Letter: Political and Social Reforms. (1933)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Political and Social Reforms.

Clapham,

September 24th, 1933.

Dear Comrades,

Seeing that the S.P.G.B. claim that, in this country, at any rate, at the present time, the only known course open to the workers to capture the seat of Government is the vote, that being so, one can logically claim that the franchise is a social reform that will eventually fundamentally benefit the working class.

The reason I express this point of view is that, was one of your speakers correct when he asked an audience to name one “ social reform ” that has fundamentally benefited the working class?

Now, Marx, writing on the Chartists, said : “But universal suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat form the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground, civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class, and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more Socialist measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent. Its inevitable result here is the political supremacy of the working class.” (New York Tribune, August 25th, 1852. Quoted by Labour Monthly, December, 1929.)

Your speaker took the opposite viewpoint, saying “that the workers had recently returned the Nationalist Government. Also that the ruling class Had given further suffrage to the women.” Quite so, that is because the workers are not mentally equipped with the necessary Socialist knowledge, and, therefore, is not a condemnation of the "social reform,” namely, “the Franchise,” which Marx agrees is a Socialist measure. Your reply to my letter, re “ The Vote,” in September, 1927, said, “We would strongly urge them (black workers) to agitate for the franchise.”

Yours fraternally,

T. W. C.

Reply.

Our correspondent has, we think, completely misunderstood the speaker whose remarks he quotes.

It is usual to refer to changes in the machinery of Government as “political" reforms, and to keep the phrase “social reforms” for such measures as old-age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, etc. The speaker in question would therefore not expect his statement, that no social reform had “fundamentally benefited the working-class," to be understood as meaning that the franchise is useless.

Our correspondent falls into a second misunderstanding when he fails to separate the present misuse of the franchise from its future correct use. It is true, as Marx said, that the franchise will inevitably result in the political supremacy of the working class. It is also true to say (as our speaker is reported as saying) that the workers have used their votes to return a capitalist Government to power. Our speaker would therefore have been quite correct if he had also said that the franchise has not yet been used by the workers in such a way as to be of fundamental benefit to them.

When they become Socialists the working class will know very well how to use the vote.

Ed. Comm.

Early days of globalisation (2006)

Book Review from the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational by Nick Robins (Pluto Press)

I often gauge how much I have enjoyed a book by the amount of highlighting and marginal notes I make in pencil. This book, like many on my shelves, will horrify those who prize pristine, unmarked first editions.

On 31 December 1600 a precursor of the modern transnational corporation came into existence. Its pioneering techniques in the field of trade and commerce, and downright murder and corruption, preceded by centuries the noxious business practices that we associate with today’s all-powerful corporations, many of whom have a higher turn over than small countries.

This book presents as a meticulous account of perhaps the most powerful corporation that ever lived, tracing how it came into existence, how it operated, its inner structure, the role of its own armies in its rise to supremacy, its part in the Bengal Famine when 10 million died as a result of the Company’s market manipulation, its militaristic role in the Opium Wars, its part in the Indian Mutiny and the Boston Tea Party and how, for the last twenty years of its existence, it ruled India as an agent of the British Empire. When it comes to downright exploitation, corruption, slaughter and sheer negligence and indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps no company that ever existed comes near the East India Company in its ruthless pursuit of profit, whilst refashioning the world commercial order in the interests of privilege and power for hundreds of years to come.

In its time the company had many critics, most notably Edmund Burke, “the real champion of India’s identity”, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Burke fought long and hard to impeach the Company’s Governor General Warren Hastings for the devastation wrought on India in its endless search for profit.

Commencing his opening speech at Westminster Hall in February 1788, Burke said:

“I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate . . . I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in very age, rank, situation and conditions of life.”

Despite Burke’s opening four day tirade against Hastings – one of the longest opening speeches in history – during which women were carried out fainting, at which the Speaker was “rendered speechless” and at which spectators were willing to pay ú50 for a seat, despite an ensuing trial that lasted from February 1787 to April 1795, Hastings was acquitted.

Considering the Company’s operations for the New York Daily Tribune in the summer of 1853, Marx noted five characteristics: 

“ . . . a permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable system, of justice and law..”

Satirising the Company’s administrative system, he commented how there existed “no government by which so much is written and so little done.” Marx furthermore viewed the company as a tool of British capitalism plc in India, observing how “the aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy wanted to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it”.

