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Marx's Centenary tripleC 16(2): 717-728, 2018 http://www.triple-c.at Marx’s Centenary (1918) in the Light of the Media and Socialist Thought Christian Fuchs University of Westminster, London, UK, [email protected], @fuchschris- tian, http://fuchs.uti.at, [email protected] Abstract: This article takes a historical view on Marx’s anniversary: It analyses how Marx’s centenary (5 May 1918) was reflected in the media and socialist thought. 1918 not just marked Marx’s 100th anniversary but was also the year in which the First World War ended. It was the year that saw the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the start of the Russian Civil War, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the formation of the Weimar Republic, Austria’s First Republic, the Czech Republic, the Hungarian Republic, the Second Polish Re- public; the founding of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and the independence of Ice- land from Denmark. The cultural forms, in which Marx’s centenary was reflected in 1918, in- cluded press articles, essays, speeches, rallies, demonstrations, music, and banners. The communists as well as left-wing socialists of the day saw themselves in the tradition of Marx, whereas revisionist social democrats based their politics on a criticism or revised reading of Marx. This difference resulted in different readings of Marx. Keywords: Karl Marx, centenary, 5 May 1918, bicentenary, 200th anniversary, 5 May 2018, 1818 1. Introduction We can take Marx’s bicentenary as an occasion for having a look at some aspects of his centenary in 1918. 1918 marked not just Marx’s 100th anniversary but also the year in which the First World War ended. It was the year that saw the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the start of the Russian Civil War, the end of the Austro- Hungarian Empire; the formation of the Weimar Republic, Austria’s First Republic, the Czech Republic, the Hungarian Republic, the Second Polish Republic; the founding of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and the independence of Iceland from Den- mark. The communists as well as left-wing socialists of the day saw themselves in the tradition of Marx, whereas revisionist social democrats based their politics on a criti- cism or revised reading of Marx. This difference resulted, as we will see, in different readings of Marx. 2. Communists and Left Socialists on Marx’s Centenary After the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had in August 1914 voted for war credits that had enabled the mobilisation of the German army in the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring, Ernst Meyer, Wilhelm Pieck and Karl Liebknecht founded the Gruppe Inter- nationale (Group International) that in 1916 became the Spartacus League. Spartacus in 1917 became part of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), a split-off from the SPD, and turned at the end of 1918 into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Date of Publication: May 5, 2018 CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons License, 2018. 718 Christian Fuchs Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned from 18 February 1915 until 9 November 1916. She was jailed for two speeches in which she had called for conscientious objection. After she had served the sentence, she was not immediately released because she was considered a security threat. At the time when Marx’s centenary was celebrated, Rosa Luxemburg was a political prisoner. Writing was, as one can imagine, difficult in prison, but Luxemburg managed to secretly write the Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the Ger- man Social Democracy (1916) in 1915. The pamphlet was published anonymously in 1916 and distributed illegally in Germany. Luxemburg had written the chapter on Capital Volumes 2 and 3 for Franz Mehring’s Marx biography that was published in May 1918 (Mehring 2003/1936). In a letter to Mehring, Luxemburg (2011, 458) wrote on December 30, 2017: “How fine that your Marx […] will soon appear, which is truly a gleam of light in these sorry times. I hope the book will be a stimulus and an encouragement for a great many people and at the same time a nostalgic reminder of that lovely time when one did not yet have to be ashamed to call oneself a German Social Democrat”. Convinced by the book’s excel- lence, she nonetheless had doubts about its effectiveness, as she wrote in a letter to Clara Zetkin on 29 June 1918: “I find it magnificent and promise myself it will have a powerful impact on the masses. If only they will read it!” (Ibid., 463). In her chapter in Mehring’s book, Luxemburg points out that the achievement of Capital is that “Marx showed for the first time how profit originated and how it flowed into the pockets of the capitalists. He did so on the basis of two decisive economic facts: first, that the mass of the workers consists of proletarians who are compelled to sell their labour-power as a commodity in order to exist, and secondly that this com- modity labour-power possesses such a high degree of productivity in our own day that it is able to produce in a certain time a much greater product than is necessary for its own maintenance in that time” (Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in Mehring 2003/1936, 372). The second volume of Capital investigates how a whole is developed from the innu- merable deviating movements of individual capital” (Ibid., 375). “In the first volume he [Marx] deals with the production of capital and lays bare the secret of profit-making. In the second volume he describes the movement of capital between the factory and the market, between the production and consumption of society. And in the third volume he deals with the distribution of the profit amongst the capitalist class as a whole. […] In the first volume we are in the factory, in the deep social pit of labour where we can trace the source of capitalist wealth. In the second and third volumes we are on the surface, on the official stage of society. Department stores, banks, the stock ex- changes, finance and the troubles of the ‘needy’ agriculturalists take up the foreground” (Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in Mehring 2003/1936, 376, 377). “The investigations which Marx pursues in the second and third volumes of Capital offer a thorough insight into the nature of crises” (Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in Mehring 2003/1936, 378). One hundred years later after this analysis of Luxemburg was pub- lished in the year of Marx’s centenary, capitalism has gone through several more crisis stages, of which the latest began in 2008 and created a great recession. New authori- tarianisms and new nationalisms emerged in the context of this crisis. Marx and Lux- emburg remind us that the capitalist system is inherently crisis-ridden and that crises can within that system at a maximum be suspended temporarily and sooner or later always come back in new forms. So Franz Mehring was author of one of the first biographies of Karl Marx (Mehring 2003/1936) and a comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin. Mehring was one of the people who together with Luxemburg founded the Spartacus CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons License, 2018. tripleC 16(2): 717-728, 2018 719 League that became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Mehring published on the occasion of Marx’s centenary an article in Leipziger Volkszeitung on 4 May 1918. He wrote: “Karl Marx’s centenary directs our view from a gruesome presence to a brighter future just like a bright sunbeam that breaks through dark and apparently im- penetrable cloud layers […] Tireless and restless critique […] was his true weapon. […] To continue working based on the indestructible foundations that he laid is the most worthy homage we can offer to him on his one hundredth birthday”1 (Mehring 1918, 11, 15). Max Adler The Austro-Marxist philosopher and politician Max Adler was a left socialist who was part of the left wing of Austrian social democracy. In May 1918, he published the pam- phlet Die sozialistische Idee der BeFreiung bei Karl Marx (Karl Marx’s Socialist Idea oF Liberation). He wrote: “The poet’s words ‘For I have been a man, and that Means I have been a combatant’2 has for the proletariat through Karl Marx gained the deeper historical meaning that the proletariat only as struggling class reaches humanity. The World War’s inhumanity has given the proletariat a terrible object lesson of this circum- stance. […] It is only in this context that Marx will again become teacher and leader. The true celebration of his centenary consists not in mere commemoration of his works and teachings, but in keeping alive his revolutionary spirit”3 (Adler 1918, 489). Antonio Gramsci Italy at the time of Marx’s centenary fought as part of the Allied Powers in the First World War. Antonio Gramsci was at that time a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), lived in Turin, where he was PSI secretary, and was the editor of the Socialist Party’s weekly Il Grido del Popolo (The People’s Cry). On 4 May 1918, Gramsci (1918) published the essay “Il nostro Marx” (“Our Marx”) on the occasion of Marx’s centenary. In this article, Gramsci writes that Marx’s “only categorical imperative” is, “‘Workers of the world, unite!’ The duty of organizing, the propagation of the duty to organize and associate, should therefore be what distinguishes Marxists from non-Marxists” (Gram- sci 1918, 36). Organisation and political action as such are not necessarily progressive.
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