[The [illegible] first appeared in the May 1979 issue of Militant.]
Eleanor Marx, by Yvonne Kapp, Virago, London, Volume I Family Life, 352 pp., £3.85; Volume II The Crowded Years, 800 pp., £4.95.
Eleanor Marx devoted all her skills to the revolutionary workers' movement. Her organizing abilities, painstaking research, translations, agitational speeches, theatrical talent, and her small body of literary work were devoted to advancing the socialist cause. Above all, she brought to the movement her revolutionary internationalist perspective.
The youngest daughter of Jenny and Karl Marx, she was accurately described at the age of seventeen by her mother as 'a politician from top to bottom'.
Yvonne Kapp's two-volume biography is a vivid portrait of this socialist leader of the late nineteenth century. Eleanor Marx is also a cameo of the Marx household and a sprawling canvas that traces the growth of the Marxist movement against the historical events of the nineteenth century — from the American Civil War and the Paris Commune to the attempts to organize trade unions in the early 1890s in England.
No one can really understand Eleanor Marx's warm, generous, and complex personality, nor the depth of her commitment to the working class and revolutionary socialism, without grasping the passionate commitment to ending injustice that the founders of scientific socialism — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — infused into their daily lives. Kapp brings to life for readers the combination of deep parental love, chronic economic hardship, and intense political and intellectual activity that characterized the Marx household and shaped Eleanor's early years.
A Stimulating Environment
Born in 1855, Eleanor was one of seven children but the only one of three daughters who survived childhood.
Throughout her childhood, her father was not only following and participating in the major political developments of the day, but was involved in helping to establish the English International Workingmen's Association — the First International. While participating in the debates of this key organization, Karl Marx was also hard at work on the first volume of Capital.
In this atmosphere of intense theoretical and political study and discussion — in which Eleanor soon became a full participant — she became a partisan of the North in the American Civil War. She wrote — or perhaps dictated — long letters to Abraham Lincoln, advising him to conduct a war against slavery. She also championed the struggles of the Poles to liberate their country from Russia.
But the political event that most shaped her outlook was the Paris Commune of 1871. The workers and artisans of Paris revolted against the government of Louis Bonaparte in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. They took over the defence of the city. Dismantling the old state apparatus, they established a workers' government — the first in history. But surrounded by the French and German armies, the Paris Commune was isolated from the rest of France. Within two months it was drowned in blood by bourgeois forces. Many communards — including old friends of the Marx family — were brutally killed in the reactionary massacres that [illegible] the fall of [illegible].
Eleanor plunged into the task of aiding the Commune [illegible] campaigned for the right of the communards to return to France. She exposed the phony stories of the communards' 'terror' that had been broadcast, first to prepare and then to cover up, the terror of the reaction. She was inspired by the heroism of the communards — who stormed the heavens, as Karl Marx put it — as well as by the vision of socialism to which their democratic and equalitarian government pointed. And she learned about how brutally the ruling class dealt with their victims. Eleanor commented to a [illegible] on the anniversary of the Commune; it was proposed — quite seriously — that the communards who had taken refuge in England should be handed over to the doctors and the hospitals for purposes of vivisection. Perhaps exceptionally brutal in form, this proposition nevertheless expressed the feelings of the whole of respectable society.
Eleanor Marx defended the entire spectrum of the working-class movement against any attack. In 1886, while on a lecture tour of the United States, she repeatedly denounced the conviction of the eight anarchists who had led the eight-hour-day movement in Chicago. After her return to England, she and her companion Edward Aveling worked to publicize the cause there, writing articles and organizing a massive petition campaign. At the same time, she polemicized against anarchism as a grossly incorrect theory.
International Solidarity
Eleanor Marx was, above all else, an internationalist. She sided with the oppressed and exploited everywhere. She knew that English workers, living in the imperialist stronghold of that time, had a life-and-death stake in supporting the political and economic struggles of workers and peasants in other countries.
They would come to this realization, she was convinced, just as they had been won to the cause of amnesty for Irish political prisoners in the late 1860s — one of the first struggles Eleanor joined.
