Study of his life nd work maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale

Scott, reputedly America’s first general, but according to Ripley a most ‘vulgar, petty, untalented, whining, jealous bastard and a humbug, who, while conscious of owing everything to the bravery of his soldiers and the skill of his divisions, plays low- down tricks in order to assure himself of glory’ (letter to Engels, Dec. 2).

Lassalle invited Marx to become a London correspondent for the Breslau Neue Oder-Zeitung, whose ownership had just been assumed by Lassalle’s cousin. On December 20 Marx accepted this offer in a letter to the editor Moritz Eisner.

1855 With the new year Marx began his work for the NOZ, which published roughly a hundred of his reports during the next twelve months along with a substantial number by Engels. Marx’s contributions to the Daily Tribune numbered only ten and it was Engels who wrote more frequently for New York this year.

Marx reported for the NOZ on international issues as well as on British politics and current events. His first article was a retrospective on recent world political affairs. He remarked that the British declaration of war against Russia was evidence of the weight of the popular masses on Parliament’s decisions and signaled the end of bourgeois political domination (Jan. 2). In January Marx wrote several articles on the latest developments in the Crimean War, in particular on the ‘Four Points’; and also commented on British trade and the present commercial crisis.

On January 16 Eleanor Marx was born—into bleak London weather and equally dismal material circumstances. Marx feared the worst for their youngest ‘bonafide traveller’, he wrote Engels (Feb. 13), for she soon became seriously ill.

Rereading his excerpt notebooks on ‘Economics’—he wanted to ‘master’ their contents and have the essential ready for the moment when he would actually begin writing (letter to Engels, Feb. 13)—Marx overstrained his eyes and caught an inflammation. Thanks to his wealth of notes and excerpts Marx was able to provide Engels with a detailed account of the parliamentary proceedings under the Aberdeen government from 1852-55 and of the machinations between government and business for the same period. Engels's article, entitled ‘The Last British


Government’ appeared as a leader in the Daily Tribune on February 23.

Marx also furnished Lassalle with figures on the importation of grain to England since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. He hazarded the conclusion that, while the price relations of industrial products had not been effected by the change in importation laws, the relative value of wages in agriculture had dropped in respect to the landowner's profit. This was a necessary consequence of the development of capital, as Marx had elaborated in his 1847 pamphlet on the free trade problem. He promised Lassalle statistical material from his notebooks in support of this hypothesis, adding that other works on this topic would undoubtedly appear soon since ‘The period of crisis in England is simultaneously that of theoretical investigations’

Apart from research necessary for his current journalism, Marx did little reading of a personal nature. In a letter to Engels on March 8 he recounted having studied Roman history at the beginning of the year and drew the following conclusion from his investigations:

The internal history [of Rome] may plainly be resolved into the struggle between small and large landowners, modified naturally by the circumstances specific to slavery. The relations caused by debts, which from the start of Roman history played such an important role, figure now only in a family sense for small property holdings.

Marx declined an invitation of the International Emigrant Committee to attend a banquet on the anniversary of the February Revolution and to become an active member of their organisation. His reasons, he explained to Engels, were threefold : first of all, he considered such gatherings to be pointless; he did not want to attract the attention of the British police unnecessarily; and finally he wished to avoid meeting Alexander Herzen, having no desire ‘to see old Europe renewed with Russian blood’, an opinion he later repeated in the first edition °f Capital (Feb. 13).

Marx reported in February and March for the NOZ chiefly °n British affairs; on the parliamentary situation and Lord Balmerston, on the military—using information supplied by Engels—on Ireland's misery and growing unrest. He also wrote articles on the reaction of the British press to the death




of the Russian Czar. Typical of Marx’s invectives against the British upper dass were his remarks on Lord Palmerston, a man who ‘with unconsdonable adroitness ... has duped and cheated both friend and foe’ (NOZ, March 3). He also exposed the corruption in governmental and military affairs, where nepotism and bribery had become ‘the two factors that count’, just as in the Church. Corruption was facilitated, Marx wrote, by the British Constitution, a document which he analysed in the Tribune on March 24. This constitution amounted to no more than a ‘superannuated compromise, by which the general governing power is abandoned to some sections of the middle class, on condition that the whole of the real Government... is secured to the landed aristocracy’ (Marx, Engels, On Britain, p. 410). Through the war, however, and the commercial crisis which came in its wake the bankruptcy and helplessness of the old system had become evident. Marx predicted that the climax would soon be reached and then ‘will the mask be torn off which has hitherto hid the real political features of Great Britain’; the crass antagonisms between proletariat and bourgeoisie would be openly recognised and England ‘compelled to share in the general social evolutions of European society' (ibid., p. 412).

