130 years since Karl Marx's death
- By Heiko Khoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 14, 2013
Marx found work as a journalist with the New York Daily Tribune, which published hundreds of his articles, although half of them were actually written by Engels. In 1864 the first International Working Men's Association was founded in London and Marx became its de-facto leader. It brought together revolutionary nationalists, trade unionists, anarchists, and both utopian and scientific socialists.
That November, Marx penned a message of congratulation on behalf of the International to the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on his re-election,
"the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.
…it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world."
Lincoln replied through his Ambassador Charles Adams,
"…the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe."
But it was events in Paris that stamped the existence of the International in world history. In 1870 Prussia defeated France at war and Paris was besieged. France's new republican government capitulated in January 1871. Enraged Parisians rose up on March 18 and established a revolutionary government called the Paris Commune.
Members of the International played an important role in the leadership of the Commune and Marx wrote The Civil War in France in its defence:
"…Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.
Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman's wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune."
Marx and the International became infamous overnight by being wrongly accused of orchestrating the events in Paris. The Commune fell on May 28, 1871. Tens of thousands of Communards were killed, executed, imprisoned or exiled.
After the defeat of the Commune, the International experienced a sharp internal conflict with an Anarchist tendency led by the Russian Michael Bakunin. He advocated the abolition of money, and all power and authority, as the first act of revolution. Whereas Marx concluded that after the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state, a workers' state would replace it.
The International disintegrated in 1876 and Marx returned to studying and writing, but his health was deteriorating and he suffered from multiple ailments, including headaches, lung and liver disease, and severe inflammations of the skin.
His beloved wife and fellow revolutionary Jenny von Westphalen died of liver cancer on December 2, 1881. Marx was so ill that his doctor forbade his attendance at her funeral. His youngest daughter Eleanor took responsibility for his care and travelled with him to various recuperative spas, but damp English weather often undermined their value. The death of Marx's eldest daughter Jenny, on January 11, 1883, dealt the final blow to Marx's own will to live.
Engels recalled:
"On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep – but forever."
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm
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