She saw how the ruling class in Britain tried to conservatize a highly skilled section of the working class by making concessions on wages. Again and again she pointed out that a divided working class, whose leaders practised class collaboration, would never win its own liberation. In fact it stood to lose everything that it had gained unless that policy was reversed. From that standpoint she favoured the formation of a labour party as a step toward class independence for the British workers.
The uncompromising internationalist perspective that guided Eleanor Marx's political life was reflected in her writings and translations. As a journalist she contributed columns on the international movement to various left-wing newspapers.
Through translations she made available to English workers revolutionary writings. In an age of stilted translations, she attempted more than just a literal rendition. She took as her goal the task of making translation 'sound' so authentic that the reader would not be constantly aware that it was a translation at all.
Among her political translations are Lissagaray's classic History of the Paris Commune (1886), articles by the Russian revolutionary Stepnik (1884, 1885), and Plekhanov's Anarchism and Socialism (1895).
The Second International
Eleanor Marx knew that a revolutionary must be part of an organized social group. Unable to overcome the small and fragmented character of the socialist movement in England, she worked with all groups and urged them to join together in action wherever possible.
Additionally, she saw the need to organize socialists of various national groups into one international party, where they could hammer out a programme with the benefit of international collaboration and coordinate campaigns such as the fight for the eight-hour workday.
Thus Eleanor Marx played an important organizing role in the congresses of the Second International. Her biographer summarizes her fight against the delaying tactics, disorganization, and political disorientation of the organizing committee for the founding congress of the Second International, held in 1889. Convinced that the International must have a revolutionary socialist programme, she opposed these socialists who believed that it could include such divergent trends as the anarchists.
At the founding congress in Paris as well as at its subsequent ones in Brussels (1891) and London (1896), Eleanor Marx played an essential role as a translator. As the German socialist Eduard Bernstein recounted:
'She was ceaselessly busy, from morning till evening, generally interpreting in three languages. She gave herself no respite, missed no session. Despite the oppressive heat in the hall she stayed the course of the whole Congress doing this thankless, grueling work...'
Eleanor Marx also translated many of the reports of the Second International. She participated in the organization of the congresses, in the political discussions, and in the technical preparations. She delivered one of the main national reports, 'Report from Great Britain and Ireland', at the 1891 Brussels Congress.
Fighter for Union Rights
As revolutionary internationalist, Eleanor Marx threw herself into building and strengthening the British contingent of the international workers' movement. And the second volume of Kapp's biography details the explosive growth of the English trade-union movement, beginning with the organizing drive launched by the gas workers in 1889.
The victory of the gas workers' strike inspired a dock workers' strike, which at its peak involved 100,000 workers from eleven London docks. The fact that these poorly paid workers — who had to compete with each other every morning at shape up — could carry out such a united and effective fight was inspiring to all workers.
Eleanor Marx participated at every level in these strike battles — from handling administrative details at the union headquarters, to international fund-raising and explaining the issues to foreign workers so that they would refuse to be used as strikebreakers. She helped organize the first women's branch of the gas workers union and became its secretary.
Two of the largest trade unions in Britain today, numbering almost 3 million workers between them — the Transport and General Workers Union and Municipal Workers — originated in the struggle of the gas workers and dock workers.
An extraordinarily politically aware and well-read woman, Eleanor Marx always felt the pinch of poverty. In an age when educated women acquired only a superficial 'culture' in order to be better equipped for marriage, Eleanor Marx longed for economic independence. She became a researcher, a teacher, a translator, an actress, and a typist out of that tremendous need to open wider the limited range of opportunities available.
As a working woman, she saw the central problem of women's secondary position as an economic one. In reviewing August Bebel's Women and Socialism in 1885, she wrote, 'We must seek the real cause of woman's enslaved position in her economic dependence upon man,' and that her 'emancipation' means nothing but 'economic freedom'.
That year the English editor William Thomas Stead exposed the practice of child prostitution. In the course of the ensuing discussion, Eleanor Marx commented: 'Nearly all women obliged to earn a living have to choose between starvation and prostitution, and this must go on so long as one class can buy the bodies of another, whether in the form of labour power or sexual embraces.'
It is clear that Eleanor Marx stood with the most advanced socialists of her age in understanding how the vast majority of women suffered. Some 'socialists' of that time called for banning women from the work force. They claimed this was necessary because women were hired at a cheaper rate of pay and forced to work harder than males, thus lowering standards for all workers. But their underlying concern was to uphold class society's definition of a woman's place.