The Second Opium War was, in Marx’s view, attributable to the Company’s operations in the East and its insistence that it had the right to swamp China with drugs in the name of profit, regardless of the addiction-induced misery its trade created or how the Chinese authorities felt. He wrote:

“While openly preaching free trade in poison, it secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture. Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to, lie at the bottom of its ’freedom’”.

In eight carefully researched chapters, Robins traces the Company’s operations from its inception as a trader in spices to its role in running the Indian sub-continent on behalf of the British crown, withholding, one imagines, very little regardless how gruesome, and there indeed are some stomach-churning passages.

In the final chapter, his analysis masterly done, Robins, contemplating the state of corporate play today, reflects how the Company’s legacy reveals the importance of taking on the mega-corporations who presently rampage across the planet unhindered, and this, for socialists, is the book’s one failing.

Robins’ remedy for curbing corporate power is simple:

“First of all, its market power and political influence must be limited . . Next, stringent rules are needed to ensure that management and investors do not use the corporation as a tool for their short-term interests . . And, finally, clear and forcible systems of justice have to be in place to hold the corporation to account for damage to society and the environment.”

Thus, a brilliant attack on unchecked power in the pursuit of profit is marred by the simple request that the capitalist class behaves and shows a little more respect when carrying out its obscene business, and that the executive arm of capitalism – government – hurries to the rescue of society and the natural environment. Smiley-faced capitalism is, for Robins, the only remedy. Warren Hastings laughs in his grave.

All said, if you’re into the study of corporate power gone mad, read this.

John Bissett

An Unusual Friendship. by Franz Mehring (1920)

From the August 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The victory of Marx’s career was not only due to the man’s enormous power. According to all human probability, he would have succumbed sooner or later, if he had not found in Engels a friend, of whose self-sacrificing fidelity we have had no accurate picture until the publication of the correspondence of the two men.

No other such spectacle is afforded in all recorded history. Couples of friends, of historical importance, are found throughout history, and German history has its examples also. Frequently their lifework is so closely interwoven that it is difficult to decide which accomplishment belongs to each one of them. But always there has been a persistent remnant of individual obstinacy or stubbornness, or perhaps only an instinctive reluctance to surrender one’s own personality, which, in the words of the poet, “is the highest blessing of the children of men.” After all, Luther saw in Melanchton only a chicken-livered scholar, while Melanchton regarded Luther as a coarse peasant. And in the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller, anyone with sound senses can discern the secret lack of attunement between the great Privy councillor and the small Court councillor. There is no trace of this ultimate human weakness in the friendship of Marx and Engels: the more their thoughts and labors become interwoven, the more each one of them remained a full man, complete in himself.

Their exteriors were quite different. Engels, a blond Teuton of tall stature, of English manners, as an observer once said of him, always well dressed, with a bearing that was rigid with the training not only of the barracks, but also of the counting-house. With six clerks, he said, he would organize a branch of the administration a thousand times more simple and efficient than with sixty government councillors, who cannot even write legibly and get your books all balled up, so that the Devil himself can make nothing of them. A member of the Manchester Stock Exchange, perfectly respectable in the business dealings and the amusements of the English bourgeoisie, its fox-hunts and its Christmas parties, he was yet a tireless mental worker and fighter, who, in a little house on the outskirts of the city held his treasure concealed, his little Irish girl, in whose arms he would refresh himself whenever he tired of the human turmoil in the world without.

Marx, on the other hand, short, thick-set, with flashing eyes and a lion’s mane of ebon hue, betraying his Semitic origin; of careless exterior, a father whose family cares alone would be sufficient to keep him away from the social life of the great city; so intensely devoted to consuming intellectual labor that he has hardly the time to gulp down a hasty dinner and uses up his bodily strength to all hours of the night; a tireless thinker, to whom thought is a supreme pleasure; in this respect a genuine successor of Kant, of Fichte, and particularly of Hegel, whose sentence he loved to repeat: “Even the most criminal thought of a scoundrel is more sublime and more magnificent than the miracles of the celestial sphere,” but differing from them in that his thoughts inexorably drive him to action: he was unpractical in small matters but very practical in large matters; far too helpless to arrange a petty household, but incomparably capable in the business of recruiting and leading an army that was to revolutionize the world.

