INTERVIEW WITH KARL MARX,
HEAD OF L'INTERNATIONALE
REVOLT OF LABOR AGAINST CAPITAL -- THE TWO FACES OF L'INTERNATIONALE --
TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY -- ITS PROGRESS IN THE UNITED STATES
by R. Landor
New York World, July 18, 1871
reprinted
Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, August 12, 1871
London, July 3 -- You have asked me to find out something about the
International Association, and I have tried to do so. The enterprise is a
difficult one just now. London is indisputably the headquarters of the
Association, but the English people have got a scare, and smell
International in everything as King James smelled gunpowder after the famous
plot. The consciousness of the Society has naturally increased with the
suspiciousness of the public; and if those who guide it have a secret to
keep, they are of the stamp of men who keep a secret well. I have called on
two of their leading members, have talked with one freely, and I here give
you the substance of my conversation. I have satisfied myself of one thing,
that it is a society of genuine workingmen, but that these workmen are
directed by social and political theories of another class. One man whom I
saw, a leading member of the Council, was sitting at his workman's bench
during our interview, and left off talking to me from time to time to
receive a complaint, delivered in no courteous tone, from one of the many
little masters in the neighborhood who employed him. I have heard this same
man make eloquent speeches in public inspired in every passage with the
energy of hate toward the classes that call themselves his rulers. I
understood the speeches after this glimpse at the domestic life of the
orator. He must have felt that he had brains enough to have organized a
working government, and yet here he was obliged to devote his life to the
most revolting taskwork of a mechanical profession. He was proud and
sensitive, and yet at every turn he had to return a bow for a grunt and a
smile for a command that stood on about the same level in the scale of
civility with a huntsman's call to his dog. This man helped me to a glimpse
of one side of the nature of the International, the result of
Labor Against Capital
of the workman who produces against the middleman who enjoys. Here was the
hand that would smite hard when the time came, and as to the head that
plans, I think I saw that too, in my interview with Dr. Karl Marx.
Dr. Karl Marx is a German doctor of philosophy, with a German breadth of
knowledge derived both from observation of the living world and from books.
I should conclude that he has never been a worker in the ordinary sense of
the term. His surroundings and appearance are those of a well-to-do man of
the middle class. The drawing room into which I was ushered on the night of
the interview would have formed very comfortable quarters for a thriving
stockbroker who had made his competence and was now beginning to make his
fortune. It was comfort personified, the apartment of a man of taste of easy
means, but with nothing in it peculiarly characteristic of its owner. A fine
album of Rhine views on the table, however, gave a clue to his nationality.
I peered cautiously into the vase on the sidetable for a bomb. I sniffed for
petroleum, but the smell was the smell of roses. I crept back stealthily to
my seat, and moodily awaited the worst.
He has entered and greeted me cordially, and we are sitting face to face.
Yes, I am tete-a-tete with the revolution incarnate, with the real founder
and guiding spirit of the International Society, with the author of the
address in which capital was told that is it warred on labor, it must expect
to have its house burned down about its ears -- in a word, with the
Apologist for the Commune
of Paris. Do you remember the bust of Socrates? The man who died rather than
profess his belief in the Gods of the time -- the man with the fine sweep of
profile for the forehead running meanly at the end into a little snub,
curled-up feature, like a bisected pothook, that formed the nose. Take this
bust in your mind's eye, color the beard black, dashing it here and there
with puffs of gray; clap the head thus made on a portly body of the middle
height, and the Doctor is before you. Throw a veil over the upper part of
the face, and you might be in the company of a born vestryman. Reveal the
essential feature, the immense brown, and you know at once that you have to
deal with that most formidable of all composite individual forces -- a
dreamer who thinks, a thinker who dreams.
I 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 light up the case of
mystery in which 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, "except
perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the
fact that out 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 for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you
almost as much about us as we know ourselves.
R. [Landor]: 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 overscrupulous conclave?
Dr. M.: There is nothing to prove.
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 of 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 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 administration, 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 seem otherwise to the world. People talk of secret instruction
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 to 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 choices 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. But the Society has not
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 revive 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, trade and friendly societies,
co-operative production are but means toward 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.: And Mazzini, is he a member of your body?
Dr. M.: (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
most advanced views.
Dr. M.: He represents nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class
republic. We want no part of 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.
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 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 the United States?
Dr. M.: The chief concerns 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 slaveowners's war.
I have 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 soon come to a reckoning for good or ill.
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KARL MARX
by
JOHN SWINTON
The Sun, No. 6, September 6, 1880
The interview with the editor of the progressive
New York newspaper The Sun took place August 1880
Transcribed for the Internet Jan 18 1996 by z.