Early in March, Marx’s eight-year-old son Edgar, ‘Musch’, was taken ill with a dangerous gastric fever. Marx was himself suffering from frequent coughing spells and the doctor recommended that the family leave the unhealthy district of Soho where they were living. This was of course not financially feasible for the Marxes, who could scarcely make ends meet even with Engels’s occasional contributions to their budget. Marx tended his son through weeks of critical illness, yet his condition worsened. The concerned father wrote to his friend Engels:

My wife has been ill for a week now as never before because of mental agitation. My own heart is bleeding and my head is on fire although of course I must maintain my composure. Not for a moment during this illness has the child betrayed his usual nature, at once original, good-natured and self-reliant (March 30).

On April 6 little Musch, ‘animating spirit’ of the Marx household, died in his father’s arms. For Marx and his wife the house seemed suddenly deserted and desolated; both were completely ‘down broken’. Only one thought consoled him, Marx wrote to his friend:


Amidst all the terrible moments of anguish which I have gone through in these past days, the thought of you and your friendship has kept me going and the hope that together we still have an intelligent task to accomplish in this world (April 12).

On April 18 Marx and his wife travelled to Manchester where they spent two weeks with Engels, fenny continued to suffer physically and mentally from her bereavement and Marx, too, admitted to Lassalle how much he felt the loss of their son:

Bacon said that really important men have so many relations to the world and to nature, so many objects of interest that they can easily get over every loss. I do not belong to their number; My child’s death has deeply affected me, both mentally and emotionally and I still feel the loss as acutely as on the first day. My poor wife is completely downbroken as well (July 28).

Upon Marx’s recommendation Engels undertook to write two articles on the Panslavic movement, which were published subsequently in both the NOZ and the Daily Tribune (April-May). Marx transmitted them to Eisner of the NOZ, remarking that they were intended as part of a series and stressing the importance of informing Germany ‘of the danger which is threatening’ (April 17). The Daily Tribune made certain changes in Engels's text which distorted his views in conformity with the Panslavism of one of the editors. Engels’s own attitude was most decidedly anti-Panslavic. He described this movement as the drive to liberate the Slav peoples under foreign domination combined with a political action whose aim was the destruction of Western culture: ‘It leaves Europe with only one alternative: submission to the Slavic yoke or destruction forever of its offensive strength—Russia’ (Blackstock and Hoselitz, p. 85; April 21). Although it had its origins in Austria as the offspring of the Slavic philologists who attempted to extract from linguistic similarities a doctrine of Slavic unity, Panslavism had not found its driving force until it was espoused by Russia, which turned it into a threat for all Europe.

From May to July Marx's articles in the NOZ centred prin- ^C|pally around political and economic affairs in England. He ^Wfote on the debates in Parliament, where the bureaucracy Seated ‘an inexhaustible arsenal of parliamentary chicanery,




hair-splitting and tactic manoeuvering’; on the association for administrative reform; on the Chartists, who opposed both the war in the East and the reform proposals. Marx reviewed the various Chartist demands, beginning with the universal suffrage, which would assure the popular masses of political power ‘as a means towards the realisation of their social needs’ (NOZ, June 8).

The Chartists and thousands of other protesting British citizens assembled in Hyde Park on June 24 and July 1 to demonstrate against the passage of a Beer Bill and a Sunday Trading Bill, measures which prohibited small shopkeepers from staying open on Sundays and closed the public amusement centres for the greater part of the day. Marx, who also attended and reported on these demonstrations for the NOZ, saw these laws as attempts by the Church to re-establish and consolidate its power over the masses with compulsory measures that, in fact, fostered the interests of the beer magnates and large commercial enterprises. The arbitrariness of these measures prompted Marx to compare England with medieval France:

In the 15th century the French aristocracy said: Voltaire for us, the mass and tithes for the people. In the 19th century the English aristocracy says: pious phrases for us, Christian practice for the people (June 28).