If it is true that “the style is the man,” we must also note their differences as writers. Each in his way was a master of language, a linguistic genius, with a mastery of many foreign languages and even of individual dialects. In this field Engels was even more remarkable than Marx, but whenever writing in his mother-tongue, even in his letters and of course in his writings, he exercises a most austere care to keep the language free from all foreign admixture of word and phrase, without falling, however, into the vagaries of the patriotic linguistic purists. He wrote with ease and lucidity, always in a style so pellucid that you looked right down to the bottom of the current of his animated speech.

Marx’s style was at once more careless and more difficult. In his youthful letters there is still apparent, as in those of Heine, a condition of struggle with the language, and in the letters of his later years, particularly after his settlement in England, he began to make use of a picturesque jargon of German, English and French, all mixed up. In his published writings, also, there is an over-liberal use of foreign words, and there is no lack of Gallicisms and Anglicisms, yet he is so distinctly a master of the German language that he cannot be translated without serious loss. Once when Engels had read a chapter by Marx in a French translation, even after Marx had revised the translation, it seemed to Engels that the vigor and sap and life had disappeared. Goethe once wrote to Frau von Stein: “In metaphors I am ready to stand comparison with the proverbs of Sancho Panza.” Marx could well bear comparison with the greatest of the world’s adepts in figures of speech, with Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, so full of life and vigor is his language.

He had fully absorbed Lessing’s statement that a perfect representation requires a fusion of image and conception, as closely joined as man and woman, and the university pedants have gotten square with him for this, from Father Wilhelm Roscher down to the youngest fledgling of a Privatdozent, by accusing him of being incapable of making himself understood except in an extremely vague way, “patched up with a liberal use of figurative language.” Marx never exhausted the questions which he attacked beyond the point of enabling the reader to begin a fruitful train of thought; his speech is like the dancing of the waves over the purple depths of the sea.

Engels always saw in Marx a superior spirit; he never wished to play anything but second fiddle by his side. Yet he never was a mere interpreter and assistant, but always a collaborator of independent activity, a kindred spirit, though not of equal size. In the early days of their friendship, Engels played, in one important field, rather the role of a giver than of a receiver, and twenty years later Marx wrote to him: “You know that all ideas come to me too late, and that, in the second place, I always follow in your tracks.” With his somewhat light equipment, Engels was able to move about more freely, and even though his glance was sharp enough to distinguish the decisive features of a question or of a situation, it did not penetrate far enough to review at once all the conditions and corollaries with which even the scantiest decision is often burdened. For a man of action this defect is even an advantage, and Marx never made a political decision without first calling upon Engels for advice, and Engels was usually able to hit the nail on the head.

Accordingly, the advice which Marx asked from Engels was not as satisfactory in questions of theory as in questions of politics. In theory Marx was usually the better of the two. And he was absolutely inattentive to such advice as Engels would often give him, in order to impel him to terminate his labors on his great scientific masterpiece: “Be a little less severe on yourself in the matter of your own productions; they are far too good for the public. The main thing is to have it finished and to get it out; the defects that you still see, the asses will never discover.” It was a characteristic bit of Engels advice, and it was just as characteristic of Marx to ignore it.

It is clear from the above that Engels was better fitted for a journalistic career than Marx; “a real walking encyclopedia” — so Marx once described him to a mutual friend, “capable of work at any hour of the day or night, drunk or sober, swift with his pen and alert as the devil.” It seems that both, after the cessation of the Neue Rheinische Revue, in the autumn of 1850, had still in mind the issuing of another journal in common, to be printed in London; at least, in December 1853, Marx wrote to Engels: “If we — you and I — had started our business as English correspondents in time, you would not now be condemned to office-work in Manchester, nor I to my debts.” Engels’ choice of a position of clerk in his father’s firm, in preference to the prospects of this “business,” was probably due to his consideration for the hopeless situation of Marx, and to a hope of better times in the future, and certainly not with the object of devoting himself permanently to the “damned business.” In the spring of 1854, Engels again considered the desirability of returning to London for literary work, but this was the last time; it must have been about this time that he made up his mind to assume the cursed burden for good, not merely in order to be of assistance to his friend, but in order thus to preserve the party’s best mental asset. Only with this motivation could Engels make the great sacrifice, and Marx accept; both the offer and the acceptance required a great spirit.

