Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

this episode. Apart from the anger and frustrations related to the trial and the publication of his pamphlet, he was again without income or other means of support for his family. While he tried vainly to find a publisher for the manuscript of Great Men of Exile, Jenny wrote to all their friends and relatives, ‘terrible letters’ in which she was obliged to beg for aid for her hungry family ;(cf. Jenny Marx to Engels, April 27).

For the April issues of the Daily Tribune Marx reported on Mazzini, O’Connor and the affairs of the British government. He also wrote three articles for Jones’s People's Paper based on his Daily Tribune reports and dealing with Gladstone’s fiscal policies. In May he began investigating the question of British influence and hegemony in the East in preparation for his articles on British rule in India and China. He made numerous excerpts from authors such as Thomas Raffles, Washington Wilks, George Campbell, R. P. Patton and David Urquhart, and examined numerous documents on British diplomatic relations with India, in particular the publications of the India Reform Association and Urquhart’s Portfolio. Between June and October eleven articles by Marx on India, British rule in the East, and the East India Company appeared in the Daily Tribune. On June 14 Marx’s article on ‘Revolution in China and Europe’ was published as well. Here he recapitulated the recent history of Western, and especially British, trade with the East, calling attention to the social changes wrought by the influx of foreign commercial goods: the patriarchal authority of the Chinese emperor was being undermined; the population unsettled through the abundance of inexpensive British textiles and the growing use of opium; Eastern isolation was brought to an end as industrialisation drove the West to seek new and unexplored markets:

Now, England having brought about the revolution of China, the question is how that revolution will in time rest on England and through England on Europe ... it may safely be augured that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long- prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely

1853 111

followed by political revolutions on the Continent (June 14).

His studies on the developmental history of Eastern society led Marx to conclude that .. Bernier rightly considered the basis of all phenomena in the East—he refers to Turkey, Persia, Hindustan—tore the absence of any private property whatsoever in land. This is the real key, even to the Oriental heaven .. / (letter to Engels, June 2). As for India, Marx maintained that the incursion of the British bourgeoisie had, as such, no effect of a social-revohitionajM nature and explained the ‘stationary character;.of the East as due to;

1. 
   the public works which are the affair of the central government.
   
2. 
   Besides this, the whole empire except for the few larger cities is divided up into villages, each having an entirely distinct organisation and forming a little world in itself (June 14).
   

From June to September Marx continued his correspondent’s reports on the growing conflict between Russia and Turkey, the Irish question, parliamentary affairs in Britain and the crisis symptoms, war, strikes, price increases, etc. In an article on the ‘Russian Question' (Aug. 12) Marx reviewed Russia's historical role as aggressot in Central Europe, noting the consistency of the goals pursued by the Czars. He attributed this aggression to Russia’s geographical circumstances- and the need for access to seaports in order to maintain her influence in Europe, as well as to her traditions: ‘If the success of her hereditary policy proves the weakness of the Western powers, the stereotyped mannerism of that policy proves the intrinsic barbarism of Russia herself.’ While the cunning of Russian politics succeeded ui impressing the courts of Europe, Marx believed that Russia would prove herself ‘utterly powerless with the revolutionised Peoples’. The approaching social revolution which will overthrow the domination of the Christian Rome of the West will "So prove to be the ‘real antagonist’ of Russian tyranny and Put an end to the dempnaic influence of Constantinople, the Eastern Rome at stake in the present conflict between Russia ^and the West. In another article from June 14 Marx had also Warned about the Russian tactics of expansion in Europe using ^reugious pretexts and summed up the account of its territorial &ins as protector of Orthodox Christianity: ‘The total acquisi-

°ns of Russia during the last sixty years are equal in extent and


importance to the whole empire she had possessed in Europe before that time*.