The scenes he witnessed in Hyde Park provided Marx with ample evidence that the struggle against clericalism had assumed the proportions of a battle between rich and poor and convinced him moreover, ‘that yesterday in Hyde Park the English revolution began' (ibid.).

In May E. Tucker published in book form three of Marx’s Palmerston articles, mentioning the author by name in his Preface. Marx feared that political repercussions might follow which would endanger his precarious situation as an alien in England.

The ‘incomprehensible war’ against Russia continued and Marx furnished the NOZ with numerous reports, dealing in particular with the military affairs of British and French. In the NOZ on August 31 he drew attention to the frequent desertions from the British army stationed outside Sebastopol. The reason for these desertions was to be found in the traditional




1855 125

British method of keeping discipline within the ranks, namely, flogging. While the other European armies had begun to abolish corporal punishment, in England ‘the cat-o’-nine-tails has been conserved in all its efficiency as an instrument of torture equal in rank to the Russian harrow’. In reality flogging destroyed discipline instead of maintaining it by breaking the soldier’s morale and his point d’honneur. Translated in social terms, this military practice was but another means of retaining the aristocratic nature of British institutions.

Earlier in the year Lord John Russell, colonial minister and president of the Privy Council, resigned his office in face of the growing crisis in the Crimea. Marx commented on the parliamentary happenings and devoted a special series of six articles to Russell and his parliamentary and ministerial career. The articles were published in the NOZ from July 28-August 15 and in the Daily Tribune on August 28. A ‘classic representative of modern Whiggism’, Russell was incapable of transforming his opinions and views into deeds. Whatever the issue might be, Jewish emancipation, anti-clericalism, law reform, free trade or the Irish emancipation, Russell failed each time to realise the standpoint he had taken. His true genius, Marx noted, lay in his ability to reduce these generous political measures to trivial parliamentary bills or to dissolve them magically before they became law. His career and his reputation were built on false pretences, began under the pretence of tolerance and liberalism and ended on a note of bigotry:

Placed by birth, connections and social accident 011 a colossal pedestal, he always remained the same homunculus—a malignant and distorted dwarf on the top of a pyramid. The history of the world exhibits, perhaps, no other man so great in littleness (NYDT, Aug. 28).

In a letter to Eisner on September 11 Marx declared that in view of the present financial crisis of the NOZ he would be willing to continue his reports even without payment. He valued highly the fact that ‘the NOZ publishes the extreme limit of what ^can possibly be published under the present press circumstances’ ^ln Germany (to Eisner, Nov. 8). Although this offer might suggest otherwise, Marx’s financial circumstances had not improved.

ⁿ the contrary, he was obliged to hide out with Engels in Manchester from September 12 to December 4 to avoid a legal ^action for non-payment of medical bills. In October, having




mistakenly assumed that Eisner had abandoned the paper to | group of Breslau liberals, Marx interrupted his bi-weekly reports. In November he resumed reporting for the Daily Tribune as well and came to an agreement with Dana, whereby he would be paid ten dollars per article for bi-weekly contributions. All of his Tribune articles now appeared anonymously. The year’s last pieces of journalism dealt with the Crimean War, speculation on the European markets and British politics.

1856 During the winter 1855-56 Marx had several visits with his estranged friend Bruno Bauer, who was spending some time in England. Marx described Bauer as a light-hearted old gentleman, a confirmed bachelor as always, and hazarded the guess that Bauer wanted to introduce ‘scientific theology’, now dead in Germany, in England. In his letters to Engels Marx recounted the conversations he had with Bauer who held class struggles to be illusory and told Marx that the proletariat had no hatred for the other classes. A few pennies more in wages and everything would be in order (see letters to Engels, Jan. 18 and Feb. 12).