And before Engels became a partner in the firm some years later, he cannot exactly be said to have trod a path of roses, but from the first day of his stay at Manchester he aided Marx and never ceased aiding him. An unending stream of one-pound, five-pound, ten-pound, later even hundred-pound notes began to flow toward London. Engels never lost his patience, even though it was often sorely tried by Marx and his wife, who had no over-great supply of domestic wisdom. He forgot the amount of a note and appeared unpleasantly surprised to learn of it when the note fell due. Slight also was his concern when, on the occasion of another general clean-up of the domestic economy, Mrs. Marx, through misplaced considerateness, concealed a large item and began paying it off by stinting with her household money, thus starting the old trouble over again, with the best of all intentions; on this occasion Engels allowed his friend the rather pharasaical amusement of bewailing the “idiocy of women,” who manifestly are “in constant need of guardianship,” and contented himself with the gentle admonition: See it doesn’t happen again.

But Engels did not alone slave away for his friend in office and exchange all day long, but he also gave to him most of his evening leisure hours, in fact, a great part of the night. Although the original reason for this added labor was the necessity of preparing an English version of Marx’s articles for the “New York Tribune,” until Marx should be able to use the language well enough for literary purposes, the laborious cooperation continued for many years after the original reason had been overcome.

But all this seems a slight sacrifice as compared with the greatest service Engels rendered his friend, namely, his renunciation of his independent accomplishments as a thinker and investigator, which, in view of his incomparable energy and his rich talents, would have produced valuable results. A correct notion of this sacrifice can also be obtained from the correspondence of the two men, even if we note only the studies in linguistic and military science, which were carried on by Engels partly owing to an “old predilection” and partly with a view to the practical needs of the struggle for proletarian emancipation. For, much as he hated all “autodidacticism” — ”it’s all damn nonsense,” he contemptuously said — and thorough as were his methods of scientific work, he was yet as little a mere closet-scholar as Marx, and every new piece of knowledge was doubly precious in his eyes, if it might aid at once in lightening the chains of the proletariat.

He therefore undertook the study of the Slavic languages because of the “consideration” that in the next great clash of national interests, “at least one of us” should be acquainted with the language, history, literature, social institutions of those nations with whom there was some likelihood of immediate conflict. Oriental troubles led him to the oriental languages; he steered clear of Arabic, with its 4,000 roots; but “Persian is a veritable child’s play of a language”; he would be through with it in three weeks. Then came the turn of the Germanic languages:

  “I am now buried in Ulfilas: I simply had to get rid of this damned Gothic: I have been so long carrying it on in a rather desultory manner. I am surprised to find that I know much more than I expected. I need one more book, and then I’ll be absolutely done with it in two weeks. And then for Old Norse and Old Saxon, with which I have long been on terms of half-acquaintance. As yet I have absolutely no paraphernalia, not even a lexicon: nothing but the Gothic text and old Grimm, but the old fellow is really a brick.”

In the sixties, when the Schleswig-Holstein question came up, Engels undertook “some Frisian-English-Jutian-Scandinavian philology and archaeology,” and when the Irish question blazed up, “some Celto-Irish,” and so on. In the General Council of the International his comprehensive linguistic accomplishments were of great value to him; “Engels can stammer in twenty languages,” was said of him, because in moments of excitement he displayed a slight lisp.

Another epithet of his was that of the “General,” which he earned by his still more assiduous devotion to the military sciences. Here also he was satisfying an “old predilection” at the same time he was preparing for the practical needs of the revolutionary policy. Engels was counting on “the enormous importance which the parti militaire would attain in the next commotion.” The experiences with the officers who had joined the revolution in the years of rebellion had not been very satisfactory, and Engels declared that the military rabble has an incredibly dirty caste spirit. “They hate each other worse than poison, envy each other like schoolboys at the slightest mark of distinction, but they show a united front against all civilians.” Engels wanted to arrive at a point at which his theoretical remarks might have some weight and might not merely expose his ignorance.

He had hardly gotten established in Manchester when he began to “plug up military science.” He began with the “simplest and most rudimentary things, such as are asked in an ensign’s or lieutenant’s examination, and are therefore assumed by all authors as already known.” He studied everything about army administration, down to the most technical details: elementary tactics, Vauban’s system of fortification, and all other systems, including the modern system of detached forts, bridge construction and field works, fighting tools, down to the varying construction of carriages for field guns, the ravitaillement of hospitals, and other matters; finally he passed on to the general history of war, in which connection he paid particular attention to the English authority Napier, the French Jomini, and the German Clausewitz.

