С О Ц И Н Т Е Г Р У М

Как Зевс я - вот лейтмотив этого эпизода.

Григорий, Вы хотите сказать, что как Зевс это Вы?

Зевс - в древнегреческой мифологии бог неба, грома, молний, ведающий всем миром.... самый сильный из богов-олимпийцев

"Бог гордым противится, а смиренным даёт благодать"

A LETTER FROM THE EARL OF WESTMORLAND p.234

Григорий чокнулся на антимаркси(с)зме

With all its hesitations and sudden changes of direction, and with its
very amateurishness, this report is oddly convincing. There is no doubt
that Marx was at this time engaged in a conspiratorial movement of
considerable scope, reaching down among groups of communist workmen
in Germany, France and England, and that he believed that a new European
revolution was imminent. When the secret agent puts into Marx’s
mouth the words: “They might be perfectly tranquil, their men were
everywhere at their Posts . . . not one of the European crowned Executioners
can escape,” he was employing the authentic Marxist jargon, and
we have only to translate the words back into German to realize that this
is very much how Marx would have spoken. That Queen Victoria should
twice be described as “a Moon Calf”R appears surprising until we learn
that these words also belonged to the conventional Marxist vocabulary.
The secret agent, whoever he was, had caught the precise accent of the
revolutionary oratory at Great Windmill Street.

During these months Marx was living in a state of feverish excitement
and enthusiasm. For perhaps the first time he was tasting the delights of
revolutionary command, seeing himself as the self-appointed leader of
the masses in their long-awaited uprising against their feudal rulers. According
to the secret agent there were between 300 and 350 workmen’s
organizations in Germany, all ready to come out in open revolt. These
numbers were no doubt exaggerated, but even if only a hundred workmen’s
organizations existed, each with its own secret conspiratorial arm,
these would be enough to provide the core of a revolutionary army. The
secret agent goes on to say that only a few of these workmen were “initiated
in the more immediate views of the Chiefs, and thus their measures
are directed with more secrecy and certainty,” and we know that this
was precisely the kind of revolutionary organization of which Marx approved.
Peter Roser, in Cologne, was being urged to establish as many
secret communes in the Rhineland as possible; emissaries were continually
being sent to Germany to fan the flames; every day the prospects
became more inviting. Soon “the Blindmen” would strike down the kings
of Europe, and the armed workmen would come into their own.

If Marx had drawn up a balance sheet of his revolutionary designs, he
would have found very little to suggest that he was on the eve of a
catastrophe. Everything seemed to point in his favor. In April his own
party had formed a confederation with the French revolutionaries and
with the Chartists. His intellectual dominance was being acclaimed in
revolutionary circles. He had already worked out in great detail a theory
of the coming revolution based on his studies of the abortive revolts of
1848. Only one thing disturbed him: all his appeals to the German comrades
to provide money to pay for the cost of running the Central Committee
went unanswered. The revolution was in desperate need of funds.
The secret agent had depicted Marx and Engels as violent men who
would stop at nothing to bring the revolution about. There was some
justice in the accusation. In March a secret call to arms, written by Marx
and Engels, was distributed to the German members of the Communist
League. It was called A Plan of Action against Democracy and took the
form of an appeal to revolutionary terrorism. Bourgeois democracy, according
to the plan, would receive its deathblow at the hands of the
armed and awakened proletariat. The revolutionaries were ordered to
form open and secret conspiratorial groups, both acting on orders from above. Their first task was to ally themselves with the bourgeois democrats
in order to seize power from the ruling princes; once the princes
were dethroned and exterminated, the revolutionary proletariat was ordered
to turn pitilessly against the democrats and destroy them.

A Plan of Action against Democracy, although little known and rarely
studied, is one of the most important and seminal documents of the nineteenth
century; it is also one of the most chilling. It had very little influence
in its time. It acted like a bomb with a delayed fuse, exploding only
in the twentieth century.
Step by step Marx and Engels described a plan of action which was
to become only too familiar after 1917. They had no illusions about the
strengths and weaknesses of bourgeois democracy. They explained in
great detail how a popular front should be formed, and they showed
that the moment of victory was dangerous for the proletariat, which
was likely to continue to ally itself with the bourgeoisie. On the contrary
the proletariat must strike hard against its former allies. The destruction
of the princes was merely the prologue; the real drama consisted in the
destruction of democracy.

Neither Marx nor Engels had any objection to terrorism. The assassination
of leaders and the burning of public buildings, the murder of countless
hundreds of people and the entire destruction of the machinery of
the state, were all encouraged as being necessary and inevitable to bring
about the dictatorship of the proletariat. There could be no half measures.
What ordinary people called “revolutionary excesses” were the proper
instruments of revolutionary progress. Here in an extraordinary appeal
to naked violence Marx and Engels describe the stages the revolution
will pass through:

It is obvious that in the bloody fighting that lies ahead, as in the fighting
of the past, the workers will be victorious chiefly through their own courage,
determination and self-sacrifice. As in the past the petits bourgeois will, as
long as possible, show themselves in the mass to be hesitant, inactive and
indecisive in the fighting; but when the victory has been secured, they
will make it their own, inviting the workers to remain quiet and to return
to their work, thus avoiding so-called excesses and snatching from the
proletariat the fruits of their triumph.
It is not in the power of the workers to prevent the petits bourgeois democrats
from acting in this way, but it is in their power to render their growth
more difficult as against the armed proletariat and to dictate such conditions
to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats will from the outset carry
the seeds of its own downfall and their subsequent suppression by the
rule of the proletariat will be considerably facilitated. Above all, the workers must during the present conflict and in the subsequent fighting work against appeasement by the bourgeois as much as possible and they must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist designs. They must so direct their labors that direct revolutionary agitation will not be suppressed following the victory. On the contrary it must be maintained as long as possible.
Far from opposing the so-called excesses, those examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired hateful memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a guiding hand.