British aggression in the East, on the other hand, achieved a double purpose—first, in destroying the old primitive society and, secondly, in constructing a modern, industrialised Indian nation. With the introduction of the railway system in the East the British paved the way for modern industry and the development of the country’s productive power. Moreover, this step put an end to the isolated craftsmen’s enterprises and dissolved the ‘hereditary divisions of labour upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power’ (August 8). In India as elsewhere the bourgeoisie of industrialised Europe was fulfilling its historic task of developing the material basis upon which a new social order might be founded: ‘Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth.’

In the London Morning Advertiser the Russian immigrants Ivan Golovin and Alexander Herzen attacked Marx for having supposedly written a defamatory article against their countryman Bakunin on August 23 in the same journal! Marx’s reply, published on September 2, refuted this assumption and declared his solidarity with Bakunin’s activity in past revolutionary efforts.

Although he continued his regular contributions to the Daily Tribune, Marx still found himself in financial distress and was aided by occasional one-pound or five-pound notes from Engels. From time to time he contributed as well to the People’s Paper, yet, as he confessed to Cluss:

This continual journalistic hack-work is getting on my nerves. It takes up a lot of time, destroys any continuity in my efforts and in the final analysis really amounts to nothing at all. You can be as independent as you please, nevertheless you are tied down to the paper and to the readers, especially when you are paid in cash as I am. Purely scientific endeavours are something totally different (Sept. 5).

Marx continued to follow the events of the Turkish conflict until the end of the year with about 16 articles published beginning in September. He also treated British economic and political affairs—Peel’s Bank Act of 1844, strikes, the misery of Britain’s




industrial workers and wrote a series of six articles on Lord Palmerston, published in full in the People’s Paper and in abridged form in the Daily Tribune. The London publisher E. Tucker brought out one of these articles on ‘Palmerston and Russia’ as a fly-sheet in a printing of 15,000 copies. This publication soon proved to be Marx’s greatest literary success. Although the first edition was out of print within a few weeks, Marx himself realised no financial gain from the enterprise. The articles on Lord Palmerston were written in the same satirical tone which characterised his polemics against Bruno Bauer and his followers. Marx attacked both the personality and the politics of the renowned British statesman, whom he depicted as a man of neither profound ideas nor high objectives, but rather as one who ‘exults in show conflicts, show battles, show enemies, ... in violent parliamentary debates, which are sure to prepare him an ephemeral success, the constant and the only object of all his exertions’ (Marx, Engels, On Britain, p. 394). Submissive to foreign influence in deed if not in word, Lord Palmerston helped Europe’s tyrants to consolidate their power, while declaring himself the champion of constitutional freedom and democracy. In Marx’s eyes, his greatest shortcoming was to be extremely credulous in his dealings with the Russians, thereby helping them to achieve dominance over the Danube shipping routes.

There is no such word in the Russian vocabulary as ‘honour’. As to the thing itself, it is considered to be a French delusion ... For the inventions of Russian honour the world is exclusively indebted to my Lord Palmerston, who, during a quarter of a century, used at every critical moment to pledge himself in the most emphatic manner, for the ‘honour’ of the Czar (Hutchinson, p. 209).

Thus the vaunted merits and services of Palmerston to the world and to his people were in fact but the pose of an aristocratic ‘agent’ of Russian absolutism.

Marx’s Revelations, which had appeared in America only, provoked an attack by August Willich, also conducted in the German-American press. Cluss in Washington sent Marx copies of Willich’s articles, published during October and November nx the Belletristisches Journal und New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung. Willich had inspired earlier in the year (April) a series of articles against Marx by Wilhelm Hirsch, who revealed Marx’s




relations with the spy Bangya in an attempt to discredit him among the revolutionary and proletarian groups. Marx decided to prepare a rejoinder to WillidTs remarks and wrote during November a pamphlet ironically entitled The Knight of the Noble Consciousness, which he sent to Cluss on the 29th for publication in America.