Far removed from any shallow attacks on the moral folly of warfare, Engels sought rather to recognize its historic justification, by which effort he more than once aroused the violent rage of declamatory democracy. Byron once poured the vials of his scorching rage over the two generals who, at the Battle of Waterloo, in the character of champions of feudal Europe, inflected a deathblow on the heir of the Revolution; it was an interesting accident that made Engels, in his letters to Marx, outline historic portraits both of Wellington and Blucher, which in their small compass, are so complete and so distinct, that they hardly need to be altered in a single respect to make them fully acceptable to the present state of advancement of military science.

In a third field, too, in which Engels also labored much and with pleasure, namely, in that of the natural sciences, he was not to have the opportunity, during the decades in which he accepted the bondage of commerce in order to afford free rein to the scientific investigations of another man — to put the finishing touches to his own labors.

And this was really a tragic lot. But Engels never wailed about it, for sentimentality was as foreign to his nature as to his friend’s. He always held it to be the great good fortune of his life, to have stood by Marx’s side for forty years, even at the price of being overshadowed by Marx’s gigantic form. Nor did he consider it to be a belated form of satisfaction to be permitted, after the death of his friend, to be the first man of the international workers’ movement, to play the first violin, as it were, undisputed, in this movement; on the contrary, he considered this to be an honor that was too great for his merits.

As each of the two men was completely absorbed in the common cause, and each made an equally great sacrifice to it, although not an identical sacrifice, without any disagreeable reservation of objection or of boast, their friendship became an alliance which has no parallel in human history.

 (Franz Mehring in “The Class Struggle,” May, 1919)

Marx's Financial Articles (1983)

From the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the critique of political economy which became his life work Marx set out, as he put it in the Preface to the first German edition of Capital, to “lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society”. One of his conclusions was that the expansion of production under capitalism did not proceed at a smooth, steady pace, but was “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation” (Capital Vol I, Pelican, p.58), in which the long-term trend was nevertheless upwards.

The crisis which marked the end of the period of boom took the form of a financial crash—that is, a collapse of credit and a strong demand to be paid in cash. This gave rise to the illusion that the crisis was simply a monetary question whereas in fact the monetary crisis was a reflection of the real overproduction that had taken place.

Overproduction reflected itself as a monetary crisis, since, in the middle of the 19th century, the main form of credit was the trade bill, or bill of exchange, a promise to pay issued by a manufacturer or merchant which would be honoured when he had sold his product. Such bills could be discounted, that is, cashed below their face-value, the precise deduction depending on the going rate of interest (discount rate). In normal times these bills circulated alongside bank notes as an accepted means of payment.

Clearly, if overproduction has taken place, all the bills are not going to be able to be honoured, so that as soon as people realise—or even suspect, with or without reason—that  overproduction has taken place they will no longer be prepared to accept these bills in payment and will insist on cash. Nor will banks be prepared to discount the bills, except at a very high rate of interest. The result is a credit squeeze, high interest rates and a financial crisis.

Marx studied two of these crises in close detail, that of 1847—when just after arriving in London in 1850 he was investigating the relationship between crises and revolution—and that of 1857. In fact, by co-incidence, 1857, besides being a crisis year, also saw the publication of two British parliamentary reports on financial questions: the secret evidence taken by a House of Lords committee which investigated the 1847 crisis and a House of Commons report on the workings of the 1844 Bank Act. Marx replied on these two documents, together with the House of Lords report itself which had been published, without the evidence, in 1848 and a report on the 1857 crisis published in 1858, to write a considerable number of articles for the New York Daily Tribune in 1857 and 1858 as well as to make notes for the section of Volume III of Capital to be devoted to interest-bearing capital. Marx had also frequently written on financial subjects before 1857 for the NYDT, especially when a financial or industrial crisis seemed about to break out. He always commented on the British budget when it was presented to the House of Commons and as early as 1853 had written an article explaining the principles and working of the 1844 Bank Act to his American readers.

Since, in the end, Marx never got round to preparing for publication these notes he made for Capital –they were very scrappy and had to be put into some sort of order by Engels—it is these NYDT articles which must be regarded as expressing in a final form for publication his views on financial crises. Hence these articles are to be regarded as an important complement to Volume III of Capital.