The call to arms went on to describe the need for the workers to establish
simultaneously with the bourgeois government their own revolutionary
workers’ government, and to compromise the bourgeois democrats as
much as possible. The bourgeois government must be placed in a position
where it feels threatened and menaced by the authorities who command
the workers. The workers must be armed with guns, carbines and cannons,
and formed into militant revolutionary groups under their own
elected officials. At the decisive moment the Central Revolutionary Committee
will arrive in Germany from abroad—evidently the committee consisted
of Marx and Engels—and they would then assume supreme power.
There was no question now of a dictatorship of the proletariat; all power
would be gathered in the hands of the Committee, which would rule by
dictatorial decree.
This blueprint for a communist revolution written in the spring of 1850
was carried out to the letter in the autumn of 1917. Lenin had read A
Plan of Action against Democracy, and he knew exactly what had to be
done. The last words of the plan were the most terrifying of all, for they
offered no relief from the iron rule of the Central Revolutionary Committee—
The battle cry must be: The Revolution in permanence.p.240

A Plan of Action against Democracy, which was also known as An
Address from the Central Committee to the League, derives of course
from Jacobin sources colored by the ideas of Rlanqui. In time Marx would
moderate his views, saying that the plan was unrealistic because the
revolutionary proletariat could not acquire power through a short and
savage confrontation with the enemy but only after many years of constant
struggle. But when the plan was written he felt supremely confident.
Revolution was in the air, and the defeated revolutionaries of 1848 had
gained their second wind.
With the utmost seriousness the English, French and German revolutionaries
in London drew up a statement of revolutionary aims on behalf
of a new organization called the Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists.
In theory this organization was to govern all the European revolutions
which were expected to break out in the summer. The statutes of the Universal Society were drawn up by Marx and Engels. The first restated
some of the arguments of A Plan of Action against Democracy,
while the remaining five statutes have a curiously improvised and ineffective
appearance, as though they were added in an afterthought by
men who found it too much trouble to draw up serious statutes for an
organization which was not likely to have any future whatsoever. The
six statutes read:

1. The aim of the society is the overthrow of all the privileged classes, and
to submit these classes to the dictatorship of the proletariat by maintaining
the revolution in permanence until the realization of communism, which
will be the last organizational form of the human family.
2. For the attainment of this aim the society will form bonds of solidarity
among all sections of the revolutionary communist party by breaking down
the barriers of nationality in conformity with the principle of republican
fraternity.
3. The founding committee of the society constitutes itself the Central Committee.
Wherever it is necessary to carry out the appointed tasks, there
will be established local committees in direct communication with the
Central Committee.
4. There is no limit to the number of members in the society, but no one
may be a member who is not elected by a unanimous vote. But on no
account may the vote be secret.
5. All members of the society are obliged by oath to observe unconditionally
the first article in the statutes. Any changes, which may conceivably have
the effect of weakening a member’s deliberate intention to follow the
first article, releases the member of the society from his obligations.
6. Decisions of the society will be always arrived at by a two-thirds majority
of the votes.

The statutes of the Universal Society were originally written in French
in the middle of April 1850, about a month after A Plan of Action against
Democracy. The signatories were Marx, Engels, Willich, George Julian
Harney and Adam Vidil, a representative of the Blanquists. While A
Plan of Action against Democracy can still chill the blood with its battle
cry for a permanent revolution and its detailed analysis of provocations
and treacheries, the statutes appear curiously remote and unreal. There
is no bite in them. The five self-elected leaders of the conspiracy, regarding
themselves as the future dictators of Europe, had merely sketched
out a vague and uncertain program leading to the last organizational form
of the human family.
Nevertheless they were in earnest. The spring and summer were full
of revolutionary excitement. While the English Chartists were merely
toying with thoughts of revolution, the Blanquists were deliberately preparing
for an armed uprising in France and there were small but power fui groups in Germany which could be expected to come out in revolt.
Marx confidently expected to see a European revolution in the summer or
at the very latest in the autumn when, according to his prognostications,
there would be a general economic collapse.

Nearly all the documents of the short-lived Universal Society are lost.
For a brief moment Blanquists, Communists and Chartists made common
cause, believing that they had only to utter the word and all of Europe
would be scorched with revolutionary flames. All crowned heads would
be killed, all who opposed the Universal Society would be trampled
underfoot. When the autumn came, the revolutionaries learned that the
revolution would have to be postponed indefinitely—Europe was economically
secure, world trade was developing at an extraordinary pace,
and the discovery of gold in California was visibly improving the economic
health of the world. The people of Europe had put revolutions
behind them.
The Earl of Westmorland’s confidential report to Lord Palmerston was
accurate in all its essentials. In that feverish spring the revolutionaries
were determined on extreme measures. They spoke of mass insurrections,
the creation of vast revolutionary armies, and the assassination of the
crowned heads of Europe, as though all these things were inevitable and
desirable. They thought they had prepared the ground and were only
waiting for the signal to plunge Europe into revolution. The signal never
came.p.242

Синица на море пустилась;
Она хвалилась,
Что хочет море сжечь.
Расславилась тотчас о том по свету речь.

Страх обнял жителей Нептуновой столицы;
Летят стадами птицы;
А звери из лесов сбегаются смотреть,
Как будет Океан, и жарко ли гореть.

И даже, говорят, на слух молвы крылатой,
Охотники таскаться по пирам
Из первых с ложками явились к берегам,
Чтоб похлебать ухи такой богатой,

Какой-де откупщик и самый тароватый
Не давывал секретарям.
Толпятся: чуду всяк заранее дивится,
Молчит и, на море глаза уставя, ждет;

Лишь изредка иной шепнет:
«Вот закипит, вот тотчас загорится!»
Не тут-то: море не горит.
Кипит ли хоть?— и не кипит.

