Brentano vs. Marx

 In view of the great importance of the Gladstone's quotation for the Social Democratic claim that in the framework of the

existing state and social order the rich would necessarily become ever richer and the poor ever poorer, I drew the attention of

the editors of the Concordia, Zeitschrift für die Arbeiterfrage, at that time appearing in Berlin, to the forgery which had been

committed here. They asked me to write an article on the subject, which was published in the Concordia of March 7, 1872. The

article was not signed by me; this was done, on the one hand, at the request of the editors in the interests of the reputation of

their paper, and, on the other hand, I had all the less objection, since following earlier literary controversies pursued by Marx it

was to be expected that this time too he would heap personal insults upon his adversary, and that for this reason it could only be

amusing to leave him in the dark as to the identity of his adversary.

 Three months later Marx replied in the Volksstaat. In the polemic which then developed it became clear that Marx had not

undertaken the forgery himself, but had taken the forged quotation from a diatribe which had been published anonymously in

1864. This work, entitled The Theory of the Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844. The abuse of the metallic principle to

depreciation. Parliament mirrored in Debate, supplemental to 'The Stock Exchange and the Repeal of Sir J. Barnard's Act',

London: T. Cautley Newby, 80, Welbeck Street, 1864, is the work of a perverse Thersites and consists largely of garbled

quotations from writings and speeches on national economy, bestrewn with Latin, English and French verses and other

comments, aimed at derision. Being of such a nature, this book has understandably remained in thorough obscurity.

 Had Marx simply admitted that he had been misled by this book, and from then on reproduced the quotation correctly, one

might have been surprised that he had relied upon such a source, hut the mistake would at least have been rectified. But for him

there was no question of this. And given the wide circulation which had been attained by the Inaugural Address, the loss of this

show-piece as the result of this correction, would have been very embarrassing for the agitation. One of the main agitational

methods of Social Democracy is that its representatives proclaim themselves the sole proprietors of real science; and as the

Party Congress in Halle 148 showed, they prefer to accuse themselves of having utilised the iron law of wages in deliberate

untruthfulness simply as a means of agitation, rather than confess that they have been shown to be in error. Instead of

withdr;iwing, Marx therefore attempted to prove that Gladstone had subsequently tinkered with the shorthand report of his

budget speech; the loutishnesses of his Scurrilous polemics was now directed against the supposed manufacturer, who had

attempted to tell him what to do with the help of an English business partner; when it was shown that The Times too, in its issue

which appeared on the morning following the night in which Gladstone had made his speech, carried this speech in a sense

according with the shorthand report, he acted, as the editors of the Concordia wrote: "like the cuttlefish, which dims the water

with a dark fluid, in order to make pursuit by its enemy more difficult, i.e. he tries as hard as he can to hide the subject of

controversy by clinging to completely inconsequential secondary itatters; and finally he saves himself with the explanation that

for 'lack of time' he cannot go into the matter any further." And for all time he failed to reply to my analysis of his rejoinder

published in the Concordia on August 22, 1872.

 The fact that I was the author of the articles in the Concordia of March 7, July 4 and 11, and August 22, 1872 was known to a

ntimber of people, and in the second edition of Mehring's Geschichte der Sozialdemokratie, which was published while Marx

was still alive, I was publicly named as such. Having his attention thus drawn to it, Mr. Sedley Taylor of Trinity College,

Cambridge studied the polemic, and wrote a letter about it to The Times. This brought upon the scene Miss Eleanor Marx,

daughter of Karl Marx, who had died in the meantime, and in the socialist monthly To-Day of March 1884 she not only

defended her father's loyalty, but closed with the remark that her father had restored and rescued from oblivion a particular

sentence from one of Gladstone's speeches, a sentence which had indubitably been pronounced, but which somehow or other

had found its way out of the shorthand report in Hansard.

Even at that time I considered replying to this obstinate clinging to the false quotation with the verbatim publication of the

entire polemic. But editors often have their own judgement; the specialist journal which I regarded as suitable above all others

refused to publish, on the grounds that the dispute lacked general interest. Engels was obviously of a different opinion. In the

Preface to the fourth edition of the first volume of Capital, which he undertook, he returned to the polemic, hut reported upon it

in such a manner that the dishonesty with which it had been conducted by Marx was, understandablv not made clear in addition

he left unchanged the passage in Capital I, 4th edition, p. 617, in which Marx had Gladstone say the opposite of what he really

said and Lven more while Marx in his first edition simply referred to "Gladstone in H.o.C. April 16 1863", the 4th edition

added "The Morning Star, April 17 1863 as though the report in this newspaper really contained the quotation as given by

Marx. But the report in The Morning Star too contains all those sentences omitted by The Theory of the Exchanges and

subsequently by Marx, sentences which show that where Gladstone refers in his budget speech to income tax revenue, he is

onlv contrasting the incomes of those who pay this tax with the incomes of those who, because of lower incomes, are free of

this tax; that he perceives from the income tax lists an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, and remarks at the same

time that the increase in income shown by these lists is confined to those in easy circumstances -- quite naturally, since the

incomes of the rest are not shown in these lists; but that he does not believe this augmentation is confined to these classes, since

it is known from other sources that at the same time the condition of the British labourer has improved to a degree unexampled

in any country and any age...

1891: Brentano vs. Marx -- The documents

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