

This method is best exemplified by Marx’s stance on the various wars of his days, on which Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen provide much commentary. For Marx, the question was always which side’s victory would do the most to hasten the social revolution — and in his day this question was synonymous with asking which side would destroy more barriers to capitalist development or prevent the old barriers of feudalism from being reintroduced. This was not because Marx supported capitalism over feudalism per se, but because capitalism created the preconditions for socialist revolution. As Marx wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 21 January 1849,

We are certainly the last people to desire the rule of the bourgeoisie … but we say to the workers and the petty bourgeoisie that it is better to suffer in the contemporary bourgeois society, whose industry creates the conditions for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone society…

Accordingly, the primary criterion by which Marx judged wars in his day was whether Russia was involved. As “the great stronghold, reserve position, and reserve army of European reaction,” as Engels wrote, Marx sided with Russia’s foes in every war. When Russian advances on Istanbul in the 1850s prompted the French and British to declare war, Marx was so enthusiastic in promoting the war effort that he eagerly contributed anti-Russian commentaries to conservative newspapers and even took an interest in the anti-Russian fanatic Urquhart. Indeed, during the ’60s Marx was best known to Englishmen — the only people who remembered him — merely as an anti-Russian. When France and Austria went to war in 1859, Marx supported Austria since it was a powerful counterweight to the power of Russia. And in 1877, during the brief war between Turkey and Russia, Marx once again called on the workers’ movement to support Russia’s foe.

In wars not involving Russia, Marx applied the same principle of supporting whichever country or bloc would promote the development of capitalism and, in turn, the strengthening of the working class, the gravediggers of capitalist society. During the American Civil War, Marx enthusiastically supported the cause of the modern, capitalistic Northern states over the semi-feudal South, which was antagonistic to industrial development. This view was so pervasive within the workers’ movement that many of Marx’s comrades found themselves fighting for the North. (Ironically, American conservatives point to the presence of “Marxists” within the ranks of the Union army as evidence of the federal government’s “socialism,” even though the reason they fought for the North was precisely because only under Northern leadership could the whole of American experience real capitalist development!) Even in British cities where workers were turned out of the factories for lack of cotton from America — prevented from reaching Britain by a powerful Union blockade of Southern ports — there was nearly unanimous support for the Union war effort. Finally, during Prussia’s war with France in 1870, Marx and Engels supported Prussia since its victory would (and did) unite Germany and open the way for unified capitalist development in Germany, thus enabling the workers’ movement there to move on make more important demands, and because Prussian victory would topple Napoleon III’s regime (and did). However, once the Prussians had met their objectives and continued to press onwards into France, Marx quickly swung to the side of France — not out of a moral abhorrence for wars of conquest, but to prevent a Franco-Russian alliance that would (and in fact did) arise from a humiliating French defeat and harsh German peace terms.

Contrast this method, which saw Marx supporting powerful states against weaker ones and national oppressors against national unification movements (e.g., Austria, the oppressor of Italy, in its war against France), to the method employed by, say, the Trotskyists, who speak endlessly of the “rights” of “smaller countries,” or worse yet, of the need to respect the sovereignty of (capitalist) nations, or any of a dozen mystifications which amount to taking the side of one group of capitalists against another group of capitalists, without ever considering the interests of the working class (which, today, has no interest in supporting any war since, as capitalism already rules the entire globe, no war can serve a progressive role).

The last third or so of the book focus on Marx’s dispute with the anarchists. These chapters reiterate and amplify all of the wonderful work the authors did to demonstrate the integrity of Marx and the process by which he came to possess his political opinions. Equally important, they show that “official Anarchism” is an ideology that has no place within the workers’ movement, and that the who anarchists have been great fighters for our class — of which there were and are many — have only become such by breaking with the noxious ideas of Bakunin.

To better understand Marx’s dispute with the anarchists, we must first get a bit of history of anarchism — particularly the personal history of its greatest 19th century proponent, Bakunin — as well as the history of the Workingman’s International, which was to be the battleground between the “Marxists” and the anarchists.