И чем же кончились затеи величавы?
Синица со стыдом в-свояси уплыла;
Наделала Синица славы,
А море не зажгла.

Meanwhile he worked on his long-projected Critique of Political Economy,
which went on so slowly that he despaired of ever finishing it. As he
contemplated the mounting pages of his manuscript, a feeling of helpless
dissatisfaction swept over him. It was a feeling he knew well, for nearly
all his books were written with prolonged labor pangs, and the endless
delays drove him nearly out of his mind. These delays were of his own
making. He lacked the power to concentrate fully.
He would plead poverty, misery, headaches, boils, his old liver complaint, but he knew only too well that these were no more than excuses. The truth was that fear had a place in the workings of his mind—fear of his own capacities, fear that the book would not be the masterpiece he had hoped for, fear that it would be forgotten the moment it was published. On this book he proposed to stake his reputation. P.312

As he worked, he was buoyed up by the hope of a crash which would
destroy all the governments of western Europe. He had indeed been
prophesying crashes for many years. Long ago, in 1844, he had predicted
revolution following the uprising of weavers in Silesia. In 1848 he had
surrendered to some weeks of joyful expectation as revolutions broke out
in many of the capitals of Europe, only to collapse before the forces of
the reaction. In the first number of the Neue Rheinische Revue he predicted
a European revolution “by August 1850 at the latest.” Afterward he
saw it coming in 1851, in 1853, and again in 1854 at the time of the Crimean
War. These prognostications were shared by Engels, who wrote in
1855 that a general trade crisis would bring about the total ruin of European
industry, glut the markets, and reduce the bourgeoisie to the level
of the proletariat. In the following year he repeated the same dire prophecies
with even greater urgency. There would be a crash of phenomenal
proportions such as the world had never known before; and Marx was of
the opinion that his role as a spectator would soon come to an end. “The
mobilization of our persons is at hand,” he wrote, meaning that at any moment
he expected to direct the fortunes of the European revolution, with
Engels as commander in chief of the revolutionary forces and himself as
dictator. P. 312.

The first great crisis in the capitalist world did in fact shake the European
governments, but not in the manner that Marx and Engels had predicted.
In the autumn of 1857 there was an economic crisis of quite
extraordinary proportions, beginning in America and extending to England,
France and Germany. Engels, observing the strange aberrations of
the Manchester stock exchange, prices plunging down, bankruptcies taking
place every other minute, confessed to a sense of wonderful wellbeing
at the prospect of disaster. He wrote to Marx on November 15, 1857:

Physically the crisis has done me as much good as a swim in the sea. In
1848 we said: Now our time is coming, and in a certain sense it came, but
this time it is really coming, now it will be a fight for life. This at once
makes my military studies more practical, and I will immediately throw
myself into the existing organization and elementary tactics of the Prussian,
Austrian, Bavarian and French armies, and beyond this nothing but riding,
i.e. fox hunting, which is the real school.

Engels preparing himself for revolutionary war by fox hunting was no
more surprising than Marx suddenly working himself to the bone in order
to complete his book before Europe erupted in flames. He wrote at the
beginning of December: “I am working like mad all through the night to
put my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines
clear before the deluge comes.” In a fever of physical contentment Engels
continued to go fox hunting, strengthening his body for the perils ahead.
He wrote on the last day of the year:

Last Saturday I went fox hunting, 7 hours in the saddle. This kind of
thing makes me hellishly excited for a few days, it is the greatest physical
pleasure imaginable. In the whole field I only saw 2 who rode better than
I, but they had better mounts. This brings my health really to a peak. At
least 20 fellows fell from their horses or were thrown, 2 horses were ruined,
1 fox was killed—I was in at the kill.

But Engels’ hopes to be in at the kill of Western civilization were to be
sadly disappointed. The crisis was a spectacular one, but it was not mortal.
The markets recovered, and Marx’s repeated fears that he would be
unable to finish his book before the revolution caught up with him proved
to be illusory. The great crash had not come; in the following years he
would prophesy again and again that it was about to come, and would
inevitably take place in a week or in a few months. Prophecy had become
a habit. What he wanted to happen became the subject of a prophecy,
whether it was rational or not.
These oracular utterances were always made with fervor, and then
quietly forgotten. A quite fantastic number of these prophecies appear in
his letters, and the only explanation would seem to be that he did not
expect them to be fulfilled, did not keep a close record of them, and had
grown accustomed to failure. His prophecies were an indulgence and a
recreation, like chess. Banks would crash, armies would march across Europe,
emperors would fall, there would be barricades in the streets and
the red flag would fly from the government offices; at all costs there must
be the glimpse of disasters on the horizon.

During her absence Marx had been working on the text of one of his
most extraordinary writings. It was nothing less than an examination of
Russia’s historical role in the light of some documents he had discovered
in the British Museum. He had discovered the documents in 1853 and
pondered them at great length to curious effect, for he had come to the
conclusion that Great Britain, far from being the enemy of Russia, was her
friend and secret supporter through the centuries, and Lord Palmerston,
who claimed to be the enemy of Russia, had sold himself to the Russian
Crown. This theory had been advanced by David Urquhart, a rich
and adventurous Scot, who became pro-Turk after prolonged residence
in Turkey, but Marx claimed to have arrived at the same conclusion
independently. P.307

The articles written by Marx and collected under the title Secret Diplomafie History of the Eighteenth Century showed, or pretended to show,
that ever since the time of Peter the Great the British and Russian cabinets
had been in secret collusion. There was, of course, considerable evidence
to the contrary; the Crimean War scarcely supported the untenable thesis.
In his effort to come to grips with the problem Marx wrote a long article
on the nature of Russian power, examining the unchanging Russian policy
from the time of Rurik to the present day. The article was written in
Marx’s strange and curiously contrived English, which always reads like
a translation from German. It was written with power and brilliance, and
since his conclusions were not likely to please the Russians, it has not
been reprinted in his collected works.p.308