1845 Willich’s attack on Marx had been motivated by the feeling that Marx had wrongfully insulted and betrayed both him and his faction in the Communist League with his ‘revelations’. He accused Marx of having falsified and distorted the evidence presented in defence of the Cologne communists. In The Knight of the Noble Consciousness Marx denied that he had used unseemly tactics or committed indiscretions against his fellow communists. He underlined the essential difference between the Working Men’s Educational Association and the Communist League, contrasting the ‘public, exoteric’ functioning of the first with the secret nature of the League, and explained in detail the issues which had led to a split between the group around Marx and Engels and the sectarian ‘party of adventurers’ under the leadership of Willich and Schapper. This 16-page pamphlet appeared in New York in mid-January.

Marx continued his bi-weekly contributions to the Daily Tribune, for which he received one pound per article in payment. He was at variance with the Tribune’s editors who allowed ‘only rubbish’ to appear under his name, while the best of his articles were used as leaders without any mention of his authorship (see letter to Engels, April 22). In the course of the year Marx and Dana reached an agreement whereby Marx’s articles were to appear henceforth as the anonymous contributions ‘from our London correspondent’. The chief preoccupation of the year s Tribune reports was the war between Russia and Turkey and its repercussions in the West. Marx hoped for a massive proletarian uprising to be ignited by the European war on the Eastern problem and foresaw this revolution as the ‘sixth and greatest European power’ which would intimidate the other five (Feb. 2). He criticized the European statesmen and politicians for their failure to provide an effective policy to check the Russian advances. He pilloried, for example, a liberal member of the British Parliament, Richard Cobden, for sympathising with the Czar’s foreign policy (Feb. 16). Cobden was the author of numerous pamphlets in


18^4 115

support of Czarism. The French commander-in-chief of the Crimean troops, A. Leroy de Saint-Arnaud, also provoked Marx to a sharp critique which presented the French officer as an unscrupulous adventurer and the prototype of Louis Bonaparte’s party of power-mongers (June 24). Similarly, Marx attacked the war policies of the Prussians and the Austrians, terming Austria a tool in the hands of the Russian monarch and his English allies, while Prussia was characterised as ‘greedy, vacillating and pusillanimous’, ready to support whatever party offered it the greatest advantages, regardless of its principles (Feb. 2). Two articles in the Daily Tribune were devoted to the secret diplomatic correspondence between Britain and the other great powers for a division of conquered Turkey. Apart from this war, in the first half of the year Marx also treated British finances, electoral laws and the general politico-economic situation as well as the insurrection in Greece and the Allied occupation.

In early February E. Tucker prepared, with Marx’s aid, a revised edition of the first political fly-sheet under the new title Palmerston and Poland. At the same time Tucker brought out a second Palmerston fly-sheet entitled Palmerston, what has he done? or Palmerston and the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi and containing two more of the six People's Paper articles. Noting that there was ‘a pretty brisk demand’ for these two publications, Tucker suggested to Marx a third (cf. Marx to Engels, July

In February the first meeting took place between Marx and the ‘thorough-going monomaniac’ Russophobe David Urquhart in London. The latter paid Marx the high compliment of saying that his anti-Palmerston articles left the same impression ‘as if a Turk had written them'. Marx retorted that his orientation was rather more revolutionary than Turkophile (Marx to Engels, Feb. 9).

The predominant topic of discussion in Marx’s correspondence with Ferdinand Lassalle was also the Crimean War. Lassalle, who had access to the highest official sources of information on the war, in Prussia, furnished Marx with material for a Tribune article on ‘The Mission of Count Orloff’ (Feb. 20-21). The two men differed on the question of Palmerston and his hue intentions and on a definition of the nature of this war. Lassalle maintained that England had no plan for waging a phoney war’, but that, on the contrary, the British ministry




feared the war would become ‘gruesomely serious’ (March 7). Lassalle attempted to correct Marx’s image of Palmerston who, whatever might be the results of his politics, was not deliberately acting in the interests of the Czar. Marx replied that for him nothing was more certain than the conclusion that ‘Palmerston is a Russian agent’ (April 6). They did agree, however, that ‘the present apathy cannot be overcome by theory’ but only through the heat of an open conflict (Lassalle to Marx, Feb. 10) and that a German revolution would result from an all-out war against Russia.

