5. Two Barking Dogs
There is a Sherlock Holmes story in which a key piece of evidence, overlooked, of course, by the bumbling Dr. Watson, is something that is missing. A dog didn’t bark when it should have. In the case we are investigating, practically all participants played the role of Watson. Only, they had less excuse. It wasn’t that the dog didn’t bark; it was that there were two dogs, both barking loudly, and no one noticed them. Neither Kautsky, nor Potresov, nor Lenin, nor, as far as I have been able to determine, any other socialist during Word War I, cited the two wars after 1848 in which Marx and Engels unambiguously took a prowar stand in support of a bourgeois government.
During the American Civil War, Marx actively campaigned for the Union. His support was unconditional and unqualified. He did not ask himself which side’s victory would be “most desirable.” He came down solidly on the side that was fighting slavery. His activity was not only literary. A significant section of the British bourgeoisie, led by Gladstone’s liberals, favored an alliance with the Confederacy. Marx, together with his friends in the movement, mostly ex-Chartists, carried on a counter campaign, organizing rallies and meetings in support of the Union. Given the economic crisis created in the textile industry by the Union blockade of cotton exports from the slave-holding South, England’s main supplier, this campaign by Marx and the former Chartist leaders required a confrontation with conservative trade unionists in what was a relatively well-organized trade. But Marx’s support of the Union, while unqualified, was not uncritical. The conduct of the war by the Lincoln administration was pilloried in Marx and Engels’ correspondence and their public comments, while more restrained, were also harsh.13
Even more surprising is the failure of any of the participants in the 1914 debates to make much of Engels’ extensive writings on the Franco-Prussian war in The Pall Mall Gazette. From the fall of the Second Empire in September of 1870 up to the insurrection of the Paris Commune in March of the following year, Engels wrote as an outspoken partisan of the bourgeois Third Republic. And Marx used all his influence in the IWMA to swing that organization into the pro-Republican camp. Here again, from the beginning, neither Marx nor Engels held any illusions about the bourgeoisie. They predicted its betrayal of the working classes before the insurrection in Paris even broke out. And this skeptical assessment of the bourgeoisie as a class, and of its political leaders, radically shaped the policy they advocated. But their support for this Republican government, which was soon to ally itself with the Prussians to crush the Commune, was unqualified as long as it fought against the Prussians and for the Republic. What “support” for one side in a war meant for Marx is illustrated by these cases; it was of no use for socialists who, like Potresov, were arguing for a policy of social peace in World War I. It should be obvious why this was so. Any comparison of Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Franz Joseph, Tsar Nicholas, or even the politicians of the Third Republic to Abraham Lincoln, let alone the American abolitionists, would have been ridiculous. The comparison itself would have highlighted the demagogy behind the claim of any of the former to be fighting for “freedom.” What is more to the point, Marx’s support for the union side militarily in that conflict took the form of political opposition to the Lincoln administration’s handling of the war. And the same distinction was made in his support of the Third Republic.
6. What Engels Did and Didn’t Say
Finally, however valuable the schemas put forward by Lenin might be in themselves, they were unknown to Marx and Engels. The following chapters will show them evolving from belligerent champions of war against Russia by ‘the Democracy’ in 1848 to prophets denouncing the war preparations of capitalist governments by 1870. Engels, by the 1880s, clearly dreaded the prospect of war. It is also true that the Franco-Prussian war was a political watershed for them.
In his last years, Engels developed the consistent antiwar politics that were the source of the resolutions of the Second International. It was his influence that guaranteed a hearing for the antiwar left even as the leadership moved to right. Most importantly, it was Engels who explicitly rejected anti-Tsarism as the basis of a revolutionary socialist position in the impending world war. But he never explicitly reexamined the theoretical basis of the politics he and Marx had held since the 1840s.
Engels continued to write on numerous occasions as if the main threat to the working class and even “European civilization” came from Tsarism.* Even in these instances, however, he explicitly repudiated any support to the governments—especially the Prussian government—opposed to Tsarism. At the same time, moreover, sometimes in the same article or letter, he recognized how weak Tsarist Russia had become. He recognized that it was the junior partner in its dealings with Germany and France. He wrote with eager anticipation of the anti-Tsarist revolution that he believed imminent. On a number of occasions, again in juxtaposition with passages repeating the old “line” about the Tsarist threat, he offhandedly describes imperialist drives leading to war that emanated from capitalist competition not dynastic ambition.**
Perhaps, Engels, by the 1890s, should have realized more clearly what was going on. Perhaps, he should have anticipated Lenin and written Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. But he didn’t. What he did do was to imprint on the newly born Second International his own passionately held conviction that there was only one way to respond to the drive to war. Socialists had to make clear not only that they would not support any of the governments in a crisis but that they would use such a crisis to overthrow those governments.
* For an interesting treatment of the continuing debates over this question by Balkan socialists see the anthology of translated material The Balkan Socialist Tradition by Andreja Živkovič and Dragan Plavšič.
** There is one, and only one, exception to this. It is discussed in Chapter 6. In a private letter to August Bebel, Engels flirted with the possibility of supporting the German government in a real case of defense of the country. The complicated story behind this letter is discussed in some detail in Chapter 6, but the dénoument can be simply stated here. In the article he published on the question Engels explicitly rejected support for any of the governments.
CHAPTER 1. WAR AND THE DEMOCRACY IN 1848
What strikes the modern reader who turns to the speeches, pamphlets and articles of Marx and Engels of the period surrounding the revolution of 1848 is their bellicose, “prowar” tone. In the twentieth century, the rivalry of the great powers led to brutal and exhausting world wars which ground up the smaller countries and ended in the collapse of one or more of the major contestants. Winners were often difficult to distinguish from losers. Revolutionaries, revolted by the slaughter, were antiwar almost by instinct. The only alternatives they saw were opposition to war on principle—from either a revolutionary or a pacifist standpoint—or capitulation to chauvinism.
1. War and Revolution 1793-1848
This was not the case with Marx and Engels. They began by using the words war and revolution almost interchangeably. Like most of their contemporaries, when they thought of revolution the image that preoccupied them was the revolutionary war of the French Republic in 1793-4. War and revolution were then merged. In that war—or so Marx, Engels, and most of their contemporaries, thought—the nation defended itself by mobilizing the population. And that was only possible because the people were convinced that the France they were defending was their democratic, revolutionary France; not the old France. The alliance of all the