Marx’s thesis was that the Tatar invasions, which lasted for two hundred
years, reduced the Russians to slavery, and when the Tatars were overthrown
they accepted slavery under the Tsars, who themselves possessed
the mentality of slaves. Slavery was a Russian disease. Ivan the Terrible
was not the august and terrifying personage depicted in the history books
but a man who hid behind his own fears and “succeeded in hiding under
a mask of proud susceptibility and irritable haughtiness the obtrusiveness
of the Mongol serf.” In Marx’s eyes Ivan the Terrible was a craven theatrical
figure, possessing only those virtues which are granted to slaves. He
was a cunning mass-murderer, a deceitful ally, an obtuse politician. Peter
the Great was little better, for he merely brought Ivan the Terrible up to
date. Here is Marx’s summing-up of Russian policy since the time of Peter
the Great:

Peter the Great is indeed the inventor of modem Russian policy, but he
became so only by divesting the old Muscovite method of encroachment of
its merely local character and its accidental admixtures, by distilling it into
an abstract formula, by generalizing its purpose, and exalting its object from
the overthrow of certain given limits of power to the aspiration of unlimited
power. He metamorphosed Muscovy into modern Russia by the generalization
of its system, not by the mere addition of some provinces.
To resume. It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery
that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming
a virtuoso in the craft of serfdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy
continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master. At length
Peter the Great coupled the political craft of the Mongol slave with the
proud aspiration of the Mongol master, to whom Genghis Khan had, by will,
bequeathed his conquest of the earth.

These words were printed in The Free Press, an obscure news weekly
published by David Urquhart in Sheffield and London. Marx’s study of
Russian policy appeared in the news weekly at intervals. Eleanor Marx later collected the articles and they were published under the title of Secret
Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. For some reason she deliberately
excluded the passage quoted above with its orchestrated denunciation
of Russian policy.
Marx had read widely about Russia in the British Museum, and very
little that he read gave him any satisfaction. He regarded Russia with
intense fear and loathing. It was a phantom power, swelling like a gas,
poisonous and deadly because it seemed to have no limits. A passage at the
beginning of his short history of Russia breathes a peculiarly modern
disenchantment :

The overwhelming influence of Russia has taken Europe at different
epochs by suiprise, startled the peoples of the West, and been submitted to
as a fatality, or resisted only by convulsions. But alongside the fascination
exercised by Russia, there runs an ever-reviving skepticism, dogging her like
a shadow, growing with her growth, mingling shrill notes of irony with the
cries of agonizing peoples, and mocking her very grandeur as a histrionic
attitude taken up to dazzle and to cheat. Other empires have met with similar
doubts in their infancy; Russia has become a colossus without outliving
them. She affords the only instance in history of an immense empire, the very
existence of whose power, even after world-wide achievements, has never
ceased to be treated like a matter of faith rather than like a matter of fact.

Such statements were to be found in Marx’s articles to the New York
Daily Tribune, and were by no means unusual. What he feared above all
was that Russia would spill over her frontiers and infuse Kalmuck blood
into Europe. There was, he believed, only one way to deal with Russia—
to oppose her fearlessly.

The Secret Diplomatic History had three printings in the nineteenth
century. It was published in installments in Urquhart’s Free Press of Sheffield
between June and August 1856 and then again in the Free Press of
London between August 1856 and April 1857. More than forty years later
came Eleanor Marx’s bowdlerized version. The Bolshevik historian David
Ryazanov rediscovered it in 1908, and then it was forgotten again.
These same ideas were being included in articles to the New York Daily
Tribune. In some fourteen or fifteen articles Marx dissected the PanSlavism
of his day, only to learn later that the articles never appeared in
print. A Pole, Count Adam Gurowski, once condemned to death by the
Russians, had caught the ear of the New York editors and strongly objected
to their publication.

…Marx was engaged in a pleasant correspondence with Lassalle, who had promised to contribute
heavily to the publication of the book. They were discovering
larger and larger areas of agreement, and the tone of their letters was
uniformly polite, affable and intelligent. Lassalle spoke highly of Marx’s
works, and Marx in turn congratulated Lassalle on the formative ideas he
expressed in his letters. Among these ideas there was one which held a
special place in Lassalle’s mind, for it oifered a solution to many of the
problems which haunted him. It was nothing less than a holy war to be
fought by the Germans against Russia. At some length he explained the
logical advantages to be gained by a victorious war against an entrenched
tyranny, and Marx found himself in happy agreement. Together with
Engels he had made over many years a profound study of Russian diplomatic
documents, and their study had led them to an inexorable conclusion—
the absolute necessity of war against Russia. He wrote: p. 326

Everywhere in Germany there is this hatred of Russia, and as far back as
the first number of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung we proclaimed that the
war against the Russians was the revolutionary mission of Germany. Rut
hatred and understanding are two very different things.

Marx did not elaborate on the difference between hatred and understanding,
and went on to discuss the publication of his own works in a
mood of cautious appraisal. There was nothing particularly surprising in
his verdict on Russia. For him Russia was the eternal enemy.

