Page:Marx and Engels on Revolution in America - Heinz Neumann.djvu/6

 the American workers in those days showed a much greater resistance to counter-acting forces than Marx and Engels had hoped. Marx and Engels misjudged the tempo of the process of dissipation of the illusions obsessing the American working class but they were entirely correct in their estimation of the forces and methods that will finally destroy them.

All these letters and quotations speak for themselves. But a few words must be said as to their origin.

The heroic struggle of the Paris proletariat for the Commune in 1871 had driven home to the ruling classes of those days the reality of the danger of a proletarian revolution. No wonder, then, that, to their ever-present hatred of the revolutionary aspirations of their wage-slaves, they now added a haunting dread. The International Workingmen's Association (The First International) came in for a full share of this hatred and fear. The place of the "Zinoviev letters" of today was taken in those days by letters from that "'arch fiend," Karl Marx. It is but little known today that in the first telegraphic reports of the Chicago conflagration (October, 1871), it was not Mrs. Kelly's cow that caused it, but—the International Workingmen's Association. The General Council of that body was fully justified when it sarcastically complained that the tornado devastating the West Indies about the same time was not booked to its account.

The defeat of the Commune brought the inner differences of the International to a head. Although the Centralists under the leadership of Marx