KARL MARX

45 2 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Engels, 'I was obliged to accept into the preamble of the Statutes two
phrases on "duty" and "right", and also on "truth, morality and justice";
but they are so placed that they cannot do harm.' 15 The General Committee
then approved the Preamble, Address and Rules, though not without
amendment: that Marx was not able to get his way completely is shown
by the passage of a motion that his term 'profit-mongers' be deleted.
The Address, a piece of writing skilfully adapted to his audience, was
produced within a week and included material that later appeared in
Capital. Marx wrote to Engels: 'It was very difficult to arrange the thing
in such a way that our view appeared in a form that made it acceptable
to the present standpoint of the workers' movement. It will take time
before the reawakening of the movement allows the plain speaking of the
past. We must act fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (strong in content, soft
in form)." 6 Thus, in contrast to the Communist Manifesto, there were no
sweeping generalisations or appeals to revolutionary action. The Address
began with the statement that 'It is a great fact that the misery of the
working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864', 17 and proceeded
to document this statement with quotations from official British publications
describing the poverty that contrasted so glaringly with the optimistic
pronouncements of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the
country's increasing wealth. Marx's reason for dwelling on England at
length was the apparently rather naive view that 'with appropriate changes
in local colour and scale, the English facts reproduce themselves in all
the industrial and progressive countries of the Continent'. 18 Although, he
admitted, 'a minority of the working class have obtained increases in their
real wages', yet 'since 1848 the great mass of the working classes have
been sinking down to a lower depth at the same rate at least as those
above them have been rising in the social scale'. 19 His conclusion was:
In all countries of Europe it has become a truth demonstrable to every
unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those whose interest it is to
hedge other people in a fool's paradise, that no improvement of machinery,
no application of science to production, no contrivance of communication,
no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets,
no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the
miseries of the industrial masses; but that, on the present false basis,
every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend
to sharpen social contrasts and accentuate social antagonisms. 20
This is one of the clearest formulations of Marx's doctrine of relative
pauperisation. It is paradoxical that in England the International chiefly
helped to benefit the better-off workers and thus served to increase the
very disparity Marx mentioned. 21