Sometimes even Marx found Jenny’s imperious manner too much for
him. At such times he would wander off with his bosom companions on
a monumental pub crawl. A German pub crawl was a very serious affair
undertaken with deliberation and with a proper respect for the convention
that nothing less than a full glass of beer must be drunk at every
public house they passed. Only one pub crawl by Marx has been recorded
at any length. It ended, not surprisingly, with a shattering of glass and a
wild chase by the police. P. 280

It began one evening when Edgar Bauer, whom Marx had attacked
bitterly in The Holy Family many years before, suddenly descended on
Soho from his place of exile in Highgate. In a letter to Engels written
about this time, Marx describes Edgar Bauer as a man who has become
prematurely old, resembling a pedantic professor, with his high forehead
and air of remoteness from the world, but on this occasion Bauer was in
high spirits. He proposed a pub crawl from Oxford Street to Hampstead
Road, a distance of about a mile. It was an area of London with a vast
concentration of public houses, and only the boldest spirits could be expected
to endure such a prolonged exertion. Bauer, Marx and Liebknecht
took part in this endurance test. They succeeded in reaching the end of
Tottenham Court Road without incident, and then came upon a public
house where members of the Order of Oddfellows were having a reunion. There was nothing odd about the Oddfellows. They were working-class
men organized in a society for mutual aid, and they had elaborate rituals.
They were intensely patriotic, kindly, hospitable, and convivial, and when
they saw Bauer, Marx and Liebknecht—three men who were only too obviously
refugees from Germany—they invited them to join their reunion.
Speeches were made in honor of the refugees, who were commended for
having abandoned the despotism of Germany for the freedom of England.
The German princes and the Prussian nobility were consigned to the devil
by these happy Oddfellows, who were not entirely clear where Prussia
was situated, because they kept referring to the Russian nobility. Toasts
were drunk, and the Germans were called upon to drink to the health of
the Oddfellows. Swollen with drink, and halfway through a hilarious evening,
they scarcely knew what they were saying.

There is a stage in drunkenness when the mind turns sour and speech
turns to bile. Suddenly the three Germans began to abuse their hosts.
Stung by a chance remark, Bauer accused the English of snobbishness,
while Marx, not to be outdone, launched into a bitter denunciation of
British science and music—especially music. What had the British done
to promote civilization? What musicians could compare with Beethoven,
Mozart, Handel and Haydn? The British, lacking music, were incomparably
below the Germans in culture, and in all other matters the Germans
would be superior if it were not for the appalling political and economic
conditions in Germany which have prevented them from accomplishing
their destiny. Nevertheless, Marx shouted, the time would come when
Germany would rise above all other nations and demonstrate her vast and
triumphant power.
He was in a ranting mood, all his old antagonism to the British flowing
out in this, his first address to the London working class. His German nationalism
was never very far below the surface, while his contempt for
British culture was real, profound, and enduring, being based entirely on
his own unconquerable ignorance, for he knew scarcely any Englishmen,
had never studied English history, and had chosen to ignore the culture
of the country which had given him sanctuary.

So he went on, carried away by the fury of denunciation and mischief,
never at a loss for a biting word or a sarcastic phrase. The outburst was
provoked by fear, his own poverty and insularity, the knowledge that he
was living in a country which paid no attention to the just claims of
refugees; and as he solemnly denounced the Oddfellows for their cultural
immaturity compared with the Germans, it never occurred to him that he had chosen the wrong audience at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
The Oddfellows were normally good-humored and they made allowances
for the strange habits of foreigners, but when their country was attacked
they were likely to be dangerous.
Liebknecht, too, was caught up in the fever of denunciation, and when
Marx had completed his sermon, he launched into a scholarly dissertation
intended to prove that political conditions in England were no better than
in Germany, the only difference being that the Germans knew their governments
were miserable, while the English simply did not know how
miserable their government was: whence it followed that the Germans surpassed
the English in political intelligence.

By this time the Oddfellows were growing restless, or as Liebknecht
describes it, “their countenances were growing darker.” Unhappily the
Germans were too drunk to stop, and Edgar Bauer took this opportunity
to bring up his heavy guns and to enlarge on the subject of English cant.
Some of the long-suffering Oddfellows began to murmur, there were cries
of “Damned foreigners!” and these grew louder and more menacing. Fists
were being clenched. The Germans finally realized that they were in danger
and chose the better part of valor by beating a hasty retreat. It was a
difficult maneuver, but they accomplished it without too much difficulty
—the Oddfellows were probably glad to see them go.
The first part of the unhappy evening was over, and normally they might
have been expected to continue their pub crawl in a more chastened
mood, but they were still determined to create trouble. Here Liebknecht
recounts the last stages of that famous night:

We had now had enough of our “pub crawl” for the time being, and in
order to cool our heated blood, we began a forced march, until Edgar
Bauer stumbled over a heap of stones used in paving the roads. “Hurrah, I
have an idea!” he shouted, and remembering his wild student antics, he
snatched up a stone, and with a terrific clatter the glass panel of a gas lamp
was smashed to smithereens. This madness was contagious. Marx and I were
not to be left behind, and we smashed four or five street lamps—by this time
it was two o’clock in the morning, and consequently the streets were empty.
The noise however attracted the attention of a policeman who promptly
signaled his colleagues in the area. Soon answering signals could be heard.
The position became critical. Happily we took in the situation at a glance,
and happily we knew the district well. So we stormed ahead, with three
or four policemen pursuing us in the distance. Marx displayed an agility that
I would not have attributed to him. After the wild chase which lasted several
minutes, we succeeded in turning down a side street and so into an alleyway
—a back yard running between two streets—and in this way we came in the
rear of the policemen who were pursuing us and had lost the trail. We were
safe now. They had no description of us, and so we arrived at our homes
without any further adventures.

So ended the monumental pub crawl which was intended to take the
three travelers from Oxford Street to Hampstead Road. This was the only
occasion, so far as is known, when Marx was pursued by the London
police.
Since he was generally law-abiding, and took care to avoid the attentions
of the police, he was never in any real danger of arrest. Once the
police saved his life, or at least prevented him from being beaten within
an inch of his life. Again it is Liebknecht who tells the story, that wholly
unimaginative Liebknecht who was incapable of embroidering upon any
facts that came to his attention, and is therefore always reliable.