Bakunin was not the first modern to be called an anarchist — that distinction belongs to Proudhon — but he was arguably the first whose anarchism was really at odds with the established capitalist society. (Whether Bakunin’s vision was incompatible with capitalism in general is debatable.) Born to nobility, Bakunin quickly renounced his heritage. Already by the 1840s he was well-known to Europeans as a voice of opposition to Tzarist absolutism. He was first sentenced to death by Saxony for his part in the 1849 risings in Dresden. He was sentenced to death for a second time by Austria, whereupon he was handed over to the Russians where he served five years in solitary confinement.

Marx and Bakunin were already familiar with each other by 1844. The two evidently respected each other’s abilities and tread a common path, but there conceptions of revolution were inimical. Bakunin saw revolution as a great sweeping away while Marx, of course, saw it as growing from the foundations of the present society. Accordingly, Bakunin criticized Marx for teaching “paralyzing theory” to the working class in 1848.

The next misstep was Marx’s. In 1848, Marx printed a letter from Polish radicals charging that Bakunin was a Russian agent. Marx was acting in good faith, but was duped. He publicly retracted the letter later, and subsequently defended Bakunin when a similar smear was made a few years later, but the damage was already done. Still, Marx and Bakunin both were men who would not let personal disputes stand in the way of working for a common cause. Unfortunately, the two — and their factions — did not have a common cause, or at least a common vision of how that cause was best served.

The International Workingmen’s Association — afterward known as the First International — was a mass organization founded in the middle of the 1860s which brought together a wide spectrum of groups within the workers’ movement. English members saw the organization as tool to aid strikes by discouraging foreign scabbing. On the other hand, the French saw it as a way of furthering reforms beneficial to artisans and went so far as to repudiate strikes! Because its goal was to organize all workers, this incoherence was to be expected. By 1869, the First International had 800,000 members on every inhabited continent.

Marx joined in 1864 though he realized its composition and leadership were not ideal. Even so, he felt that its ties to the working class were real enough that he was obligated to join. He was soon elected to the first committee, for which he wrote the inaugural address, which reads thusly: “The capture of political power has become the great duty of the working class.” Marx quickly became leading member and quite busy. He worked to keep disparate factions united, even though he privately had many criticisms of them. At the same time, he wouldn’t budge on the class character of the international — he was happy to see Mazzini and other Italians forced out after their attempts to dilute the class character of the international by promoting nationalistic schemes.

Like Marx, Bakunin was an early member of the First International. However, unlike Marx, Bakunin rejected the idea that the proletariat was capable of organizing and acting as a class. Instead, like the Leninists that modern anarchists denigrate while venerating Bakunin, Bakunin was firmly attached to the notion that the revolution would be effected by heroic actions, undertaken by shadowy conspiracies, that would ignite the revolution. Accordingly, Bakunin told Marx he would agitate for international in Italy, but upon arrival promptly founded a society society. Meuron, who joined Bakunin’s next secret society in Switzerland, saw these conspiracies as a means for protecting the International from ambitious, scheming men who craved power and success more than revolution. As the authors point out, Meuron like Bakunin could not conceive of a large, public organization organized in a way that wasn’t a “cockpit” for ambitious men. Like the anarchist caricature of Lenin, Bakunin and his compatriots had an incredibly low regard for the ability of the working class to organize itself. In this they were truly the first vanguardists.

The best example of the elitist, anti-proletarian attitudes of the anarchists is provided by Bakunin’s association with a young Russian emigre named Nechaiev. An extract from Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen’s book detailing this affair will ably tell this story and give readers a delightful taste of how the authors write.

The Nechaiev affair plays such an important role in the history of the International, or rather in the history of its decline, that it deserves to be recounted at some length.

Nechaiev was the son of a servant in a small Russian provincial town. He put to such good use the few free hours that his work as a messenger in the office of a factory left him that he succeeded in passing his examinations as an elementary school teacher. He starved and scraped until he had saved enough money to go to St. Petersburg, where he had himself entered as an external student at the university. In his first winter term, in 1868, he entered the student movement, in which his energy and the radical nature of his views soon earned him prominence. But that was not enough for him. He wanted to be foremost, and in order to enhance his reputation as a revolutionary he started inventing stories of his adventurous past. First he said he had been a prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Then he added an account of his daring escape. The majority of his listeners accepted all this unquestioningly, and were filled with indignation at the stories he told of his treatment by the prison warders, and a students’ meeting was actually called and a delegation actually approached the university authorities. Nevertheless there were some who doubted. Some of the details of Nechaiev’s prison experiences sounded improbable to the more experienced among his colleagues, and the officials declared that Nechaiev had never been under arrest.

