Review – Marx’s journalistic writings

Penguin has done the left – and the world in general – a huge favour by their recent publication of Dispatches for the New York Tribune – selected journalism of Karl Marx. Edited by CNN economics journalist James Ledbetter, and with a foreword by the most readable of Marx’s biographers, Francis Wheen, this series of contemporary journalistic pieces for the New York Tribune, over 10 turbulent years of world history between 1852 and 1862, present a fresh, vibrant, morally and critically engaged Marx.  This gives us a somewhat different picture from the commonly misconceived notion that - after fleeing the continent following the failure of the revolutionary movements of 1848 - Marx was a largely sedentary figure, haunting the British Museum and writing Capital.

Although his friend and collaborator Engels was always good for a bung, Marx had to do something to make a living while pursuing his economic researches. Writing articles on the political, economic and international issues of the day for the social reforming New York Tribune proved one way of doing that and still maintaining a useful émigré anonymity (relatively) this side of the Atlantic. And though he often complained in correspondence to Engels about the onerous economic prostitution this entailed, in this collection at least, Marx reveals himself to be both first rate writer and dissector of the current events of the day, often bringing both a prodigious intellect and savage wit to his subject matter.

And the subject matter is manifold, from the Opium Wars to the American Civil War, from continental political diplomacy to the death of vagrants from starvation in England, from economic analysis of the state and private finance in Louis Bonaparte’s France, to the brutality of bailiffs in Ross-shire and the Highland clearances (I kid you not!), Marx’s short articles burn with the immediacy of the times, and often, a relevance to the politics of today that might surprise the reader.  Marx’s rich and fulsome dialectical analysis is always there, of course; there can be no doubt he brings his own worldview to all he surveys. The German professor is ever present but a Chartist moral indignation also flows vehemently from his pen. Take this passage from a piece published in March 1853:   On the Continent, hanging, shooting and transportation is the order of the day. But the executioners are themselves tangible and hangable beings, and their deeds are recorded in the conscience of the whole civilised world. At the same time there acts in England an invisible, intangible and silent despot, condemning individuals, in extreme cases, to the most cruel of deaths, and driving, in its noiseless, every day working, whole races and classes of men from the soil of their forefathers, like the angel with the fiery sword who drove Adam from Paradise. In the latter form the work of the unseen despot is called forced emigration, in the former it is called starvation.   No cold academic moral or cultural relativism there then!  Or take this short extract from The Increase of Lunacy in Great Britain where Marx’s carefully calculated black humour shows itself (as it often does throughout this book)

There is, perhaps, no better established fact in British society than that of the corresponding growth of modern wealth and pauperism. Curiously enough, the same law seems to hold good with respect to lunacy. The increase of lunacy in Great Britain has kept pace with the increase of exports, and has outstripped the increase in population…

Such is Marx’s facility with the English language that one ceases to remember he was writing in his second language, almost as easily as one forgets the majority of Beethoven’s major works were written by someone chronically deaf. In fact, the fastest form of international communication at the time was by boat, and Marx’s method of finding out what was happening was often the reading of source documents and dispatches arriving in the Port of London, often in their original language which Marx would undertake to learn sufficiently to translate.

Wheen, in his introduction concludes that, even if Marx had done nothing else, he would have deserved to have been remembered as one of the nineteenth century’s greatest journalists. I don’t know enough about nineteenth century journalism to comment, but as history written contemporaneously this book fascinates, as writing it enthrals, as analysis it is priceless and as insight into Marx the socialist and human being it stands as a worthy complement to Wheen’s excellent 1999 biography itself.

Penguin Classics have set the price for this paperback at £12.99, so it’s no snip – but, go on, you’re worth it.