One of the most remarkable men of the day, who has played an inscrutable but
puissant part in the revolutionary politics of the past forty years, is Karl
Marx. A man without desire for show or fame, caring nothing for the
fanfaronade of life or the pretence of power, without haste and without
rest, a man of strong, broad, elevated mind, full of far-reaching projects,
logical methods, and practical aims, he has stood and yet stands behind more
of the earthquakes which have convulsed nations and destroyed thrones, and
do now menace and appal crowned heads and established frauds, than any other
man in Europe, not excepting Joseph Mazzini himself. The student of Berlin,
the critic of Hegelianism, the editor of papers, and the old-time
correspondent of the New York Tribune, he showed his qualities and his
spirit; the founder and master spirit of the once dreaded International and
the author of "Capital", he has been expelled from half the countries of
Europe, proscribed in nearly all of them, and for thirty years past has
found refuge in London. He was at Ramsgate the great seashore resort of the
Londoners, while I was in London, and there I found him in his cottage, with
his family of two generations. The saintly-faced, sweet-voiced, graceful
woman of suavity who welcomed me at the door was evidently the mistress of
the house and the wife of Karl Marx. And is this massive-headed,
generous-featured, courtly, kindly man of 60, with the bushy masses of long
revelling gray hair, Karl Marx? His dialogue reminded me of that of
Socrates -- so free, so sweeping, so creative, so incisive, so genuine --
with its sardonic touches, its gleams of humor, and its sportive merriment.
He spoke of the political forces and popular movements of the various
countries of Europe -- the vast current of the spirit of Russia, the motions
of the German mind, the action of France, the immobility of England. He
spoke hopefully of Russia, philosophically of Germany, cheerfully of France,
and sombrely of England -- referring contemptuously to the "atomistic
reforms" over which the Liberals of the British Parliament spend their time.
Surveying the European world, country after country, indicating the features
and the developments and the personages on the surface and under the
surface, he showed that things were working toward ends which will assuredly
be realized. I was often surprised as he spoke. It was evident that this
man, of whom so little is seen or heard, is deep in the times, and that,
from the Neva to the Seine, from the Urals to the Pyrenees, his hand is at
work preparing the way for the new advent. Nor is his work wasted now any
more than it has been in the past, during which so many desirable changes
have been brought about, so many heroic struggles have been seen, and the
French republic has been set up on the heights. As he spoke, the question I
had put, "Why are you doing nothing now?" was seen to be a question of the
unlearned, and one to which he could not make direct answer. Inquiring why
his great work "Capital", the seed field of so many crops, had not been put
into English as it has been put into Russian and French from the original
German, he seemed unable to tell, but said that a proposition for an English
translation had come to him from New York. He said that that book was but a
fragment, a single part of a work in three parts, two of the parts being yet
unpublished, the full trilogy being "Land", "Capital", "Credit" , the last
part, he said, being largely illustrated from the United States, where
credit has had such an amazing development. Mr. Marx is an observer of
American action, and his remarks upon some of the formative and substantive
forces of American life were full of suggestiveness. By the way, in
referring to his "Capital", he said that any one who might desire to read it
would find the French translation much superior in many ways to the German
original. Mr. Marx referred to Henri Rochefort the Frenchman, and in his
talk of some of his dead disciples, the stormy Bakunin, the brilliant
Lassalle, and others, I could see how his genius had taken hold of men who,
under other circumstances, might have directed the course of history.
The afternoon is waning toward the twilight of an English summer evening as
Mr. Marx discourses, and he proposes a walk through the seaside town and
along the shore to the beach, upon which we see many thousand people,
largely children, disporting themselves. Here we find on the sands his
family party -- the wife, who had already welcomed me, his two daughters
with their children, and his two sons-in-law, one of whom is a Professor in
King's College, London, and the other, I believe, a man of letters. It was a
delightful party -- about ten in all -- the father of the two young wives,
who were happy with their children, and the grandmother of the children,
rich in the joysomeness and serenity of her wifely nature. Not less finely
than Victor Hugo himself does Karl Marx understand the art of being a
grandfather; but, more fortunate than Hugo, the married children of Marx
live to cheer his years. Toward nightfall he and his sons-in-law part from
their families to pass an hour with their American guest. And the talk was
of the world, and of man, and of time, and of ideas, as our glasses tinkled
over the sea. The railway train waits for no man, and night is at hand. Over
the thought of the babblement and rack of the age and the ages, over the
talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind one question
touching upon the final law of being, for which I would seek answer from
this sage. Going down to the depth of language, and rising to the height of
emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I interrogated the revolutionist
and philosopher in these fateful words, "What is?" And it seemed as though
his mind were inverted for a moment while he looked upon the roaring sea in
front and the restless multitude upon the beach. "What is?" I had inquired,
to which, in deep and solemn tone, he replied: "Struggle!"
At first it seemed as though I had heard the echo of despair; but,
peradventure, it was the law of life.
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