Before this fact had been established, however, Nechaiev illegally went abroad to make contact with the Russian émigré leaders. He reached Geneva in March, 1869, and made the acquaintance of Herzen and Ogarev, the patriarchs of the ‘emigration,’ as well as of the representatives of the younger generation of refugees. He made an extraordinary impression upon them all. Herzen, who had grown old, tired and sceptical, said that Nechaiev went to one’s head like absinthe. But the young student was not satisfied with praise and honour. He added details of his own. He said that Russia was on the eve of a tremendous revolutionary outbreak, which was being prepared by a widespread secret society. Of this society he was a delegate. And he repeated the story of his imprisonment and flight. In Geneva also there were a few people who refused to be taken in so easily. A number of émigrés had been prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress themselves and knew how impossible it was to escape, and letters came from St. Petersburg from people who ought to have known, saying that the secret society did not exist, or at any rate gave not the slightest sign of its existence. But those who regarded Nechaiev with suspicion belonged to groups who were hostile to Bakunin. It was these who not long afterwards formed a ‘Russian section’ of the International and made Marx their representative on the General Council. This, however, cannot have been the deciding factor in causing Bakunin to ignore their warnings. He knew the Peter and Paul Fortress himself and knew–could not possibly have helped knowing–that Nechaiev was a liar. But what did it matter? Lies could be useful in revolutionising the slothful, and after all this Nechaiev was a marvellous fellow. Bakunin wrote a regular panegyric about him in a letter to Guillaume, describing him as ‘one of those young fanatics who hesitate at nothing and fear nothing and recognise as a principle that many are bound to perish at the hands of the Government but that one must not rest an instant until the people has risen. They are admirable, these young fanatics–believers without God and heroes without phrases!’ Bakunin and Nechaiev became fast friends.

Bakunin did not apparently formally admit Nechaiev to his secret society. The idea of his association with Nechaiev being surveyed by its otherwise fully initiated members was an uncomfortable one to him. The Bakunin—Nechaiev society was a quite intimate super-secret society, such as the old conspirator loved. Its object was the revolutionising of Russia.

In the spring and summer of 1869 Bakunin wrote as many as ten pamphlets and proclamations, and Nechaiev had them printed. Among them was the subsequently famous Revolutionary Catechism, which was intended to be a reply to the question of what were the best ways and means of hastening the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. The answer was to be found by the consistent application of two principles. The first was ‘the end justifies the means’ and the second was ‘the worse, the better.’ Everything–and by that Bakunin meant every thing without any exception whatever–that promoted the revolution was permissible and everything that hindered it was a crime. The revolutionary must concentrate on one aim, i.e. destruction. ‘There is only one science for the revolutionary, the science of destruction. Day and night he must have but one thing before his eyes–destruction.’ That was Bakunin’s own summary of the duties of a revolutionary. Within the revolutionary organisation the strictest centralisation and the most rigorous discipline must prevail, and the members must be completely subordinate to their leaders. The object of this organisation was ‘to use all the means in its power to intensify and spread suffering and evil, which must end by driving the people to revolt.’ The Catechism even defended terrorism, which, however, it did not recommend against the worst tyrants, because the longer such tyrants were allowed to rage the better it would be for the revolutionising of the people.

Towards the end of the summer of 1869 Nechaiev travelled illegally to Russia, taking with him a mandate from the ‘Central Committee of the European Revolutionary Alliance,’written and signed by Bakunin, recommending him as a reliable delegate of that organisation. Bakunin had actually had a special stamp prepared, with the words: ‘Office of the foreign agents of the Russian revolutionary society Narodnaia Rasprava.’