The British banking laws of 1844 and 1845 which Marx analysed in detail were an attempt to put into practice the doctrine of the so-called Currency School. In 1797, at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, the convertibility of Bank of England notes into gold had been suspended and was not restored until 1819. As a result of the experience of this period of inconvertibility a controversy arose in the first part of the 19th century over whether or not the number of paper notes issued by banks should be controlled by legislation. The Currency School argued that it ought to be, in order to ensure that the circulation of paper notes conformed to what they believed to be the economic laws governing the circulation of a metallic currency (gold and/or silver). Their opponents, known as the Banking School, denied the need for such control arguing that, as long as the paper notes were ultimately convertible into a fixed amount of gold, the number that would in actual practice circulate would always be governed by the economy’s need for currency. It was thus impossible, in their view, for the number of convertible paper notes to be over-issued since if more were issued that the economy needed the surplus notes would eventually find their way back, one way or another, to the bank that had issued them.

The Currency School based their theory on the views expressed by Ricardo on the circulation of a metallic currency like gold. According to Ricardo, there was a direct causal relationship between the amount of gold in a particular country and the general level of prices prevailing there. When a country had a favourable balance of trade, with exports exceeding imports, there would be an inflow of gold to that country; this increased quantity of gold would lead to an increase in the general price level; exports would therefore tend to fall off and imports to increase; as the balance of trade shifted from favourable to unfavourable so gold would flow out of the country, bringing about a fall in prices again. In other words, according to Ricardo, with a metallic currency the amount of money in circulation was automatically regulated by the flow of gold into and out of a country as its trade balance changed one way or the other. [1]

The Currency School wanted to make the circulation of a paper currency (or rather of a currency composed partly of gold and partly of paper notes) conform to this automatic model described by Ricardo. They thus proposed that the number of notes that could be issued should be tied to the amount of gold in the vaults of the bank that issued them. In 1844 led by the banker Samuel Loyd (later Lord Overstone, 1796-1883) they persuaded the then Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, to try to put their so-called currency principle into practice. The Act was piloted through the House of Commons by Peel himself and so is often known as the “Peel Bank Act”. Marx explained its principle and main features in an article published in the NYDT on 24 September 1853:

  It assumes that £14,000,000 of bank notes form the necessary minimum amount of circulation. All notes issued by the Bank of England beyond that amount shall be represented by bullion. Sir Robert Peel imagined he had discovered a self-acting principle for the issue of notes, which would determine with mechanical accuracy the amount of the circulation, and which would increase or diminish it in the precise degree in which the bullion increased or decreased. In order to put this principle into practice, the Bank was divided into two departments, the Issue Department and the Banking Department, the former a mere fabric of notes, the latter the true Bank, receiving the deposits of the State and of the public, paying dividends, discounting bills, advancing loans, and performing in general the business with the public, on the principles of every other banking concern. The Issue Department makes over its notes to the Banking Department to the amount of £14,000,000, plus the amount of bullion in the vaults of the Bank. The Banking Department negotiates those notes with the public. The amount of bullion necessary to cover the notes beyond £14,000,000 remains in the Issue Department, the rest being surrendered to the Banking Department. If the amount of bullion diminish beneath the circulation exceeding £14,000,000, the notes returning to the Banking Department in discharge of its advances, or under the form of deposits, are not reissued nor replaced, but annihilated (Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vo112, pp.298-9).

Marx regarded the theory of the Currency School as wholly mistaken and described the attempt to apply it through the 1844 Bank Act as a “fiasco” even in Volume I of Capital (Pelican, p.939). His first objection was to their view, derived from Ricardo, that the quantity of money in circulation governed the general level of prices. In his view the relationship was exactly the reverse: that more or less money was in circulation because prices were high or low, (see Volume I of Capital, Chapter III, 2b). In other words, money was essentially only a secondary factor, the amount circulating depending on the needs of the economy as determined by real economic factors such as the prices of the commodities to be traded (reflecting their value, or amount of socially necessary labour-time spent in producing them from start to finish) and the level of productive activity and trade. His views are summed up rather well at the end of his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he says that Thomas Tooke (1774-1858), who had started out as a partisan of Ricardo’s theory but who later became a leading opponent of the Currency School, was led

  to recognise that the direct correlation between prices and the quantity of currency presupposed by this theory is purely imaginary, that increases or decreases in the amount of currency when the value of precious metals remains constant are always the consequence, never the cause, of price variations, that altogether the circulation of money is merely a secondary movement and that, in addition to serving as a medium of circulation, money performs various other functions in the real process of production (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, p.186).