In March the Chartists called together a ‘Labour Parliament’ and invited Marx to attend as an honorary delegate. Marx declined the invitation but sent a message of congratulations to the assembly, which was published subsequently in the People’s Paper (March 18). ‘The mere assembling of such a Parliament marks a new epoch in the history of the world’ and was certain to arouse the hopes of the working class in Europe and America that it would soon be possible to free their productive powers from the ‘infamous shackles of monopoly’ and subject them to the joint control of their producers. Having conquered nature, the working classes now had the task of conquering man and the most effective step towards this goal, Marx concluded, would be a national organisation of their forces modelled on the Labour Parliament (Marx, Engels, On Britain,

Wilhelm Weitling’s German newspaper Die Republik der Arbeiter, published in New York, brought out a series of articles on ‘The Fundamental Trends of the Times’, among them a critique of Marx’s economic thought which Marx referred to as a ‘furious onslaught on our “corrupt ideas” and unprincipled “frivolity”’ (Letter to Engels, May 6). The author, E. Wiss, compared Marx and his adherents to the Neptunists who maintain that the earth was formed by the striking of the waters with the difference that the former steadfastly persist in their belief that the ‘development of class contradictions’ and the effects thereof, alternating periods of crisis and prosperity, are the moving factors. ‘They calculate that a new society will be constituted when the revolution with its primary impulses is at work among the peoples, when vulcanic man finally rises up on this vulcanic earth to break through the petrified products of his past, to melt down and destroy its tyrannic insolence and oppres


sive strata of class contradictions with subterranean fire’ (Die Republife der Arbeiter, Apr. 1).

The Marx family's financial circumstances continued to be dismal; they were frequently ill, yet lacked the money for medicine and doctor’s fees. In May the children came down with measles, while Marx was suffering from a facial ulcer which hindered his work. In June Jenny Marx was pregnant and, when she became seriously ill, Marx was unable to call the doctor to whom he owed a total of £26. He wrote to Engels for assistance and remarked: ‘Beatus ille who has no family' (June 21).

Marx’s reading for the year was orientated around the themes he treated for the Tribune. In March he took up a history of the Ottoman Empire by Joseph Hammer-Purgstall. He began learning Spanish with the intention of studying the current events and history of Spain, and before long was reading Don Quixote in the original, Calderon, etc. A work which he found most interesting was Augustin Thierry’s Essai sur I’histoire de la formation et des progres du tiers etat (1853). ‘Father of the class struggle’ in French historical writing, Thierry expressed in his Preface a certain indignation with writers who tried to discover class antagonisms between proletariat and bourgeoisie and to find the roots of this conflict in the history of the tiers-etat before 1789. ‘If M. Thierry had read us,’ Marx wrote to Engels, ‘he would have known that the decisive antagonism between bourgeoisie and peuple does not arise of course until the former has ceased its opposition to the clerge and the noblesse as the tiers-ctat’ (July 27). Characteristic of France, Marx noted in reading Thierry, was that the bourgeoisie had traditionally gained strength through parliamentary representation and the bureaucracy and not, as in England, exclusively through commerce and industry.

After doing intensive research in Spanish history with works by Carlos Luis Federico de Bransen, H. Wood, Chateaubriand and Manuel de Marliani, Marx wrote nine articles for the Tribune which were published under the heading ‘Revolutionary Spain’ from September to December. At the same time he continued to send the Tribune regular reports of the actual course of the 1854 revolution which began in summer. Thus, taken together, Marx’s series of articles on Spain provide at once a historical analysis of the circumstances which made that country ripe for revolution and a descriptive account of the most recent outbreak.