Nechaiev remained in Russia for more than three months. He succeeded in forming an organisation based on, or alleged to be based on, the Revolutionary Catechism. Revolutionary-minded young men were not so very difficult to find, and his letter of recommendation, signed by Bakunin, whose name was universally honoured, earned him the greatest respect. He chose Moscow as his centre and it was not long before he had gathered a group about him. Had he assigned it practical aims and objects, its fate would have been the usual fate of such organisations in Russia. It would eventually have been discovered and dissolved by the police, but two or three new groups would have arisen to take its place. To Nechaiev,however, that would have appeared an idle pastime. He wished his followers to believe that there was a secret revolutionary committee which they must unconditionally obey, and,true to the injunctions of the Catechism, he used every means that tended to serve his aim. Once, for instance, he persuaded an officer he knew to pose as a supervisory party official sent from the secret headquarters on special duty. That ruse might pass at a pinch. But Nechaiev did not shrink from even cruder mystifications, so crude that he ended by perplexing some of his own followers. Finally a student named Ivanov announced to other members of the group that he no longer believed in the existence of any committee, that Nechaiev was lying to them and that he wished to have nothing more to do with him. Nechaiev decided that the ‘criminal’ must die. He succeeded in persuading the rest of his followers that Ivanov was a traitor and that only his death could save them. On November 29, 1869, they lured Ivanov to a dark corner of a park and murdered him. Ivanov defended himself desperately and bit Nechaiev’s hand to the bone as he was strangling him with a shawl. Nechaiev bore the scar for the rest of his life! The murderers were soon discovered and arrested, and only Nechaiev succeeded in escaping abroad.

Detailed reports of Ivanov’s murder appeared in the papers, and the crime was remembered for many years. It armed the Russian revolutionaries against Nechaiev-like methods.

Bakunin knew the whole story in detail, but it only enhanced Nechaiev’s reputation in his eyes. On learning that Nechaiev had arrived in Geneva–he was living at Locarno at the time–he leapt so high with joy that he nearly broke his old skull against the ceiling, as he wrote to Ogarev. He invited Nechaiev to Locarno, looked after him and was his friend as before. ‘This is the kind of organisation of which I have dreamed and of which I go on dreaming,’ he wrote to his friend Richard. ‘It is the kind of organisation I wanted to see among you.’ At this time Bakunin had already started his struggle against the General Council of the International on the ground of its ‘dictatorial arrogance.’

To the same period there belongs the incident which, apart from the other reasons, led directly to Bakunin’s expulsion from the International. His financial position had always been precarious, but in the autumn of 1869 he was in particularly desperate straits. Through some Russian students who were followers of his he was put into touch with a publisher who offered him 1,200 roubles–far more than the author himself ever got for it–for translating Marx’s Capital. Bakunin accepted the offer gladly and received an advance of 300 roubles. He did not show himself to be in any hurry to complete the task, however, and three months later he had only done sufficient to fill thirty-two printed pages. He readily let himself be convinced by Nechaiev that he had more important matters to fill his time and that he belonged to the revolution and must live for the revolution only. So he laid the work aside and gave Nechaiev full authority to come to an arrangement with the publisher. Nechaiev set about this task in an inimitable manner. It was impossible for Bakunin to communicate directly with the publisher himself on account of the police, and a student named Liubavin had undertaken to do so on his behalf. The contract had been formally made out in Liubavin’s name and in the publisher’s books Liubavin was nominally liable for the 300 roubles’ advance. One day Liubavin received a letter bearing the stamp of Nechaiev’s organisation. Its most remarkable passages are quoted below:

‘DEAR SIR, –On behalf of the bureau I have the honour to write to you as follows. We have received from the committee in Russia a letter which refers among other things to you. It states: “It has come to the knowledge of the committee that a few young gentlemen, dilettanti Liberals, living abroad, are beginning to exploit the knowledge and energy of certain people known to us, taking advantage of their hard-pressed financial straits. Valuable personalities, forced by these dilettante exploiters to work for a day-labourer’s hire, are thereby deprived of the possibility of working for the liberation of mankind. Thus a certain Liubavin has given the celebrated Bakunin the task of translating a book by Marx, and, exploiting his financial distress just like a real exploiting bourgeois, has given him an advance and now insists on the work being completed. Bakunin, delivered in this manner to the mercy of young Liubavin, who is so concerned about the enlightenment of Russia, but only by the work of others, is prevented from being able to work for the supremely important cause of the Russian people, for which he is indispensable. How the behaviour of Liubavin and others like him conflicts with the cause of the freedom of the people and how contemptible, bourgeois and immoral their behaviour is compared with that of those they employ and how little it differs from the practices of the police must be clear to every decent person.

