On the masons, I am not sure they are all in with the bourgeoisie. Brick masons lodges are sort of the Workers' Internationales of ancient times.
See Marx's comment on the masons and the Paris Commune ( an anti-bourgeois effort) in the newspaper interview below.
CB
>>> Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> 08/30/99 11:24AM >>>
On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Charles Brown wrote:
> I have a theory that the longer capitalism goes on the more it does
> become a conspiracy, because the ruling class is more and more
> conscious.
Willie is more class conscious than George Washington? Actually, one look at that pyramidal floating eyeball on the back of the dollar bill should convince you that the founding fathers were involved in a masonic conspiracy to create a new society and take over the world. And it worked!
)))))))))))))))))))
INTERVIEW WITH KARL MARX, HEAD OF L'INTERNATIONALE REVOLT OF LABOR AGAINST CAPITAL -- THE TWO FACES OF L'INTERNATIONALE -- TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY -- ITS PROGRESS IN THE UNITED STATES
by R. Landor New York World, July 18, 1871 reprinted Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, August 12, 1871
London, July 3 -- You have asked me to find out something about the International Association, and I have tried to do so. The enterprise is a difficult one just now. London is indisputably the headquarters of the Association, but the English people have got a scare, and smell International in everything as King James smelled gunpowder after the famous plot. The consciousness of the Society has naturally increased with the suspiciousness of the public; and if those who guide it have a secret to keep, they are of the stamp of men who keep a secret well. I have called on two of their leading members, have talked with one freely, and I here give you the substance of my conversation. I have satisfied myself of one thing, that it is a society of genuine workingmen, but that these workmen are directed by social and political theories of another class. One man whom I saw, a leading member of the Council, was sitting at his workman's bench during our interview, and left off talking to ! me from time to time to receive a complaint, delivered in no courteous tone, from one of the many little masters in the neighborhood who employed him. I have heard this same man make eloquent speeches in public inspired in every passage with the energy of hate toward the classes that call themselves his rulers. I understood the speeches after this glimpse at the domestic life of the orator. He must have felt that he had brains enough to have organized a working government, and yet here he was obliged to devote his life to the most revolting taskwork of a mechanical profession. He was proud and sensitive, and yet at every turn he had to return a bow for a grunt and a smile for a command that stood on about the same level in the scale of civility with a huntsman's call to his dog. This man helped me to a glimpse of one side of the nature of the International, the result of
Labor Against Capital of the workman who produces against the middleman who enjoys. Here was the hand that would smite hard when the time came, and as to the head that plans, I think I saw that too, in my interview with Dr. Karl Marx.
Dr. Karl Marx is a German doctor of philosophy, with a German breadth of knowledge derived both from observation of the living world and from books. I should conclude that he has never been a worker in the ordinary sense of the term. His surroundings and appearance are those of a well-to-do man of the middle class. The drawing room into which I was ushered on the night of the interview would have formed very comfortable quarters for a thriving stockbroker who had made his competence and was now beginning to make his fortune. It was comfort personified, the apartment of a man of taste of easy means, but with nothing in it peculiarly characteristic of its owner. A fine album of Rhine views on the table, however, gave a clue to his nationality. I peered cautiously into the vase on the sidetable for a bomb. I sniffed for petroleum, but the smell was the smell of roses. I crept back stealthily to my seat, and moodily awaited the worst.
He has entered and greeted me cordially, and we are sitting face to face. Yes, I am tete-a-tete with the revolution incarnate, with the real founder and guiding spirit of the International Society, with the author of the address in which capital was told that is it warred on labor, it must expect to have its house burned down about its ears -- in a word, with the
Apologist for the Commune of Paris. Do you remember the bust of Socrates? The man who died rather than profess his belief in the Gods of the time -- the man with the fine sweep of profile for the forehead running meanly at the end into a little snub, curled-up feature, like a bisected pothook, that formed the nose. Take this bust in your mind's eye, color the beard black, dashing it here and there with puffs of gray; clap the head thus made on a portly body of the middle height, and the Doctor is before you. Throw a veil over the upper part of the face, and you might be in the company of a born vestryman. Reveal the essential feature, the immense brown, and you know at once that you have to deal with that most formidable of all composite individual forces -- a dreamer who thinks, a thinker who dreams.
I went straight to my business. The world, I said, seemed to be in the dark about the International, hating it very much, but not able to say clearly what thing it hated. Some, who professed to have peered further into the gloom than their neighbors, declared that they had made out a sort of Janus figure with a fair, honest workman's smile on one of its faces, and on the other, a murderous conspirator's scowl. Would he light up the case of mystery in which theory dwelt?
The professor laughed, chuckled a little I fancied, at the thought that we were so frightened of him. "There is no mystery to clear up, dear sir," he began, in a very polished form of the Hans Breitmann dialect, "except perhaps the mystery of human stupidity in those who perpetually ignore the fact that out Association is a public one, and that the fullest reports of its proceedings are published for all who care to read them. You may buy our rules for a penny, and a shilling laid out in pamphlets will teach you almost as much about us as we know ourselves.
R. [Landor]: Almost -- yes, perhaps so; but will not the something I shall not know constitute the all-important reservation? To be quite frank with you, and to put the case as it strikes an outside observer, this general claim of depreciation of you must mean something more than the ignorant ill will of the multitude. And it is still pertinent to ask, even after what you have told me, what is the International Society?
Dr. M.: You have only to look at the individuals of which it is composed -- workmen.
R.: Yes, but the soldier need be no exponent of the statecraft that sets him in motion. I know some of your members, and I can believe that they are not of the stuff of which conspirators are made. Besides, a secret shared by a million men would be no secret at all. But what if these were only the instruments in the hands of a bold, and, I hope you will forgive me for adding, not overscrupulous conclave?
Dr. M.: There is nothing to prove.
R.: The last Paris insurrection?
Dr. M.: I demand firstly the proof that there was any plot at all -- that anything happened that was not the legitimate effect of the circumstances of the moment; or the plot granted, I demand the proofs of the participation in it of the International Association.
R.: The presence of the communal body of so many members of the Association.
Dr. M.: Then it was a plot of the Freemasons, too, for their share in the work as individuals was by no means a slight one. I should not be surprised, indeed, to find the Pope setting down the whole insurrection to their account. But try another explanation. The insurrection in Paris was made by the workmen of Paris. The ablest of the workmen must necessarily have been its leaders and administration, but the ablest of the workmen happen also to be members of the International Association. Yet, the Association, as such, may be in no way responsible for their action.
R.: It will seem otherwise to the world. People talk of secret instruction from London, and even grants of money. Can it be affirmed that the alleged openness of the Association's proceedings precludes all secrecy of communication?
Dr. M.: What association