Interview with Karl Marx

Head of L'Internationale

Revolt of Labour Against Capital – the Two Faces of L'Internationale–

Transformation of Society – Its Progress in the United States

by R. Landor

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.

New York World, July 18, 1871

reprinted

Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, August 12, 1871