‘”The committee entrusts the foreign bureau to inform Liubavin:

‘”(1) That if he and parasites like him are of the opinion that the translation of Capital is so important to the Russian people at the present time they should pay for it out of their own pocket instead of studying chemistry and preparing themselves for fat professorships in the pay of the state…

‘”(2) It must immediately inform Bakunin that in accordance with the decision of the Russian revolutionary committee he is exempt from any moral duty to continue with the work of translation…”

‘Convinced that you understand, we request you, dear sir, not to place us in the unpleasant position of being compelled to resort to less civilised measures…

‘AMSKIY,
‘Secretary to the Bureau.’

Bakunin subsequently stoutly denied that he knew anything of the contents of this letter, and there is every reason to believe him. But when Liubavin sent him a letter indignantly protesting against these threats, Bakunin, instead of talking to Nechaiev about it, for he must have guessed who was behind it all, took occasion to be offended at Liubavin’s intelligibly not very courteous tone. He wrote to Liubavin that he proposed to sever relations with him, that he would not continue the translation and would repay the advance. He never did repay the advance and must have known that he would never be able to do so.

In Nechaiev’s opinion this species of blackmail was not only permissible to a revolutionary but was actually demanded of him. At every opportunity he threatened denunciation or the use of force, and stole his opponents’ letters in order to be able to compromise them with the police. He shrank at nothing. He caused revolutionary appeals to be sent to one of his greatest enemies, a student named Negrescul, who was being kept under police observation, and, as Nechaiev expected, the material fell into police hands and Negrescul was arrested. He succumbed to tuberculosis in prison and died a few months after his release.

Bakunin knew what Nechaiev was capable of, as many others did by this time, but he remained loyal to him as before. Not till Nechaiev actually started threatening people whom Bakunin held dear–Herzen’s daughter for instance–did Bakunin raise his voice against him. The final impulse that caused Bakunin to break with him seems to have been provided by Nechaiev’s plan to form a gang for the specific purpose of robbing wealthy tourists in Switzerland. He even tried to force Ogarev’s stepson to join him, whereupon Bakunin protested. At that Nechaiev appropriated a strongbox of Bakunin’s containing correspondence, secret papers, and the statutes of his revolutionary organisations–including the original manuscript of the Catechism–and threatened Bakunin with publication should he take any steps against him.

That was the end of Bakunin’s friendship with Nechaiev. Bakunin was horrified at the practical conclusions that Nechaiev drew from principles that he himself had helped him to formulate. The story that Nechaiev told some of his acquaintances, namely, that when he first came abroad he was an ‘unspoiled, good and honourable youth’ and that it was Bakunin who corrupted him, was, of course, not true. Nechaiev had started his mystifications in Russia before his first journey abroad. But Bakunin not only made no attempt to counter-act Nechaiev’s inclinations, he actually encouraged them by giving them a kind of theoretical foundation. Their quarrel is not sufficient to obliterate the fact that Nechaiev was very strongly influenced by Bakunin and that it was Bakunin himself who evolved the theory by which all things were permitted.

Not much more needs be said about Nechaiev’s further career. He lived two more years abroad, First in London, then in Paris and finally in Switzerland. He published more revolutionary literature and threatened and blackmailed as before. Bakunin refused to have anything more to do with him and was so embittered against him that he would have liked to denounce him as a ‘homicidal maniac, a dangerous and criminal lunatic, whom it was necessary to avoid.’ Nechaiev was finally betrayed by a Polish émigré in the service of the police. He was arrested in Zurich in the middle of August, 1872, and repatriated to Russia as a common criminal. On January 8, 1873, he was condemned to twenty years’ hard labour in the mines of Siberia. He was not sent to Siberia, however, but confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Such was his power over people that he actually succeeded in winning over the soldiers who kept guard over him, and they helped to put him in touch with revolutionaries outside. He devised a plan for seizing the fortress during a visit of the Tsar’s, but he was betrayed by one of his fellow-prisoners and transferred to severe solitary confinement. He died of scurvy on November 21, 1882.