This year Marx contributed roughly two dozen articles to the Daily Tribune and seven to the Chartist’s People’s Paper. The London Free Press reprinted between November 1855 and February of this year the 1853 series on Lord Palmerston. British affairs were the chief topic of Marx’s writing for the Daily Tribune along with the Crimean War. However, as he wrote to Engels on February 12, ‘This newspaper writing is getting to be most bothersome now, since nothing at all is going on in England and the change in the economic situation is not very clear yet. At the moment the decisive factor is the swindling on the stock markets, but for this the necessary material is lacking. Early in February Marx began investigating a number of documents on British diplomatic relations which he had discovered accidentally in the British Museum Library. He then decided to use his findings for a detailed study of the secret collaboration between St Petersburg and London which helped Russia to its place as a world power. Marx was particularly interested in finding a publisher for his ‘curiosa’ which would expose Britain s complicity with Russia and the conscious submission of British statesmen to the will of the Eastern despots.

In one of his first articles for the Daily Tribune this year,




Marx anticipated the viewpoint sketched above. Reporting on Traditional English Policy’, Marx stated that historical evidence did not corroborate Britain's professed opposition to Russian expansionism but that, on the contrary, British diplomats had always behaved as Russia’s lackeys. Marx recounted the example of the statesman Sir James Harris, who, during the American War of Independence, convinced his government of the ‘necessity of nourishing the Russian appetite, if her aid against the American colonies was to be secured'. Marx queried the logic behind such an act: ‘Was Russia less barbarous then than she is pictured now? Was she less then that hideous depotism which modern Whigs in such terrible colour portray her?' (NYDT, Jan. 12). Marx could only denounce the course chosen by the British as a betrayal of their own interests in Europe.

Marx reported on the approaching conclusion to the long war in the Crimea in an article entitled ‘The Results of the War’ (Feb. 16). Despite its costs in terms of men and materials, this war had shaken neither the political nor the social state of Europe: ‘The squandering of these immense resources and the sacrifice of torrents of blood have gained nothing for the people’. Marx’s commentary on the Treaty of Paris, dated March 30, appeared in the Daily Tribune on April 14. He attached far greater significance to this treaty than to the treaty of 1840-41 in so far as it signalled the end of the Holy Alliance and pointed to new ‘affinities and attractions’ between countries, notably France and Russia. The war itself Marx termed ‘exclusively diplomatic’, and like most other European wars it had been conducted ‘by princes for their individual aims and interests; of course the various classes of peoples and nations have not been contemplated and received no real satisfaction’ from the struggle.

During the first part of the year Marx began an intensive study of Slavic history, literature and culture. Again he inspired Engels to write a series of articles on Panslavism for the Daily Tribune. In corresponding with Engels, Marx provided him with an abundance of bibliographical material and much critical commentary on the works in question. Marx sent the finished manuscripts to Charles Dana, who returned them, however, in September unpublished. Marx later learned that Dana had been influenced by a member of the Tribune's editorial staff who was m the service of the Russian government. Although the articles Never appeared in print, ‘we have the honour’, Marx wrote to




Engels, ‘of having, or rather of having had, our articles inspected and censured by the Russian legation’ (Oct. 30).

For the Daily Tribune and both the People’s Paper and the Free Press in London Marx prepared a critique of the British defeat at Kars when this Turkish city fell into the hands of the Russians on November 28, 1855. Supporting his argumentation with official documents and statements of the participants in the struggle, Marx claimed that the British Government deliberately foiled the military defence of Kars by falsifying communiques and suppressing important papers. A ‘phoney war’ had been fought; a ‘phoney peace’ was concluded and the heroes of the British army and diplomacy could collect their rewards:

History exhibits, perhaps, no parallel more bitterly ludicrous than that between the British Government making England the laughingstock of Europe by its adventures in the Crimea, the Baltic, and the Pacific, and the rewards lavished on the tools of its miscarriages ... (People’s Paper, April 26).

A series of four articles on ‘The Fall of Kars’ appeared in The People’s Paper (April), one in the Tribune (April 18) and one entitled ‘Kars Papers Curiosities' in the Free Press (May 3).

