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| SPECIAL FEATURE

Idea that ‘stormed
the heavens’ touched
even distant B.C.

By HAL GRIFFIN

When, in May, 1871, even as the Paris
Commune was being drowned in the blood
Of its defenders, Karl Marx asserted that
a timately its principles must triumph, Vic-
oria in distant British Columbia was an
unlikely place for a voice to be raised in its

efence. Even more unlikely, the voice was
that of an elected member of the legislative
Council, Amor De Cosmos, soon to be both
veniet of the new province and a MP in Sir

ohn A. Macdonald’s Conservative federal
SOvernment.

Paris already was an industrial city of
reat. 1.8 million people. Socialist ideas long
had influenced the thinking and revolu-
patted actions of its workers, as in their
isis insurrection during the Revolution of

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§
| Victoria was a city barely counting its
4 eects in thousands, only three decades
‘| fom its founding as a Hudson’s Bay Com-
y | pany Post. The flood of adventurers to the
Taser River gold bars had surged to the
4 dino: where — after the first flush, deep
{ 8gings requiring capital investment in
f Pumps and equipment had transformed
d| Many free miners into mine workers — they
Dp aa their first strike for wages, a strike
18 a on ‘‘American agitators,’’ in May,
In Victoria the first unions had been form-
— the printers in 1862, shipwrights in
1863 — and the miners in the Nanaimo
Coalfields fought their first long strike in
- 1871. But it would be the turn of the century
fore growth of industry and population
Provided the basis for union and socialist
Political organization strongly influenced by

arxist writings.

Yet those early gold miners who opened
x the British Columbia wilderness also
Tought with them radical and socialist ideas
Which found common ground in their op-

6, peation. to Governor James Douglas’
4 ey ocratic regime and the master-servant
¢|  ~ations governing employment.
Alth Fa

my. Ough the majority of them came by
yo “AY of California, their origin was in many
eA

fS.

ENGELS, LE

20-40%

countries — the Canadas, the Maritimes,
Britain and all the countries of Europe, from
which many had been driven into exile by
despotic regimes.

Roe cates were known in the U.S.,
for the U.S. section of the International
Working Men’s Association — the First In-
ternational — had been functioning in New
York from the mid-Sixties. And in 1861-65
Marx was a contributor to the New York
Daily Tribune, although the articles actually
were written by his co-worker Frederick
Engels, reflecting their joint views.

But, as Engels was to note in his work ©

Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Ger-
man Classical Philosophy, published in
1888, five years after Marx’s death on March
14, 1883:

‘«¢  _Tcannot deny that both before and
during my 40 years’ collaboration with Marx
I had a certain independent share in laying
the foundations, and more particularly the
theory. But the greater part of its leading
basic principles, particularly in the realm of
economics and history, and above all, its
final clear formulation, belong to Marx.
What I contributed — at any rate, with the
exception of a few special studies — Marx
could very well have done without me. What
Marx accomplished I could not have achiev-
ed. Marx stood higher, saw further, and
took a wider and quicker view than all the
rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were
at best talented. Without him the theory
would not be what it is today. It therefore
rightly bears his name.”’

Marx, in a brief speech recorded in the
minutes of the First International’s general
council on May 23, 1871, declared that “‘the
“principles of the Commune. . . could not
be crushed; they would assert themselves
again and again until the workers were
emancipated.”

De Cosmos; described as a “‘sort of
socialist”? by Dr. J. S. Helmcken, an ad-
vocate of annexation to the U.S., wrote in
his Victoria Daily Standard on May 31,
1871:

; People’s Co-op Bookstore
4 353 W. Pender

4 COMPLETE SELECTION OF

| | xx MARX

NIN i

|

political & economic

- | Off our regular
low prices
Mar. 21-April 2
Out of print old literary,
titles will also be offered for sale.

“Of all the instrumen

7
ts of product Ng pawet a tend
di B)

ion, the greatest producti
15 the revolutionary clas

Poster commemorating the Marx centenary (considerable detail on the red and black
original has been lost here through half-tone reproduction).

“< The names of Rouge, Red
Republican, Communist scare men, not on-
ly in France but abroad. But the day will
come when the principles of the ill-fated
rebellion of Paris will be extolled to the
skies.”’