Faced with the obvious association of the bandit Nechaiev and Bakunin, a leading figure in the International, as well as the Anarchists’ unwillingness to put the interests of the working class, though it often meant supporting the development of capitalism, before insurrectionist conspiracies, Marx’s decision that it was necessary to purge the international of Bakunin. The authors carefully defend this.

In many ways, this was a fight Bakunin himself had begun a few years before. In 1869 Bakunin and his followers tried to have the First International’s council transferred from London (where Marx lived) to Geneva (where the anarchists usually resided). But by 1871 or ’72 a tremendous waning of the International’s strength prepared the way for bitterest infighting. Jacobin emigres from France revived Bakunin’s old claims that Marx was authoritarian, a pan-German, or, even more unscrupulously, they revived the bourgeois press’s claims that he swindled workers or was a secret servant of Bismarck. The English section, increasingly conservative, felt entitled to their own regional council, whereas previously the General Council, on which Marx served, and which was based in London, had served this role. Finally, Bakunin and some of his followers were incensed at the growing importance of Germany within the European workers’ movement. Seizing upon all of these tensions, Bakunin — who had already declared his intention of conquering the International by taking down Marx’s weaker factional supporters — decided to use local autonomy as his rallying cry. Marx and the General Council, on the other hand, sought more centralization, in order to combat Bakunin’s incessant plotting and the increasingly fractious nature of the International.

After much wrangling, a congress of the 1st International decided to expand the purview of the General Council, to move the General Council to New York (where Marx would not be able to follow it, which meant this measure was heartily supported by the Anarchists — and which demonstrates, for the umpteenth time, that Marx was no power-seeking authoritarian), and, in the end, to expel Bakunin. Marx’s faction received support from the Germans, Swiss, and Americans (who were mostly German emigres), while Bakunin’s faction received its support from the Spanish, French, and the conservative English, whose demands for local autonomy meshed up with the hypocritical but tactical stance of Bakunin (who, as we saw before, was not hostile to the most intense centralization, even going so far as to invent centralized bodies that did not exist).

Once again demonstrating a keen understanding of the personal and political, Maenchen-Helfen and Nicolaievsky suggest that Bakunin’s contempt for the ability of the working class to self-organized stemmed from his focus on the periphery of capitalist Europe: “the differences between Marx and Bakunin boiled down to the differences between the historical tasks necessarily confronting the proletariat in countries in which capitalism was fully developed and the illusions to which the semi- and demi-semi-proletarians living in countries in which capitalist development was only just beginning were equally necessarily subject.”

In the end, then, our brave authors forever smash the notion that Marx unfairly prosecuted Bakunin or that some personal agenda was at work in their dispute. They also clearly demonstrate that Marx was deeply committed to fighting alongside the working class, rather than working outside of it as a conspirator who regarded the class as an inert powder-keg waiting for its spark. Perhaps the best summary of Marx’s role in the workers’ movement is offered by a passage of Engels’s which the authors cite:

By his theoretical and practical work Marx has acquired such a position that the best people in the workers’ movements in the various countries have full confidence in him. They turn to him for advice at decisive moments, and generally find that his advice is best. … but any attempt to influence people against their will would only do harm and destroy the old trust that survives from the time of the International. In any case, we have too much experience in revolutionary matters to attempt anything of the sort. It is not Marx who imposes his opinions, much less his will, upon the people, but it is they who come to him.

Under the weight of anarchist criticisms, one might dismiss this as vapid hagiography from a committed friend. Thanks to the work of Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, we instead see that this portrayal is true. In reminding us of Marx’s respect for the capacity of the working class, as well as his dedication to basing his the interests of the working class rather than abstract principles or morality and justice, their work is not only an antidote to Official Anarchism’s distortion of history, but also to the lies of Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and all the other phony followers of Marx.

Karl Marx: Man and Fighter by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen is available for free download at archive.org.

