Routledge Library Editions karl marx

I. European Politics

Towards the end of 1853, just as Marx had concluded his fight against “ democratic emigration illusions and amateur revolutionism ” with his polemic against Willich, a new period in European politics was opened up by the Crimean War, and it occupied his chief attention in the following few years.

His own views on the subject were given chiefly in his contributions to The New York Tribune. Although its editors did their best to force him down to the level of ordinary newspaper correspondence, he could say with truth that “ only in exceptional cases ” did they succeed. He remained loyal to his principles, and even that work which he was compelled to do in order to earn a living was ennobled in his hands and given a permanent value by being based on laborious studies.

Most of these treasures from his pen are still buried, and it will cost a certain amount of trouble to bring them to the surface again. Owing to the fact that The New York Tribune treated his contributions more or less as raw material, flung them into the waste-paper basket at its discretion, published them under its own flag and often, as Marx complained bitterly, published “ rubbish ” under his name, it will never be possible to reconstruct the whole of his work for the paper, and very careful examination will be necessary to determine its limits with any degree of accuracy.

Indispensable assistance has been offered in this respect only recently with the publication of the Marx-Engels correspondence. For instance, it shows us that the series of articles on revolution and counter-revolution in Germany whose authorship was credited to Marx for many years, was in fact chiefly written by Engels, and that Engels wrote not only the contributions on military questions, a fact that had been known for a long time, but that he co-operated widely in other respects in Marx’s work for the paper. Apart from the series of articles on revolution and counter-revolution in Germany, the articles on the Eastern question which appeared in TIzq New York Tribune have also been

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collected, though both with regard to what it contains and what it does not contain, this latter collection is of much more doubtful authenticity than the former which was after all only credited to the wrong author. ¹

But even this critical examination of Marx’s work for The New York Tribune would represent only a small part of the labours necessary because although Marx certainly succeeded in raising the level of journalist work tremendously, even he could not raise it completely above the circumstances in which it had to be written. The greatest brain in the world cannot make new discoveries or give uirth to new ideas twice a week always just in time to catch the regular packet-steamer on Tuesdays and Fridays. As Engels has pointed out, it is impossible under such circumstances to avoid “ pure improvization on the spur of the moment and reliance on memory only ” altogether. Further, daily work is dependent on daily news and daily moods, and it cannot emancipate itself from them without running the danger of becoming dry and boring. How much, for instance, would the four big volumes of the Marx-Engels correspondence be worth without the hundred and one contradictions out of which the great general line of their ideas and struggles developed ?

However, even without the great mass of material which is still awaiting its resurrection in the columns of The New York Tribune, the main lines of the European policy which they began to adopt with the Crimean War are quite clear to-day. To a certain extent the adoption of this policy may be said to have marked a turning-point in their activities. The authors of The Communist Manifesto and the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung concentrated their main attention on Germany. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung enthusiastically supported the struggle of the Poles for national independence and then that of the Italians and the Hungarians, and in the upshot it demanded war against Russia as the strongest bulwark of European counter-revolution. But later this demand developed more and more into one for a world war against England because only after the breaking of England’s world power would it be possible for the social revolution to emerge from the world of utopia into the world of reality.

This “ Anglo-Russian slavery ” was the basis on which Marx developed his European policy at the time of the Crimean War. He welcomed the war because it promised to break the European superiority which Tsarism had won as a result of the victory of the counter-revolution in Europe, but he was certainly not in agreement with the fashion in which the Western European

¹ The Eastern Question, see Bibliography.—Tr.




powers waged the war. Engels adopted the same attitude, and declared that the whole Crimean War was one colossal comedy oferrors whereby it was almost impossible to say from one moment to the next who was the cheater and who the cheated. Despite the million lives and the millions of pounds the war cost, both Marx and Engels regarded it as a pseudo-war as far as France and, in particular, England were concerned.

They were certainly right in so far as neither the false Bonaparte nor Lord Palmerston, the English Foreign Secretary, had any intention of wounding the Russian bear in any vital spot. As soon as they felt convinced that Austria could hold the main forces of the Russian army in check on the Western frontiers they shifted the scene of hostilities to the Crimea, where they battered their heads against the fortress of Sebastopol, succeeding in capturing only half of it after a long-drawn-out campaign. In the end they had to satisfy themselves with this one rather dilapidated laurel wreath of victory and beg “ defeated Russia ” for permission to evacuate their troops without further interference.