Marx had the highest regard for Tooke. He was particularly impressed by his History of Prices from 1792 to the Present Time which appeared between 1823 and 1857. When he wrote that detailed confirmation of the economic law that “prices are thus high or low not because more or less money is in circulation, but there is more or less money in circulation because prices are high or low” was “the only achievement of the post-Ricardian English economists” it was clearly the work of Tooke he mainly had in mind. When Tooke died in 1858 Marx wrote to Engels that the last English economist of any value was dead (letter of 5 March 1858).

Marx’s second objection, based on the empirical research of men like Tooke, was that it was not possible in practice to increase the amount of convertible paper money in circulation beyond what the economy required, as he argued and demonstrated with statistics many times in his NYDT financial articles. The needs of the economy determined the amount of currency in circulation just as much when the currency was gold and convertible notes together as when it was gold alone.

This does not mean that Marx is to be regarded as a member of the Banking School; in fact he criticised people like Tooke for not going beyond the currency question to examine the real economic factors at work. Nor should he be seen as an advocate of the reform of the banking legislation in Britain, even though he knew that this aggravated the monetary crisis phase of the industrial cycle:

  Ignorant and mistaken bank legislation, such as that of 1844-45, can intensify this money crisis. But no kind of bank legislation can eliminate a crisis (Capital, Volume III, Moscow, p.478).

His concern was to show that capitalism was a system that worked according to economic laws which arose from deeper causes than mere monetary reform. A surprisingly large part of Marx’s writings on economics—not just these articles in the NYDT but also his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the notebooks known as the Grundrisse—was devoted to exposing incorrect theories about money. For Marx, the only way to end recurring economic crises was a social revolution as a result of which money would be abolished.

The exact way in which the 1844 Bank Act proved to be a “fiasco” is well described by Engels in an explanatory passage he added to the chapter on “The currency principle and the Bank legislation of 1844” (chapter XXXIV) of Volume III of Capital which he edited after Marx’s death and which was published in 1894:

  the separation of the Bank into two independent departments deprived its management of the possibility of freely utilising its entire available means at critical times, so that situations could arise in which the banking department might be on the verge of bankruptcy while the issue department still had intact several millions in gold and, in addition, its entire 14 million in securities. And this could take place so much more easily since there is a period in almost every crisis when heavy exports of gold take place which must be covered in the main by the metal reserve of the bank. But for every five pounds in gold which then go abroad, the domestic circulation is deprived of a five-pound note, so that the quantity of circulating medium is reduced precisely at a time when the largest quantity is most needed. The Bank Act of 1844 thus directly induces the entire commercial world forthwith to hoard a reserve fund of bank-notes at the outbreak of a crisis; in other words, to accelerate and intensify the crisis. By such artificial intensification of demand for money accommodation, that is, for means of payment, at the decisive moment, and the simultaneous restriction of the supply the Bank Act drives the rate of interest to a hitherto unknown height during a crisis. Hence, instead of eliminating crises, the Act, on the contrary, intensifies them to a point where either the entire industrial world must go to pieces, or else the Bank Act. Both on October 25, 1847, and on November 12, 1857, the crisis reached such a point; the government then lifted the restriction for the Bank in issuing notes by suspending the Act of 1844, and this sufficed in both cases to overcome the crisis. In 1847, the assurance that bank-notes would again be issued for first-class securities sufficed to bring to light the £4 to £5 million of hoarded notes and put them back into circulation; in 1857, the issue of notes exceeding the legal amount reached almost one million, but this lasted only for a very short time (Moscow, pp.542-3).

The Act was suspended for a third time on 11 May 1866 during the crisis of that year by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone. Marx did not analyse this crisis in as much detail as he did those of 1847 and 1857, though he does refer to it in passing in Volume I of Capital (Pelican, pp.822-3) and he did discuss the 1866 suspension in a letter he sent to Collet in 1868 and which the latter published in the Urquhartite journal he edited, the Diplomatic Review (as the Free Press became) under the somewhat misleading title “How Mr Gladstone’s Bank Letter Procured a Loan for Russia” (Gladstone had in the meantime become the Prime Minister).