In contrast, Eleanor Marx asserted the right of women to work, and called upon them to organize into unions. Additionally, she pierced the sexist romanticization of housework as 'woman's natural role' and labeled it endless 'drudgery'.
Inspired by the pioneering work of Bebel and by Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Eleanor Marx expanded her initial review of Bebel's Women and Socialism into a commercially produced pamphlet, The Women Question, co-authored by Edward Aveling.
Her interest in the most socially progressive writers of her day underscored her awareness of the constricting roles society imposed on women. Thus Marx was drawn to writers such as Ibsen and Flaubert, who portrayed the varied forms of women's oppression and the conscious and unconscious expressions of women's resistance. She translated some of their works into English.
While it would be a mistake to regard Eleanor Marx as a modern-day feminist she fought for every democratic right denied women — including the right to vote. Above all, she spotlighted the class roots of women's oppression and the socialist solution to it.
A Professional Revolutionist
On everything she did, Eleanor Marx left a stamp of revolutionary professionalism. She was considered one of the most memorable socialist agitators of her generation. A popular lecturer, she was equally at ease discussing the social significance of the poet Shelley, the conditions of English factories and the loopholes in existing health and safety legislation, or popularizing the ideas of socialism.
She was attentive to what others might consider minor details. Her careful research and her willingness to acquire new skills — ranging from typing and shorthand to Yiddish — were always at the disposal of the workers movement. And she willingly shared her knowledge and skills with others.
She taught Will Thorne, a leader of the gas workers union, how to read and write. She encouraged youthful socialists to develop their writing styles, taking time to go over their first attempts, showing them how to be more concise.
Eleanor Marx's circle of friends included not only political collaborators such as Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht, but trade unionists, writers, and actors.
In the midst of all this fruitful work Eleanor Marx committed suicide in 1898. For nearly fifteen years she had [illegible] disliked him and many blamed him for her suicide at the age of forty-three.
Kapp attempts to present fairly the complex personality of Aveling, sifting through contradictory accounts. Aveling was incapable of an intense emotional relationship and seemed cold next to the vivacious Eleanor Marx, but he was an intellectually stimulating companion. He did not demand subservience but encouraged Eleanor Marx's drive to develop in her own right.
Both were intensely involved in building the socialist movement, and they shared an interest in the theatre as well. Their relationship was a collaborative one. Together they produced numerous articles and four pamphlets: The Factory Hell, Shelley's Socialism, The Woman Question, and The Working Class Movement in America.
Accepting the emotional limitations of her relationship with Aveling, Eleanor Marx managed to live for fifteen years with the inner tensions this generated. These were the most fruitful years of her life.
At the time of her suicide, her relationship with Aveling had come to the breaking point. At the same time it had become clear that he was dying (his death following hers by only two months).
Kapp notes, 'Aveling alone could not have destroyed Eleanor, though his cold heart, incapable of love, undoubtedly froze her eager hold on life...The dire resolve to kill herself must surely have been taken because she believed she was no longer needed by anyone or anything.' It is possible that a downturn in the international class struggle reinforced that ill-founded belief.
The working class movement did need Eleanor Marx. Had she lived, she would have been able to play an important role in combating the degeneration of the Second International, the bulk of whose leaders succumbed to the very chauvinism and class collaboration against which she had always fought. The revolutionary socialists in the Second International would have been significantly strengthened with Eleanor Marx on their side.
In summarizing Eleanor Marx's distinctive contribution, Kapp writes: 'She was zealous to work for any and every practical reform without for a moment losing sight of the revolutionary aim, to agitate for the total overthrow of the system without brushing aside a single immediate demand for which the working class is prepared to fight...She saw organized working men and women as possessed of the strength of a sleeping giant...'
She devoted her life to raising the consciousness and organization of the working class, the social force destined to end oppression and exploitation and open a new era of progress and equality for all humanity. That she was able to accomplish so much in this cause in her short life is both remarkable and inspiring. And Yvonne Kapp has performed a great service by providing this richly detailed and sympathetic portrait of this fighting woman and her historic life's work.