It was easy enough to see why the false Bonaparte was unwilling to challenge the Tsar to a life-and-death struggle, but Palmerston’s motives were less clear. The continental governments feared him as a revolutionary “ firebrand ”, whilst the continental Liberals admired him as a paragon of a constitutional-liberal Minister. Marx solved the riddle by laboriously examining the official Blue books and the Hansard reports for the first half of the century and also a number of diplomatic reports which had been deposited in the British Museum. His efforts were crowned by proof that from the time of Peter the Great down to the opening of the Crimean War there had been secret co-operation between the Cabinets in London and St. Petersburg, and that Palmerston in particular was a venal instrument of Tsarist policy. Marx’s contentions did not pass without contradiction, and they are disputed down to this very day, particularly with regard to the role of Palmerston. There is no doubt that he judged Palmerston’s unscrupulous business policy with its half-measures and its contradictions much more clearly than did either the European governments or the European Liberals, but it does not necessarily result from this that Palmerston had been bought by Russia. However, much more important than the question of whether Marx went too far in his statements or not is the fact that from this time onwards he considered it one of the most indispensable tasks of the working class to probe into the mysteries of international diplomacy in order to counter the diplomatic machinations of the


governments or, where this proved impossible, to expose and denounce them.

Above all, he was interested in waging an irreconcilable struggle against the barbarous power which had its seat in St. Petersburg and its hand in every European Cabinet. He regarded Tsarism not merely as the most powerful bulwark of European reaction whose very passive existence was a permanent threat and danger, but also as the chief enemy whose constant intervention in the affairs of Western Europe hampered and disturbed the normal course ofdevelopment and aimed at winning a geographical position which would give it dominance over Europe and thus make the emancipation of the European proletariat impossible. The great stress which he laid on this standpoint greatly influenced his policy from the Crimean War onwards, even more so than during the years of the revolution.

With this he was merely developing an idea he had first expressed in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but from now on both for him and for Engels the national struggles of those nations whose cause the paper had championed so enthusiastically began to recede very much into the background. Not that either of them ever ceased to demand the independence of Poland, Hungary and Italy as the right of these countries and in the interests of Germany and Europe in general, but as early as 1851 Engels gave his old favourites marching orders : “ The Italians, Poles and Hungarians must be told plainly that when modern questions are under discussion they must hold their tongues.” And a few months later he informed the Poles that they were done for as a nation and useful only as a means to an end until Russia itself had been drawn into the vortex of revolution. The Poles had never done anything in history but act with gallant and quarrelsome stupidity. Even against Russia they had never done anything of historical value, whilst Russia was at least progressive towards the East. With all its baseness and Slav filth Russian dominance was a civilizing agency for the lands around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, for Central Asia, Bashkiria and Tartary, and Russia had absorbed far more cultural and, in particular, industrial elements than Poland, whose nature was essentially chevaleresque and slothful. These observations are certainly strongly coloured by the passion with which the struggles amongst the exiles were being fought, and in later years Engels’ verdict on Poland was much milder, whilst during the last years of his life he declared that Poland had saved European civilization on at least two occasions : by the rising in 1792-3 and by the revolution in 1830-1.

Referring to the belauded hero 6f the Italian Revolution,




Marx declared : “ Mazzini knows only the towns with their liberal aristocracy and their enlightened citizens. The material needs of the Italian agricultural population—as exploited and as systematically emasculated and held in stupidity as the Irish— are naturally too low for the phraseological heaven of his cosmopolitan, neo-Catholic, ideological manifestos. However, it needs courage to inform the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy that the first step towards the independence of Italy is the complete emancipation of the peasants and the transformation of their semi-tenant system into free bourgeois property.” And in an open letter of his friend Ernest Jones, the Chartist leader, Marx informed Kossuth, who was playing the lion in London, that the European revolutions were crusades of labour against capital and that they could not be depressed to the intellectual and social level of an obscure and semi-barbarous people like the Magyars, who were still stuck in the semi-civilization of the sixteenth century but actually imagined that they could command the enlightenment of Germany and France and wheedle a cheer from the gullibility of England.

However, Marx developed furthest from the traditions of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in that he not merely no longer concentrated his chief attention on Germany, but actually put it almost completely out of the sphere of his political interests. It is true that at the time Germany played a very sorry role in European politics and could be regarded as little more than a Russian province, but although this more or less explains Marx’s attitude, nevertheless both he and Engels were to pay dearly later on for the fact that for a number of years they completely lost touch with developments in Germany. Unfortunately, the contempt which both of them had always felt as Rhinelanders and citizens of an annexed province for the Prussian State was intensified in the days of Manteuffel-Westphalen to such an extent that it fitted ill with their usual keen appreciation of a political situation.

The one exception in those days in which Marx did pay attention to conditions in Prussia offers eloquent proof of this. It was towards the end of 1856, when Prussia came into conflict with Switzerland over the Neufchatel affair. The incident caused Marx, as he wrote to Engels on the 2nd of December 1856, to supplement his “ very insufficient knowledge of Prussian history ”, and he summed up the result of his studies by declaring that world history had never produced anything more lousy. The passages which then follow and an article which appeared a few days later in The People's Paper, a Chartist organ, dealing with the same matter in still greater detail, reveal him as being very far from his usual high level in historical matters. Indeed,




he sinks dangerously near to the low level of the scolding petty- bourgeois democracy, although it is one of his own particular services that he raised historical writing far above this level.