«Философы лишь различным образом объясняли мир. Но дело заключается в том, чтобы изменить его»

«Благими намерениями вымощена дорога в ад».

Выражение (это) возникло в среде богословов и связано с библейским образом широкой дороги, ведущей в ад (ср. Библия Мф. 7:13: «Широки ворота погибели и просторна дорога, туда ведущая»; Библия Сир. 21:11: «Путь грешников вымощен камнями, но на конце его — пропасть ада»). Наиболее раннее упоминание относится к 1150 году и принадлежит Бернарду Клервоскому, написавшему: «L’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désirs» (в переводе с французского «Ад полон добрых намерений и пожеланий»).

Marx himself was generally called Moor, Devil, or Old Nick by his children in tribute to his dark beard, dark complexion, and faintly sinister appearance.

Он (капитализм – Г.С.)
перерос себя,
за него
работает раб.
Лишь наживая,
жря
и спя,
капитализм разбух
и обдряб.

Обдряб
и лег
у истории на пути
в мир,
как в свою кровать.
Его не объехать,
не обойти,
единственный выход —
взорвать!

In the summer or autumn of 1865 Jenny Marx sat down to write a
brief and informal account of her life, perhaps to sustain herself in
her hours of loneliness or simply because she felt there was a need to
record her strange and unhappy life for posterity. It was not a long work,
for it covered only thirty-seven closely written pages, of which some
twenty-nine have survived. The manuscript was not published in her lifetime,
nor in the lifetime of her children. For a century it existed in a kind
of limbo, gathering dust. It was a relic, too holy to be touched, too intimate
a document to be shown to any except the most privileged. Liebknecht
and Eleanor both quoted a few sentences, and Franz Mehring,
Marx’s first biographer, permitted himself a whole paragraph, but until
the publication of a bowdlerized version in the Soviet Union in 1958 it
was not known whether the manuscript had survived. Finally the complete
text was published for the first time in Leipzig in 1965, a hundred
years after it was written. Then at last Jenny was permitted to show herself
as she was.

There were, of course, excellent reasons for concealing the document,
and no doubt the eight missing pages were torn out for good cause.
Jenny liked to speak bluntly, and though she loved her husband to distraction
there was never any period of her life when he appeared to her
as the living embodiment of a legend; for her he was human, all too human. Like Liebknecht, who described Marx with warm humanity,
happily recounting his pub crawls and his delight in throwing stones at
gas lamps, his ill temper when he lost a game of chess and his incessant
talk of impending crises which never happened, Jenny depicts a Marx
with ordinary human failings. When she speaks of herself there is no trace
of the legendary “comrade in arms of the great fighter for the world proletarian
revolution.” Instead she describes herself as a woman who never
completely disassociated herself from her aristocratic background, loved
dressing in expensive clothes, delighted in the society of cultivated middle-
class people, adored the comforts of life, and was oppressed by her
husband’s incapacity to earn a living. She was especially anxious that her
children should be brought up in an atmosphere of refinement, with the
best available tutors in singing, music and languages. She liked giving
balls and entertaining guests, and she was proud when her friends could
stay in her house. Her greatest happiness came when they were able to
find “a pretty and healthy house, which we furnished very comfortably
and rather elegantly.” All this appeared in her manuscript, which was kept
secret for so long.

Господь Бог, с горы Синая грозно возвестивший заповедь Не убивай (Исх.20:13), может ли снисходительно или одобрительно относиться к самоубийству? Да не будет! В этой заповеди запрещается столько же убийство другого человека, как и самого себя, в ней именно запрещается убийство человека вообще, будь это посторонний для меня человек, или я сам.

When the bowdlerized version was published in the Soviet Union, all
the aristocratic and bourgeois traits in Jenny’s character were scrupulously
omitted by the simple process of censoring out all the passages in which
she speaks of her love for fine clothes, balls, comforts, the refinements of
life. The Soviet government was in a strong position, for it had acquired
the unpublished document from the Longuet family, which had inherited
it from Eleanor. The original manuscript now reposes in the archives of
the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, where no one except the
most dedicated Marxist scholars are permitted to see it. It is therefore
impossible to check whether the version published in Leipzig is complete
in all essentials, although there is some internal evidence to suggest that
it is virtually complete except for the eight missing pages. These pages
were probably destroyed by Eleanor, who was determined that nothing
should be known about the quarrels and dissensions of her parents.
Jenny’s manuscript deserved a better fate, for she wrote with her heart’s
blood. She begins simply on her wedding day, the day which she always
regarded as the beginning of her mature life:

For Marx, Jenny was the symbol of all that he prized most in the world.
She represented the aristocratic tradition, the lost splendors of the past,
the traditional graces. Her letters were signed “Jenny Marx, nee Baronne
von Westphalen,” and there is no doubt that her aristocratic descent gave
Marx an exquisite pleasure. On her envelopes and note paper there appeared
according to the fashion of the time the letters J and M intertwined.
In this elegant way she announced that she belonged wholly to
the husband she worshiped and half feared.

Such were his hopes when the first printed sheets lay before him in
Hanover, where he was a guest in the house of Dr. Ludwig Kugelmann. Now that his book was actually going through the press, he felt uplifted by a new and hitherto unsuspected strength. He was sure he would complete the two remaining volumes in the stipulated time. In fact, these volumes were never completed, and for the remaining years of his life he would be forced to invent one excuse after another to explain the interminable delay.
Meanwhile Marx was enjoying the bourgeois comforts of Dr. Kugelmann’s house. The doctor was a gynecologist, with a pretty young wife and an eight-year-old daughter. He was thirty-eight years old, but he was already established as one of the leading gynecologists in the country, consulted by specialists, his fame reaching into the medical academies in Berlin. Marx was enchanted with the doctor, and the doctor in turn was enchanted with Marx. “He is a fanatical supporter (and to my mind too Westphalian an admirer) of our doctrine and both our persons,” Marx reported to Engels.