David Freeman Hawke’s Everyday Life in Early America provides a counterpoint to such a view. This is not a work of special scholarly merit. It was written for popular audiences and is merely a synthesis of the research of many other scholars. However, in addition to being a book I recently finished (the primary reason I’m discussing it), it does an excellent job of providing a look at an American society that was quite different from ours today, which drives home the point that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Hawke begins by describing the world of the Englishmen that came to America. He points out that in many places in 17th century Britain, many farmers still tended land in common. Moreover,

youngsters were taught the medieval notion that what they did reflected first on the family, then rippled out to affect the entire community. Whether they became craftsmen, merchants, or farmers, they knew from youth that no man was an island, that their lives and actions were inextricably involved with the welfare of the community. Town fathers regulated the products that citizens brought to market — judging the quality, the weight, the justness of the price — and no one questioned their right to do so. (This is not to say that cheating did not prevail; ideals seldom flourish in everyday life.) When someone died in a seventeenth-century English village, no one needed an explication of John Donne’s lines, “Do not send to ask for whom the bells toll. It tolls for thee.” (p. 8)

In some parts of America (specifically East Hampton, Long Island) community life persisted in much the same way:

All things considered, the life of the town was corporate to a remarkable degree. The citizens were indeed a body, each one integrated into part of the larger whole. Experience came to them in, and by, and through the group; literally and figuratively, they lived in each other’s presence. Their houses lay huddled together along a single street. Their field-lots were scattered in every direction — two acres here, four acres there, but always among a bevy of neighbors. They accepted common tasks and they shared both good and bad fortune. They worked together, they worshiped together, governed together. (p. 20-21, quoting John Demos)

The “profit motive” that the defenders of capitalism present as innate and eternal was little-known in the North:

there was little innovative, risk-taking behavior; there was no determined pursuit of profit. Indeed, the account books of these farm families indicate that they invariably chose the security of diversified production rather than hire labor to produce more wheat or to specialize in milk production. Economic gain was important to these men and women, yet it was not their dominant value. It was subordinate to (or encompassed by) two other goals: the yearly subsistence and the long-run financial security of the family unit. (p. 42-43, quoting James A. Henretta)

While in other regions, particularly Virginia, community was illusory and a cutthroat spirit prevailed:

The worst sides of English life flourished in a brutal, self-centered society that lacked communal bonds of any kind. Manners and morals collapsed. During the “starving time,” some “fed on the corpses of dead men, and one who had gotten insatiable, out of custom to that food, could not be restrained until such time as he was executed for it.” Excessive drinking prevailed. Community cooperation and restraints found in the village vanished. Every man looked out for himself. In the winter of 1631-1632, one entrepreneur collected two thousand bushels of corn in Virginia and sold them to New Englanders while his brethren at home wanted for food. The ideal of the commonwealth, “in which the interest of ever part would be harmoniously subordinated to the larger interest of the whole society,” never appeared. (p. 21)

The community ideal wasn’t entirely abandoned, however. Virginia tried four times to hold down ‘the excessive and immoderate prices exacted by diverse, avaricious … practitioners in psychic and surgery,’ but with little success. (p. 84) Moreover,

most communities tried to impose restraints on the miller. His monopoly usually had a time limit on it which might not be renewed if his performance failed to satisfy the neighborhood. A contract usually restricted charges to customers. The gristmill, in short, was treated as a public utility. The aim was to “adjust private enterprise to community ends.” (p. 147)

Attitudes toward religion also varied by region. To say that early white America was a Christian land may be a stretch:

A pious visitor toward the end of the century found “the lives of the planters in Maryland and Virginia are very godless and profane.” The trend that had set in there soon became fixed in most colonies. “Sunday is very badly kept,” said a visitor to Pennsylvania, “especially in the rural districts, where most country folk pay little attention to it.” (p. 90)

New England was more devout, but their Christianity was quite different from the conservative evangelicalism of today. Their take on marriage might be called progressive in modern parlance: New England departed radially from English custom. The Congregationalists held that nothing in the Bible designated marriage as a religious rite–even pagans got married–and they made it a civil affair officiated by a magistrate. (p. 93)

All in all, Hawke’s little volume does an admirable job of explaining the complexity and variety of lifeways in early British North America. Everyone should be able to find a topic of interest, whether it is his discussion of early American furniture or his comments on linguistic differences, but to me its greatest worth is in its demonstration that society and “human nature” are very much malleable. If America today is indeed marked by hyper-individualism and the complete atomization of individual, Hawke shows that this was not always the case. Those of us hoping for a better future can take heart in that.