The philosophy from which De Cosmos
drew his conclusions can only be deduced,
for his editorials and speeches in the
legislature and House of Commons con-
stitute his sole literary legacy. Itis enough for
his place in history that all his editorials on
the Paris Commune were consistent in this
conclusion.

They drew from David Higgins, publisher
of the British Colonist and Victoria Chroni-
cle, the first red-baiting attack in B.C. if not
Canadian political history, since Marx’s day
the resort of political bankrupts everywhere
and elevated to an art by themanipulators of
public opinion in these cold war years.

Replying to De Cosmos’ charge that it was
taking an ambivalent stand by supporting
both himself as a Confederationist and
Helmcken as an annexationist in the first
provincial election, Higgins declared:

“Ts it to be wondered that the man who
could utter such impious trash in the
presence of an intelligent audience should
favor the Paris Communists. . ?”

For Marx, who had warned the Parisian
workers against an ill-timed uprising but
rallied the international socialist movement
to their support in ‘‘storming heaven,”’ the
Paris Commune was the harbinger of the
future, revealing the inchoate structure of a
new society. He studied its achievements,
weaknesses and errors and wrote his pro-
found analysis in a work, The Civil War in
France, which retains all the freshness and
vitality which in 1871 alone sent it into nearly
30 editions in 11 languages.

It was the culmination of three decades of
close friendship and collaboration between
Marx, born at Trier in Prussia on May 15,
1818, the son of a lawyer, and Engels, born
at Barmen in Prussia on November 28, 1820,
the son of a cotton mill owner.

In their formative years, both were
followers of the German idealist philosopher
Georg Hegel, gravitated to the “Left
Hegelians’ seeking to draw revolutionary
conclusions from Hegel’s work and were
profoundly influenced by the German
philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach when he
turned to materialism after 1836 and was
forbidden to teach by the Prussian govern-
ment.

In 1844, when Engels visited Paris to
begin a friendship that endured until Marx’s
death 40 years later, the two discovered that
they had drawn the same fundamental con-
clusions from their studies of classical Ger-
man philosophy, French materialism and
English political economy.

Over the next four decades they produced
the works embodying the principles of scien-

tific socialism which became known to the
world as Marxism. Much of those works ap-
peared originally as pamphlets and
newspaper articles, as letters to leading
figures in the revolutionary circles of many
countries or sharp ideological debate with
Utopian socialists, anarchists, reformists, all
the trends in the labor and socialist move-
ment which continue in new guise in our own
times. And always it was tempered by their
active participation in revolutionary strug-
gles, as a result of which Marx was forced in-
to exile, to Paris, then Brussels and finally to
London.

Marx was 30, Engels was 28 when they
wrote the Communist Manifesto, first
published in German by the Communist
League in February, 1848 and since
translated into virtually every language in
millions of copies.

The foundation of Marx’s work, the great
task to which he devoted the last part of his
life, is Capital, the ultimate aim of which was
“to reveal the economic law of motion of
modern society.”

When Marx died in 1883 the work was still
unfinished, but he had left a towering legacy.
Engels, speaking at his graveside in
London’s Highgate Cemetery, singled out as
his two great discoveries the materialist con-
ception of history and the theory of surplus
value.

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of
evolution in organic nature, so Marx
discovered the law of evolution in human
history. . .’’ he said.

‘But that is not all. Marx discovered the
special law of motion governing the modern
capitalist* mode of production and the
bourgeois society that this mode of produc-
tion has created. . .

‘His name will endure through the ages
and so will his work.”’

Even as Engels followed Marx to the
grave in 1895, in Tsarist Russia another
young revolutionary, Lenin, was studying
their work, taking up the pen to continue it
and shaping the organization that in 1917
would lead to the October Revolution and
creation of the USSR as the world’s first
socialist state.

As Marx told the First International in
1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, com-
menting on the fact that French and German
workers were greeting each other in their
own common interests against war: “‘It pro-
ves that in contrast to the old society, with its
economical miseries and its political
delirium, a new society is springing up whose
international rule will be peace because its
national ruler will be everywhere the same —
labor!”’

A former editor of both the Tribune and
The Fisherman, Hal Griffin is also the
author of several books including the
newly published Soviet Frontiers of
Tomorrow.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 18, 1983—Page 11

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