Marx was the only member of the London emigration to be invited to a celebration on April 14 for the fourth anniversary of The People’s Paper. He delivered a short address in which he spoke of the social revolution which had been foreshadowed by the revolutions of 1848-49. Characterising the 19th century as a time in which ‘everything seems pregnant with its contrary’, Marx summed up the antagonism between modern industry and scientific progress on the one hand and social relations on the other: ‘At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.’ Amidst the signs of dissolution and progress, ‘signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and the poor prophets of regression’, Marx saw an element of potential social upheaval in the ‘new-fangled men’ of modern industrial society. These pioneers, with the English working dass at their fore, would aid ‘our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the Revolution’ to emandpate the world from the domination of capital and wages slavery (Marx, Engels, On Britain, pp. 446L). Occasional artides were devoted in this year to the developments in Prussia or


1856 129

Italy. A new upsurge of constitutionalism in Italy provided the motive for an article on the House of Savoy, ruler of Sardinia and of Piedmont (May). Bourgeoisie and peasant and proletarian masses had begun co-operating in Italy in order to check the power of what Marx referred to as the ‘Piedmontese nightmare’. By contrast, Prussia did not seem to be making progress towards constitutional democracy and Marx could only discern signs of dissention and disaccord among all elements of society (NYDT,

In May Engels, while travelling throughout Ireland, observed the people and their living conditions. He wrote to Marx about the tangible reality of Ireland: famine and devastation. Ireland was indeed England’s ‘first colony’:

How often have the Irish set out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed down, politically and industrially! Through consistent oppression they have been artificially made into a racked and ruined nation ... (May 23).

Marx’s well-documented study of the 18th-century diplomatic affairs between Russia and England which he had been preparing since the beginning of the year was published in abridged form in the Sheffield Free Press (june-Aug.). After Marx had objected to unauthorised changes, the full text of The Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the 18th Century was later printed in the London Free Press (Aug. 1856-April 1857).

The seven documents which Marx revealed in his secret diplomatic history exposed the expansionist plans of the Russian Czar and the deliberate, intentional aid which the British diplomats granted him, while damaging their own national interests, both political and financial. In the secret despatches which Marx discovered and published the British statesmen are found conversing about ‘Russia and her rulers in a tone of awful reserve, abject servility, and cynical submission’ (Secret Diplo- natic History..., p. 91). Despite many warnings at home about ^e Russian plans for world domination, the British diplomats Persisted in fawning for ‘a strong glow of friendship’ from the ussian Empress Ann without, for their part, receiving even ^e slightest promise of material advantage. Claims that British ^rade had expanded during the reign of Peter the Great, who ^as supported by London, were greatly exaggerated. Neither



navigation nor commerce in general profited from the opening of trade relations with Russia, at the expense of the trade with Sweden. Thus ‘there devolved on the Cabinet, at least, the onus of inventing mercantile pretexts, however futile, for the measures of foreign policy’ (ibid., p. 91).

Beginning in the 14th century an immense empire emerged in the ‘historical arena’ under the reigns of Ivan I, Kalita (1328- 40) and of Ivan III, surnamed the Great (1440-1505). Ivan Kalita, Marx recounted, overthrew the Tartar yoke with ‘the Machiavellianism of the usurping slave. His own weakness—his: slavery —he turned into the mainspring of his strength’ (ibid., p. 1,84). His policies endured under his successors and, as Marx stated in a section of the history which was omitted in the first printing, ‘A simple substitution of names and dates will prove to evidence that between the policy of Ivan III, and that of modern Russia, there exists not similarity but sameness’ (ibid., p. 120). -J

Peter the Great in the 17th and 18th centuries merited recognition for his successful transformation of the traditional Muscovite methods of local expansion into methods worthy of a country aspiring to unlimited power. He took hold of the Baltic provinces and made Petersburg ‘the eccentric centre of the Empire' and his own ‘abode of cosmopolitan intrigue’ (ibid., p. 124). From here was able to win from Europe the necessary elements of culture, military cunning, bureaucrats and teachers ‘who were to drill Russians into that varnish of civilisation that adapts them to the technical appliances of the Western peoples, without imbuing them with their ideas' (ibid., p. 125). Czar Peter thus succeeded in coupling ‘the political craft of the Mongol slave with the proud aspiration of the Mongol master, to whom Genghis Khan had, by will, bequeathed his conquest of the earth’ (ibid., 121).