In the first artide on ‘Revolutionary Spain’ (Sept. 25) Marx explained the unique character of Spain’s feudal monarchy, which he compared to Asiatic forms of government. Although headed by an absolutist sovereign, the ‘agglomeration of mismanaged republics' called Spain did not become centralised and the local independence nourished popular rivil liberties (Marx, Engels, Revolution in Spain, p. 26). This ‘oriental’ system of despotism tolerated self-government and since Labour was not repartitioned on a national scale nor was there extensive internal exchange of goods, the transition to centralisation was checked.

Marx devoted the third artide to an analysis of the 1808 war for Spanish independence against the Napoleonic forces (Oct. 20). This great popular movement was both nationalist— in opposing the French aggressors—and dynastic, reactionary, superstitious and fanatical, ‘regeneration mixed up with reaction' (ibid., p. 31). For the defenders of Spanish sovereignty the past offered a powerful source of resistance against French encroachments and the country’s ‘oriental’ peculiarities prevented the invaders from localising their attacks: *... the center of Spanish resistance was nowhere and everywhere’ (ibid., p. 36). In the provinces juntas were successfully established* but the weak central junta failed in its revolutionary mission and permitted the old monarchic order to be restored. The people, however, retained their eagerness for regional insurrection and came to support the military in 1820, when the 1812 constitution was reintroduced under Riego.

In the current revolutionary endeavour the military again played the role of the avant-garde, supported by a broad popular movement. However, this was no social revolution which Spain was experiencing, Marx pointed out, for ‘the social question in the modem sense of the word has no foundation in a country with its resources yet undeveloped, and with such a scanty population as Spain ...’ (ibid., p. 126). The country’s sole national institution was its army which therefore symbolised for the people the ‘state’. Consequently, ‘the movable part of the nation has been accustomed to regard the army as the natural instrument of every national rising’ (ibid., p. 96).

Just at the point when the revolution seemed likely to succeed, the vivid Spanish imagination made of the General Espartero a great national hero, whose reputed greatness, however, had no


i854 ^1J9

logical connections with the facts. With his return to power the counter-revolution began. Marx observed:

It is one of the peculiarities of revolutions that just as a people seem about to take a great start and to open a new era, they suffer themselves to be ruled by the delusions of the past and surrender all the power and influence they have so dearly won into the hands of men who represent, or are supposed to represent, the popular movement of a by-gone epoch (ibid., p. i02f.—Aug. 19).

In October, in connection with his studies on Spain, Marx read Chateaubriand's Congres de Verona (1838) which was written in a style he described as a most repulsive mixture of ‘elegant scepticism and Voltarianism of the 18th century and fashionable 19th-century sentimentalism and romanticism' (letter to Engels, Oct. 26). The ‘conceited dandy' Chateaubriand openly admitted in his book to having been personally responsible for the French aggression against Spain in 1822.

As the fighting in the East continued, Marx reviewed the issues, covert and professed, which motivated this prolonged straggle. Under the guise of religious protectionism, rival bourgeois and aristocratic powers were exploiting nationalist movements for their own expansionist aims. Under the pretext of sacredness, the Crimean conflict was as much racial as national and represented a ‘democratic revolt against ecclesiastical authority’, which authority still retained a strong hold over state and population in Czarist Russia. ‘Russia has claimed for its war of might against right a religious sanction as a war of the viceregent of God against the infidel Turks' (Blackstock and Hoselitz, p. 152). Nonetheless, this revolt marked a trend whose ultimate development was undeniably ‘towards abrogating absolute authority and establishing the independence of the individual judgment and conscience in the religious as well as the political sphere of life’ (ibid., p. 153).

The proletarian revolution, however, which Marx had hoped for at the outset of this conflict, failed to take place and, related to this failure, Europe proved incapable of conducting a real ^War> ‘a decent, hardy, hard-fought war’, as Marx imagined it, which would bring the Eastern Question to a decisive climax (August 17).

Reading Roswell Ripley’s history of The War with Mexico (1849), Marx was particularly struck by the figure of General