14.03.1996

Eleanor the Fenian

Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, provides us with an inspiring model of proletarian internationalism and the duties of a socialist of an oppressor nation to the oppressed nation.

All of Marx’s daughters took up the cause of Ireland, but it was Eleanor, or ‘Tussy’, who really made the cause her own. By the age of 13 the brilliant youngster considered herself a militant of the struggle for Irish national liberation. The young teenager revised the chauvinist anthem, ‘God save the queen’, to ‘God save our flag of green’. She was signing herself as ‘Eleanor FS’ - ie, ‘Eleanor, Fenian sister’. Even in the strongly pro-Fenian Marx household, according to Marx himself, Eleanor was “one of their head centres”.

Was this liberal sentimentality or Marx’s ‘indulgence’ of his most preciously gifted daughter? Hardly. It was in fact a living example of Marx’s famous dictum that “any nation that oppresses another forges its own chains”. Eleanor’s pro-Fenian sentiment and activity was encouraged by Marx because of its broader political significance. If the British proletariat did not break the hegemony of bourgeois politics on the Irish question, how could it ever break that hegemony on any other question? How could it start to establish its own, proletarian, hegemony over the battle for democracy of which the Irish national liberation struggle was such an important component? If it could not do this, how could it ever hope to make the revolution?

At a massive demonstration against the Irish Coercion Bill in 1887, Eleanor spoke along these lines. The Daily Telegraph of the day - despite itself - was really rather charmed:

“Considerable interest was actually taken in the speech delivered with excellent fluency and clear intonation by Mrs Marx Aveling (Eleanor Marx) who wore beneath her brown cape a dress of green, plush with a broad brimmed hat to match. The lady has rather a winning and pretty way of putting forth revolutionary and socialist ideas, as though they were the gentlest thoughts on earth. Her speech was chiefly confined to impressing on her socialist friends the necessity for helping Ireland as in doing so they would be helping their own poor selves and the cause to which they were attached. She was enthusiastically applauded for a speech delivered with perfect self-possession.” (my emphasis - AL).

I suspect she was “enthusiastically applauded” for the content of the speech rather than its competent delivery or her twee dress sense. As Eleanor herself noted of the period, “Everywhere large meeting are being held and the English working class is supporting Ireland.”

Eleanor Marx’s support for the IRA of her day implied no concession to nationalism - it was a component part of her commitment to international socialism and working class rule:

“Let Ireland be free, but let it be an Ireland of free workers; it matters little to the men and women of Ireland if they are exploited by nationalist or Orangemen; the agricultural labourer sees his enemy in the landlord, as the industrial worker in his capitalist.”

Alec Long

Yvonne Kapp’s two-volume biography, Eleanor Marx (Virago 1979), is a useful introduction to the life and struggles of Marx’s daughter, including her support for the Irish national liberation movement.