Rebel's Guide To Eleanor Marx

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781909026773
• eBook ISBN: 9781909026810
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Eleanor Marx was an important figure in the early British socialist movement. On top of being friends with the likes of William Morris and George Bernard Shaw, she edited many of her father Karl's works, wrote on The Woman Question' and led militant workers on strike during the New Unionism of the 1880s. This new Rebel's Guide takes us to the heart of her passionate revolutionary lie, drawing out her key contributions, the events that shaped her and the relevance of her battles to those we face today.'

1: INTRODUCTION

Eleanor Marx was an agitator, an organiser and a writer. She threw herself into struggles against imperialism, racism and sexism. She was surrounded her whole life by activists – and became one of the greatest activists of her time. She was so much more than just the youngest daughter of the great revolutionary Karl Marx.

She was shaped, as we all are, by the times she lived and worked in. From the Paris Commune in 1871 to the fightback of British workers during the New Unionism movement of the 1880s, the victories and the defeats of the time were distilled in Eleanor’s political thought, action and commitment.

She was a lover of theatre and performance, undoubtedly helpful in speaking at hundreds of workers’ meetings. She was an avid reader and entertainer. She helped bring Ibsen and Flaubert to British audiences, as well as terror to the lives of ruthless bosses in London’s East End. She offered up opinions on everything from the American Civil War to Shakespeare.

Revolutionary socialism was always closest to her heart. Karl Marx famously said that while his elder daughter, Jenny, was like him, “Tussy [Eleanor’s nickname] is me”. Her family’s, and in particular her father’s, commitment to socialism had a huge impact on her life and politics. She spent her teenage years at the congresses of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), the first international workers’ organisation, and spent much of her adult life translating and organising the distribution of Karl Marx’s work. But while she continued in his spirit, she also found her own.

At the core of Eleanor Marx’s politics was internationalism. At the age of just 16 she looked to Paris and its Commune for what workers – men and women – could do. She committed herself to sharing its history and its lessons. From an early age she stood up for the most downtrodden in society. As a child, she identified with the struggles of Irish republicans, an understanding that would pay off later when it came to organising politicised Irish workers in east London.

She built early socialist organisation in Britain long before the advent of the Labour Party. She campaigned for free speech and the right of activists to organise on the streets.

She recognised the importance of building movements and taking socialist ideas to their centres. As she so brilliantly put it in a speech to the May Day demonstration in 1890: “We must not be like some Christians who sin for six days and go to church on the seventh, but we must speak for the cause daily, and make the men, and especially the women that we meet, come into the ranks to help us” (www.marxists.org/archive/eleanor-marx/works/mayday.htm).

She worked tirelessly to spread the struggles, strikes and lessons of New Unionism – the organisation of the “unorganisable” to fight for an eight-hour day, better pay and improved conditions.

Much has been made in recent years about the changing nature of work and the implications of this for workers’ organisation. These are important debates touching on questions of whether certain groups of workers can organise or fight back.

In the 1880s the working lives of matchwomen, gas workers and dockers were every bit as precarious as today’s fast food workers or call centre staff, if not more so. They had little or no history of organisation, were excluded from existing unions and were vilified and patronised in equal measure. But they fought and they won. Eleanor organised among these workers across the country and was one of the founders of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers, now the GMB.

She wrote on the workers’ movement in Britain and the US and on the terrible working conditions and poverty that workers endured. She was a tribune of the oppressed, organising with and agitating among women and migrant workers in particular, from the women workers of Silvertown to the Jewish tailors of Stepney.

Eleanor wrote and spoke on the issue of women’s liberation. During her lifetime the women’s movement in Britain was largely dominated by middle class women and their interests. But Eleanor saw women as crucial to the success of the workers’ movement and to the emancipation of the working class as a whole, just as she saw the workers’ movement and its progress as key to the liberation of women. She didn’t reject the gains being made in areas such as women’s education, but she recognised early on that working women had more in common with working men than they did with the leaders of the women’s rights movement. She argued that, while granting the vote to women was important, voting itself was not enough.

She recognised that women and men had to organise alongside one another. In 1892 she wrote, “And now, what do we women have to do? One thing without any doubt. We will organise – organise not as ‘women’ but as proletarians; not as female rivals of our working men but as their comrades in struggle” (www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1976/women/5-emarx.html).

She impressed with her verve and bravery. The gas workers called her “Our Old Stoker”. They and others were constantly impressed with both the delivery and strength of her arguments.

Yet so many accounts of Eleanor’s life focus on her troubled personal life and her suicide. There is so much more to her life and legacy than that. Eleanor Marx should be placed where she belongs – at the centre of a powerful workers’ movement that changed the nature of British trade unionism and the position of the most exploited and oppressed in society.

2: THE EARLY YEARS

Eleanor Marx was born in January 1855 in Dean Street in Soho, the heart of London and the centre of life for political émigrés. During her early life the family was constantly under the pressure of poverty, with bailiffs regularly at their door.

Three years before Eleanor’s birth her family found they could not afford a coffin for their daughter Franziska without taking out a hefty loan. The pressures inevitably took their toll. In 1862 Karl Marx wrote, “Every day my wife tells me she wishes she and the children were dead and buried. And really I cannot argue with her. For the humiliations, torments and terrors that have to be gone through in this situation are really indescribable” (quoted in Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, Bookmarks, 2010, p35).

Despite the pressures of poverty on the Marx family and all of them suffering from some illness or other throughout her childhood, the youngest Marx’s early life appears to have been stimulating socially, culturally and, of course, politically.

She had a close relationship with her father. Eleanor spent many of her early years playing next to Karl in his study while he wrote the first volume of Capital and her mother, Jenny, tirelessly transcribed it.

Her father was also a talented storyteller and entertained Eleanor both with his own creations and those of famous authors. Eleanor enjoyed the story of Hans Rockle, a fictional poor magician, and learnt German from the stories of the Brothers Grimm. She listened to the works of Homer and to The Arabian Nights, and could perform whole passages from Shakespeare (which seems to have been like some sort of family bible) by a young age. Her mother would take the children to see plays in London’s West End. This all inspired a passion for literature and theatre that stayed with Eleanor throughout her life.

Eleanor was a bright young woman, despite a lack of formal schooling. Although her older sisters had attended school until they were 14, Eleanor didn’t go to school until she was 11, and even then quite sporadically. She found, like many children do, that school got in the way of real life.

The Marx family had to rely hugely on Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s closest friend and collaborator and a notable theorist in his own right. He provided the financial support that allowed the Marxes to survive. Engels and Eleanor forged a strong relationship throughout her childhood; Eleanor’s stamp collecting was one of their first points of correspondence, with Engels generously contributing to her growing collection.

Politics was an early passion. Eleanor followed the American Civil War with particular interest. When she was nine years old, she wrote to Abraham Lincoln because, as she later explained, “I felt absolutely convinced that Abraham Lincoln badly needed my advice as to the war” (quoted in Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life, Bloomsbury, 2014, p66). She also displayed great interest in a visit to London of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian republican leader.

When she was 14, Eleanor and Karl Marx visited Engels ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• * 1: Introduction
• * 2: The Early Years
• * 3: The Paris Commune
• * 4: The Busiest Decade
• * 5: Transition Years
• * 6: The Woman Question
• * 7: The US Tour
• * 8: The Movements
• * 9: The Birth of New Unionism
• * 10: In Silvertown
• * 11: The Great Dock Strike and The Jewish Tailors
• * 12: The Bosses’ Offensive
• * 13: Conclusion
• Further Reading
• More Bookmarks Rebel’s Guides