Marx, of course, had no illusions about what awaited him at home, for
Jenny had never shown herself indifferent to his long absences and there
could be no relief from the creditors. “Family troubles, domestic collisions,
the hunters after their prey” were familiar ghosts which had never
been laid to rest. All these were absent in that large and well-run house
in Hanover, where his slightest wishes were instantly obeyed and his
comforts were continually being attended to. “The Kugelmanns rarely
leave me alone ‘to wander through the desolate regions of my own ego.’ ”
So he wrote to Engels, praising their charm and their generosity, their
providential kindness and their solicitude for his welfare.
It was not only that he was living a life of ease and luxury, without
responsibilities, but he was enjoying the respect of the bourgeoisie. People
would come up to him and compliment him on his works. An official from the Bureau of Statistics in Hanover came to see him and spoke at some
length on the subject of money; it was a subject that had inordinately
puzzled him, but the reading of one of Marx’s books had thrown such a
dazzling light on it that he felt he now understood the subject in all its
ramifications. The chief of the local railway came to compliment him, and
Marx noted with some misgiving that “our influence has spread among
the functionaries far more than among the working classes.” It was an
oddly prophetic remark, for communism throughout its earthly career
was to remain largely in the possession of “functionaries.”

Not only did the officials and functionaries of Hanover come to greet
him, but the very highest people in the land were waiting upon him. “Von
Bennigsen is coming tomorrow to pay his homage to me,” Marx announced
casually in a letter to Engels, and it cannot have escaped Engels’
knowledge that Rudolf von Bennigsen was one of the most powerful figures
in Germany. According to Marx an even more powerful figure was
making secret advances to him. Bismarck himself had sent an emissary,
the lawyer Ernst Warnebold, to learn whether Marx would place “his person
and his great talents at the service of the German people.” Marx urged
Engels to keep this visit secret, and there is some doubt whether there was
any meeting between Marx and Bismarck’s emissary.
But there was no doubt that Marx was riding high in his own estimation.
He knew he had written a masterpiece, a book of explosive power
and extraordinary violence, and he seems to have guessed that it would
be studied and used by men hoping to bring about great revolutions in
the future. To his friend Johann Philipp Becker he wrote from Hanover:
“It is certainly the most terrible missile which has ever been hurled at the
bourgeois (including the landowners).” He wrote in German, but used
the English word “missile” which more precisely conveyed the sibilant
ferocity of his thought.

To another friend, Sigfrid Meyer, who had recently arrived in New
York, Marx wrote more explicitly about his emotions when he was writing
the book:

You ask why I have not replied to your letters. It is because I was constantly
hovering over the edge of the grave. So I had to make use of EVERY
moment when I could work in order to complete my book, to which I have
sacrificed health, happiness, and family. I trust this explanation will need no
further postscript. I laugh at the so-called “practical” men and their wisdom.
If one chose to be an ox, then one could of course turn one’s back on the
sufferings of mankind and care only for one’s own skin. But I would have
really regarded myself as impractical if I had conked out without completely
finishing my book, at least in manuscript.

In this way he would return again and again to the reasons which compelled
him to write the book. There were private and public reasons;
there were reasons which had little enough to do with his real intentions,
and there were reasons which he deliberately concealed. Once he wrote
to Kugelmann that he had submitted the work to the public “in order to
raise the party as high as possible and to disarm even the vulgar by the
manner of presentation,” and there was perhaps more truth in this explanation
than in most of the others. Das Kapital was intended to give
dignity and substance to the communist party, and at the same time it
was to be a work of art, existing in its own right. In Marx’s mind this second
reason was at least as important as the first.

But while he was editing and proofreading the manuscript Marx
seemed to be living far above the conflict. In those calm days in Hanover,
while a light mist clung to the earth and spring gave way to a glorious
summer, he was living like a man of leisure in bourgeois comfort.

He never gets to grips with the terrible last days of the Commune. There
is nothing to suggest that he felt it on his nerves or on his mind. We see
some well-dressed gentleman gazing at the battle through a telescope,
and there is more than a suspicion that the gentleman is Marx himself,
seeing it all at a great distance from the safety of the middle-class residence
in London. Bakunin had flung himself into the battle; Marx merely
read about it in the London Times.
The most charitable explanation for “The Civil War in France” is that
Marx was completely out of touch with the social forces of his time. He
had formed certain theories over many years at great expense of intellectual
toil, and he was not prepared to sacrifice them because the Commune
invalidated them. So he spoke continually of the “proletarian revolution,”
even though he was aware that it was not a proletarian revolution
at all, and he continued to depict the enemy as gnomes, monsters and
dandies, when they were in fact ruthless and determined reactionaries
who behaved with the simple logic of their class. “I shall be pitiless,” said
Thiers, and he carried out his promise to the letter. The Communards
killed 150 hostages. The government executed about 30,000 men, women
and children in reprisal, and exiled 7,000 to New Caledonia.

Бакунин и его сторонники считали, что на смену государственной централизации должны прийти федерализм и самоуправление, а вместо капиталистического угнетения — социализм и коллективная собственность. Особенно критиковалось государство. Бакунин считал, что «там, где начинается государство, кончается индивидуальная свобода и наоборот».

Of all the Russian revolutionaries of the nineteenth century there
was none who inspired more dread than Sergey Nechayev. Small,
ugly, dark-featured, nervous, always dressed shabbily, he was immune
to fear and capable of the most reckless and brutal acts, but it is not for
his recklessness and brutality that he is remembered so much as for his
astonishing power to convince others that he was the leader of a revolutionary
movement which had no existence except in his fertile imagination.
He was himself a revolutionary movement determined to bring about
the downfall of Tsarist Russia. He had discovered a simple truth: one
man, provided that he is absolutely ruthless, can destroy a state. It was
a lesson which was learned by Lenin, who studied his works and passionately
admired the cruel simplicities of Nechayev’s mind.