Marx’s commentaries, published in the summer of the year, on the Spanish Revolution and the founding of the French bank Credit mobilier are of particular interest as historical analyses which surpass the scope of ordinary reporting. In Marx’s words, the recent Spanish insurrection illustrated anew ‘the character of most of the European struggles of 1848-49, and of those thereafter to take place on the Western portion of that continent’ (Marx, Engels, On Spain, p. 147). The struggle began typically with the battle lines drawn between the middle classes, supported by industry, and the powers of the military and the royal court.

The alignment of forces broke down, however, as soon as the working class joined the rebellious bourgeoisie against the despotic rulers. As in the earlier revolutions, the middle class, frightened by the prospect of social upheaval, sought the protection of the detested military. This, Marx maintained, was the ‘secret of the standing armies of Europe, which otherwise will be incomprehensible, to the future historian’ (ibid., p. 147). The bourgeoisie was thus forced to choose between renouncing all political power to the despots or renouncing its own monopoly on social power to the advantage of the working class (Aug. 8).

In June Marx embarked on a long and detailed analysis of the crisis of speculation which had gripped Europe. He began with three articles in the Daily Tribune on the French joint-stock bank Credit mobilier. This project began in 1852, when Louis Bonaparte discovered a means to convert ‘all the property and all the industry of France into a personal obligation towards Louis Bonaparte’. He was aided in this enterprise by the exfollowers of Saint-Simon, whose belief was that class differences would disappear ‘before the creation of universal wealth by some new-fangled scheme of public wealth' (June 24). Bonaparte had the luck to find two such former Saint-Simonians, the brothers Pereire, ‘who with their practical experience had the boldness to suspect stockjobbing behind Socialism, law behind Saint-Simon’, and became the initiators of ‘Bonapartist Socialism’ and founders of Credit mobilier. These banks engaged in activities similar to modern holding companies and realised their greatest revenues by speculating on the stock market. Marx foresaw the onbreak of a new era in political economy thanks to such companies* for they

revealed the productive powers of association not suspected before, ^and called into life industrial creations on a scale unattainable by die efforts of individual capitalists; on the other hand it must not be forgotten, that in joint-stock companies it is not the individuals “nt are associated, but the capital ... The concentration of capital has been accelerated and, as a natural corollary, the downfall of the small middle class (July 11). }■

^{a re}tated article published in October and devoted to the Monetary Crisis in Europe’, Marx endeavoured to trace the ^Slgnificance of socio-economic developments since the 1848 Uprisings. This period had been one of respite which permitted




capitalist society ‘a last, condensed display of all its tendencies. In politics, adoration of the sword; in morals, general corruption and hypocritical return to explained superstitions; in political economy, the mania of getting rich without the pains of producing’ (NYDT, Oct. 15).

Aided by inheritances from Jenny Marx’s deceased relatives, the family was able to move into more spacious living quarters in the healthier district of London near Maitland Park (Sept.). At this time Marx again took up his excerpt notebooks in connection with his NYDT articles on economic problems and prepared a collection of quotations on monetary theory. He also studied Polish history, in particular, the divisions of Poland since 1789. He read, in French, a book by Mieroslawski on The History of the Polish Commune from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. He became a decided partisan of Poland, noting the historic fact ‘that the intensity and vitality of all revolutions since 1789 are to be measured with near certainty in direct relation to their attitude towards Poland’ (Marx to Engels, Dec. 2). Poland, in other words, was their ‘external thermometer’.

The current conflict between Prussia and Switzerland over the small principality of Neufchatel inspired Marx to study Prussian history and the rise of the House of the Hohenzollern. He learned that this great Northern power had won its empire through ‘small-penny thievery, bribery, outright buys, manipulation with inheritances, etc.’, that all its activities were characterised by mediocrity and held upright with ‘punctual accounting, avoidance of extremes, exactness in military drill, a certain pedestrian vulgarity and “church regulations”', Marx wrote to Engels. ‘It's disgusting! ’ (Dec. 2).


IV

1857-1863