Brentano vs. Marx

 

Quite right! Only the addition of another "yet" has been forgotten. This article by Professor Beesly deals, in fact, with the

history of the International, and as the author himself informs every enquirer, was written on the basis of material provided him

by Marx. And there is still more. At this point it is not Beesly who is quoting Gladstone at all; he is merely saying that the

Inaugural Address of the International contains this quotation. "From this alarming statistics," Beesly writes, "the Address turns

to the income-tax returns, which show that the taxable incomes of the country have increased by 20% in eight years, 'an

intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power', as Mr. Gladstone observed, entirely confined" etc. -- A fine way of proof

indeed! You trick some person who does not know your dishonesty into accepting a lying statement; this person repeats it in

good faith; and then you cite this and the honesty of the person who repeated the statement in order to prove the correctness of

the statement and your own honesty. -- Marx continues his defence:

 

"Let us now take a specialised publication, intended solely for the City and published not only before the appearance of

the Inaugural Address, but even before International Working Men's Association was founded. It is entitled: The Theory

of Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844, London 1864, published by T. Cautley Newby, 30, Welbeck Street. It

examines Gladstone's budget speech at length and p. 134 gives the following quotation from this speech: 'This

intoxicating augmentation' etc., that is, word for word, exactly what I quoted. -- This proves irrefutably that the German

Manufacturers' Association 'lied in form' in decrying this 'sentence' as a fabrication 'by me'!... The author of The Theory

of the Exchanges," Marx then continued, "quoted, like myself, not from Hansard, but from a London newspaper which,

on April 17, published the April 16 budget speech."

 

And in fact the author of this hook, which incidentally is a vulgar diatribe, quoted from Hansard just as little as did Marx. But

Marx, as we shall soon show, also did not even quote from a London newspaper. First, however, it must be noted here that

when we stated that Marx had lyingly added the sentence in question to Gladstone's speech, we did not claim, either "in form or

In content", that he himself had also fabricated it. This would only be the case if Marx himself had been the fabricator of that

still very obscure book, though one might be tempted to believe this on account of the ghastly style in which it is written. The

source from which Marx quotes this sentence is actually this book itself, and this is also the reason why, as he claims in his

"collectanea of cuttings for 1863", he has "searched in vain for the relevant extract and thus, also, for the name of the

newspaper that published it"! This origin of Marx's quotation is shown clearly by a comparison of the passage in Capital, his

book in which Marx reviews Gladstone's budget speech, and The Theory of the Exchanges There, on p. 639, particularly in

Note 103,a this speech is quoted in the absolutely senseless version given verbatim by that book on p. 134. And the glosses too,

which Marx bases on the contradiction contained in this version, are already contained in that book, in particular also the

quotation from Molière given in Note 105 on p. 640 of Capital; and in the same way the statement of the LONDON ORPHAN

ASYLUM about the rising prices of foodstuffs quoted by Marx appears on p. 135 of that book, though Marx bases his claim for

its correctness not on that book, but on that book's sources (see Capital, p. 640, Note 104).

 Now we ask; does anyone tell a lie only when he himself invents an untruth, or does he not tell a lie quite as much when he

repeats it contrary to what he knows, or is hound to know better? We believe that the answer is beyond doubt. And secondly,

when Marx repeated the untruth contained in The Theory of the Exchanges, did he not do this contrary to his better knowledge,

or should he at least not have known better? The answer here is also simple. The first rule for any interpretation, a rule

undoubtedly known to Mr. Marx, is to interpret passages which at first glance contain contradictions -- and thus make no sense

-- in such a way that the contradiction disappears; and if the available text appears to make this impossible, one should make a

textual criticism rather than believe in the presence of a contradiction. And this was all the more imperative in the case of a

speech which aroused the interest and admiration of the entire educated world, notably through its mastery of the material and

its clarity. And finally it was an act of frivolity bordering upon the criminal to act in any other way than scrupulously when

intending to tear Out of context a passage which provides one half of the contradiction in this version and to cast it as a

denunciation of the propertied amongst the propertyless all over the world. Karl Marx should have taken umbrage at this

version if only on the basis of general learning, science and conscientiousness; and the criminal frivolity with which he accepts

this lying quotation is completely inexcusable in his case, since the full text of Gladstone's speech was available to him. On the

one hand, the English newspapers reproduced this speech the day after it was delivered, and, if Dot true to the word, then true

to the sense. And then, immediately after the delivery of the speech, Gladstone published it verbatim in his book Financial

Statements, London, 1863, which attracted great attention; and on p.403 of that book the speech is printed just as we quoted it.

Finally, Marx could refer to the shorthand report of this speech in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, and it is the custom to

always quote a speech to Parliament from the shorthand report, even if it contains no contradictions to the necessarily bungling

newspaper reports.

 But here we come, to be sure, to Marx's third line of defence, and this far exceeds, in its impudent mendacity, anything which

1891: Brentano vs. Marx -- The documents

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