Nechayev stands at the threshold of the modern world—the dedicated
terrorist determined to destroy existing society, with no thought of the
consequences. While Marx concerned himself with vast and complicated
theories on the nature of capitalist society and the inevitable emergence
of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Nechayev contented himself with
the simple thesis: society must be destroyed.
At the age of twenty-one Nechayev was already a legend among the
students in St. Petersburg. With only a small following of students, he
formed a network of determined revolutionaries in the Russian universities.
He had a secret printing press, a widespread intelligence system,
considerable funds from sources which have never been traced, and clearcut
ideas about how the general uprising could be brought about. It was 1868, the year after the publication of Das Kapital. In May 1869 he expected the uprising to take place.

In fact there was no uprising, because the police were able to arrest
some of the students acting as runners between St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Nechayev disappeared, having first arranged that a penciled note
should fall into the hands of a young revolutionary friend, Vera Zasulich.
“They are taking me to the fortress,” it read. “Do not lose heart, beloved
comrades.” By “the fortress” he meant the Peter and Paul Fortress in St.
Petersburg, the most terrible prison in Russia. The ruse succeeded; his
legend grew. He went underground, vanishing without a trace. In March
1869 he slipped out of Russia on a false passport and made his way to
Geneva to teach the art of revolution to Bakunin. He was twenty-two,
Bakunin was fifty-five. He was unknown outside of Russia, and Bakunin
was the most famous revolutionary of his age.

To the tolerant and credulous Bakunin the arrival of Nechayev was a
matter for rejoicing. Nechayev was a great spinner of tales. He told how
he had been captured by the Tsarist police, thrown into a dungeon in the
Peter and Paul Fortress from which he escaped by throwing a general’s
cloak over his shoulders, and then in slow stages, always closely followed,
making his way to Rumania and freedom. There had been terrifying encounters,
sudden confrontations with the police, ambuscades. For many
weeks he had lived in deadly peril, nursing his secret plans for a revolution
which would shake Russia from end to end. The Secret Revolutionary
Committee had sent him to Geneva to demand the blessing of Bakunin
for the projected revolution. In a few weeks he would return and lead the
revolution to victory.
Nechayev’s brilliant improvisations pleased Bakunin, who was capable
of equally outrageous improvisations. What attracted him to Nechayev,
however, was his youth, his vigor, his absolute determination and dedication.
“He is one of those fanatics who doubt nothing and fear nothing,” he
wrote to his friend James Guillaume.

Together they wrote a number of revolutionary manifestos. In the
shadow of Bakunin Nechayev wrote his chilling Revolutionary Catechism
with its promise of “terrible, total, merciless and universal destruction.”
In twenty-six formal articles the Revolutionary Catechism described how
a successful revolution could be carried out by employing all the arts of
subversion, intimidation and murder.

In August, armed with his pamphlets
and a considerable sum of money, Nechayev returned to Russia on
a Serbian passport.
He organized more student cells and made plans to capture the Imperial Armory at Tula. He soon had his own agents inside the armory,
where cannon and rifles were manufactured. He drew up a list of high
officials to be assassinated, and announced to his fellow conspirators that
a general uprising would take place on the ninth anniversary of the liberation
of the serfs.

In November he made one of those grave and stupid mistakes which
revolutionaries sometimes make when they are exhausted or dazzled by
their own arbitrary power. He murdered a student called Ivan Ivanov,
who refused to obey his orders. The murder took place just outside a
grotto in the Petrovsky Park in Moscow, and the body was thrown into
an ice-covered pond. A few days later the body rose to the surface, and
the police were hot on the heels of the murderer.
During the following days they began to uncover the details of a conspiracy
which extended as far as Tula and the remote universities of
Russia. They found and deciphered the Revolutionary Catechism, which
was later printed in full in the Government Courier. They arrested 152
persons, most of them students, and kept them in jail for a year and a half
before bringing them to trial. Orders were issued for the arrest of Nechayev.
About the middle of December he fled across the border, and in January
he was in Switzerland. Once more he was explaining to Bakunin
that Russia was on the eve of a bloody revolution.

Nechayev was arrested by the
Swiss police and handed over to Tsarist gendarmes at the frontier. For
the remaining ten years of his life Nechayev was the personal prisoner of
the Tsar, consigned to a damp cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St.
Petersburg, where he was kept in solitary confinement and shackled to
the wall.

Мне ни к чему одические рати
И прелесть элегических затей.
По мне, в стихах все быть должно некстати,
Не так, как у людей.

Когда б вы знали, из какого сора
Растут стихи, не ведая стыда,
Как желтый одуванчик у забора,
Как лопухи и лебеда.

Сердитый окрик, дегтя запах свежий,
Таинственная плесень на стене...
И стих уже звучит, задорен, нежен,
На радость вам и мне.

These thoughts of solidarity and revolution were always on his mind,
and he repeated them now perfunctorily, almost mechanically, for he
was about to enter into retirement.
He could afford to be generous, and so he reminded his listeners that violent revolution was not always the
key to social progress. “We do not deny that there are countries like
England and America, and—if I am familiar with your institutions-
Holland, where labor may attain its goal by peaceful means.” There
would be no barricades in North America, he declared, but there were
still many countries where revolution offered the sole hope for change,
and these included “most countries on the continent.” If the workers did
not seize power, they would fare like the early Christians who never saw
their kingdom realized in this world. It was a strange comparison, for the
early Christians had never hoped to establish an earthly kingdom.