Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

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KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

Engels, 'I was obliged to accept into the preamble of the Statutes two

phrases on "duty" and "right", and also on "truth, morality and justice";

but they are so placed that they cannot do harm.'^15 The General Commit-

tee then approved the Preamble, Address and Rules, though not without

amendment: that Marx was not able to get his way completely is shown

by the passage of a motion that his term 'profit-mongers' be deleted.

The Address, a piece of writing skilfully adapted to his audience, was

produced within a week and included material that later appeared in

Capital. Marx wrote to Engels: 'It was very difficult to arrange the thing

in such a way that our view appeared in a form that made it acceptable

to the present standpoint of the workers' movement. It will take time

before the reawakening of the movement allows the plain speaking of the

past. We must act fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (strong in content, soft

in form)."^6 Thus, in contrast to the Communist Manifesto, there were no

sweeping generalisations or appeals to revolutionary action. The Address

began with the statement that 'It is a great fact that the misery of the

working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864',^17 and proceeded

to document this statement with quotations from official British publi-

cations describing the poverty that contrasted so glaringly with the opti-

mistic pronouncements of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the

country's increasing wealth. Marx's reason for dwelling on England at

length was the apparently rather naive view that 'with appropriate changes

in local colour and scale, the English facts reproduce themselves in all

the industrial and progressive countries of the Continent'.^18 Although, he

admitted, 'a minority of the working class have obtained increases in their

real wages', yet 'since 1848 the great mass of the working classes have

been sinking down to a lower depth at the same rate at least as those

above them have been rising in the social scale'.^19 His conclusion was:

In all countries of Europe it has become a truth demonstrable to every

unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those whose interest it is to

hedge other people in a fool's paradise, that no improvement of machin-

ery, no application of science to production, no contrivance of com-

munication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets,

no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the

miseries of the industrial masses; but that, on the present false basis,

every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend

to sharpen social contrasts and accentuate social antagonisms.^20

This is one of the clearest formulations of Marx's doctrine of relative
pauperisation. It is paradoxical that in England the International chiefly
helped to benefit the better-off workers and thus served to increase the
very disparity Marx mentioned.^21