The Prussian State undoubtedly represented a disagreeable morsel for any human being to swallow, but for all that, it was not possible to make it palatable with caustic of mockery of the “ Hohenzollerns by the Grace of God ”, of the three repeatedly appearing “ character masks ” : the pietist, the non-commissioned officer and the buffoon, of Prussian history as “an unappetizing family chronicle ”, compared with the “ diabolical epic ” of Austrian history, and similar observations which at the utmost explain the wherefore, but leave the why of the wherefore completely in the dark.

2. 
   David Urquhart, G. J. Harney and Ernest Jones
   

Whilst he was contributing to The New York Tribune Marx also worked in the same way for the Urquhartist and Chartist papers.

David Urquhart was an English diplomat who, thanks to his detailed knowledge of the Russian plans for world dominance and to his ceaseless struggle against them, had rendered valuable services, whose value, however, he diminished by a fanatical hatred of Russia and an equally fanatical enthusiasm for everything Turkish. Marx was often dubbed an Urquhartite, but quite without justification, and in fact it would be truer to say that, like Engels, he was too much irritated by the foolish exaggerations of the man to appreciate fully his real services. The first mention of Urquhart in the Marx-Engels correspondence is in a letter written by the latter in March 1853 : “I am reading Urquhart’s book at the moment. He contends that Palmerston is in the pay of Russia. The explanation is very simple, the fellow is a Keltic Scot with a Sassenach-Scottish training, by tendency a romanticist, by education a Free Trader. He went to Greece as a Philo-Hellenist and after skirmishing around with the Turks for three years he went to Turkey and was immediately seized with enthusiasm for the Turks. He is exuberantly Islamitic and declares that if he were not a Calvinist he could be only a Mohammedan.” On the whole Engels found Urquhart’s book merely highly diverting.

The point of contact between Marx and Urquhart was their common struggle against Palmerston. An article written by


Marx against Palmerston for The New York Tribune was reprinted in a Glasgow newspaper, where it attracted the attention of Urquhart. In February 1854 the two met and Urquhart received Marx with the compliment that a Turk might have written the article. However, Urquhart was very disappointed when Marx informed him that he was a “ revolutionist ”, because one of Urquhart’s crotchets was that the European revolutionaries were all conscious or unconscious tools of Tsarism used by the latter to embarrass the European governments. “ The man is a complete monomaniac,” Marx wrote to Engels after this meeting, adding that he agreed with him in nothing except with regard to Palmerston and even then the man had been of no assistance to him.

Naturally, these confidential remarks to Engels must not be taken too seriously. Despite all his critical reservations Marx publicly and repeatedly acknowledged Urquhart’s services, and he made no secret of the fact that although he had not been convinced by Urquhart he had nevertheless been stimulated by him, and for this reason he did not hesitate to contribute occasionally to Urquhart’s papers and in particular to The Free Press in London, and he also gave Urquhart permission to reprint and distribute a number of his articles in The New York Tribune in leaflet form. These Palmerston leaflets were distributed in fairly large editions, from fifteen to thirty thousand at a time, and they created a great sensation, but for the rest, Marx gained no greater material advantage from the Scot Urquhart than from the Yankee Dana.

Any really close connection between the two was made quite impossible by the fact that Marx supported Chartism, a movement which Urquhart doubly hated as a Free Trader and as an enemy of Russia, because he thought he could detect the rolling rouble in every revolutionary movement. Chartism never recovered from the heavy defeat it had suffered on the ioth of April 1848, but as long as its remnants struggled for life the movement was gallantly and loyally supported by both Marx and Engels, chiefly in the way of unpaid contributions to the papers published by George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones in the ’fifties. Harney published The Red Republican, The Friend of the People and The Democratic Review in rapid succession, whilst Jones published The Notes to the People and The People’s Paper. The People’s Paper enjoyed the longest life and was published regularly down to the year 1858.

Harney and Jones belonged to the revolutionary wing of the Chartist movement and amongst all the members of this group they were probably the least insular. They were also regarded




as the leading spirits in the international association of the Fraternal Democrats. Harney was the son of a seaman and had grown up in proletarian surroundings. He had obtained his revolutionary knowledge on his own from the revolutionary literature of France, and Marat was his model. He was a year older than Marx, and whilst the latter was editing The Rheinische Zeitung he was on the editorial board of The Northern Star, the chief organ of the Chartists. Engels visited him in 1843, and Harney described him as “ a slim young fellow, so youthful that he seemed almost a boy, but even then he spoke extraordinarily correct English ”. In 1847 Harney made the acquaintance of Marx and joined his circle \\lth enthusiasm.

He published an English translation of The Communist Manifesto in his Red Republican, together with an editorial footnote to the effect that it was the most revolutionary document ever published, and in his Democratic Review he published English translations of articles which had appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on the French Revolution, declaring that they represented “ the real criticism ” of French affairs. In the struggles of the emigration he returned to his old love and came into violent conflict with Ernest Jones and no less so with Marx and Engels. Soon afterwards he went to live on the isle ofJersey, and after a short stay there he left for the United States, where Engels visited him in 1888. Shortly after this visit Harney returned to England, where he died at a ripe old age and perhaps as the last living witness of a great historical period.