In Volume III of Capital Marx also argued that the 1844 Act had been deliberately designed to keep interest rates artificially high, so benefiting the financial section of the capitalist class at the expense of the industrial section. He thus regarded the bankers like Lord Overstone and George Norman (1783-1882), who both came in for his harsh comments, as being motivated by self-interest as well as being ignorant of monetary economics. In fact as early as 1850, in their notes for the Revue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx and Engels had spoken of “the Bank Acts of 1818 and 1844, which strengthened the financial aristocracy” (The Revolutions of 1848, Pelican, pp.305-6).

In case it should be thought that Marx’s remarks can be simply transposed to the modern discussion on money and inflation, we should bear in mind that he was talking about the circulation of a paper currency convertible on demand into a fixed amount of gold. This situation no longer obtains today. All modern currencies are now inconvertible paper money, the laws governing which are quite different—the opposite, in fact, insofar as the quantity issued does directly affect the level of prices rather than vice versa—to those governing the circulation of a metallic currency and a mixed metallic/ convertible paper currency. Marx did have something to say on this also in his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and in Capital (chapter III, 2c) where his comments still provide a basis for an analysis of modern inflation as resulting from the over-issue of an inconvertible paper currency.

Adam Buick

[1] A detailed, and very clear, discussion and history of Ricardo's currency theory is to be found in the last section of Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy on "Theories of the medium of circulation and money".

Imperial Pusher (1985)

From the November 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rapidly growing drug addiction is becoming a major headache for governments in many parts of the world. Apart from the fact that the conditions of capitalism cause anti-social behaviour among some workers, much of the problem is due to the actions of governments themselves, both past and present. According to the latest (1984) Home Office statistics, the number of drug addicts in the UK rose by 26 per cent to a record 7,400. However, the head of Scotland Yard central drug squad said the figure could be five times higher. This is not high compared with other countries, but it is growing at a faster rate. Drugs are more readily available because the traffic is more profitable, and as long as this lasts drugs will be here to stay.

There is no shortage of pressure groups, ranging from politicians and journalists, to church leaders and broadcasters, all calling on the government to deal with "those evil men who traffic in human misery". All overlook the fact that the capitalist system itself both creates and deals in human misery; for them that is not the issue.

It may come as a severe shock to these anti-drug crusaders to learn that not so long ago Queen Victoria and her ministers, at least one Prime Minister (Lord Palmerston) and many members of the Houses of Lords and Commons, were in fact the evil men and women responsible not only for drug pushing, but for its production also. The gigantic scale of the operation carried out by these highly respected people makes the combined effort of the modern drug pushers look puny.

When the police or the customs seize 100 kilos of heroin or a ton of cannabis, everybody is happy. Yet these are piffling amounts compared to the tons of opium (the basis of heroin) which were shipped into China from India between 1839 and 1890. It would be true to say that the present international drugs problem owes its existence mainly to the legalising of the production and distribution of drugs, primarily by the British government in the mid-19th century and the deliberate use of armed force to thrust them onto the China market. It took three wars, covering a period of nearly 20 years to do it, but it was accomplished.

The opium wars of 1839. 1856 and 1858 broke down semi-feudal China's resistance to foreign trade, particularly to the import of opium from India. In fact, the Indian finances of the British government depended on the opium trade with China, including the contraband trade which was given official assistance and carried out openly by British and American ships. The Victorian politicians knew perfectly well that opium was harmful, but justified its forcible export into China in the interests of free trade;

  Our government in India is dependent for revenue on the sale of opium in China, as the people of England are dependent for their breakfast and their every meal on the produce of that Empire. (Economist, 30 April 1853.)

Before the East India Company, backed by the British government, started shipping small quantities of opium to China as an experiment in 1773 there was little addiction among the Chinese. Rigid laws, thoroughly enforced, prohibited the cultivation of the opium poppy and the use of the drug. Its import was banned in 1800 except for use as medicine and the death penalty was introduced in 1839 for merchants and other persons having stocks of opium. However, there was wide-spread smuggling in 1838; around 50 British and American vessels were engaged in running contraband under the protection of the British Navy. In that year, 20,200 chests of opium each containing 125 lbs (i.e. about 1,127 tons) were confiscated by the Chinese authorities. This was one of the prime causes of the first opium war. Indemnities were demanded of the Chinese. The town of Nanking was seized and the war commenced. A subsequent peace treaty ceded Hong Kong to the British government and five ports were opened to British trade, which of course included the opium trade to which the Chinese authorities were vehemently opposed. Despite their repeated protests the trade continued and expanded.

Marx, in an article to the New York Daily Tribune (25 September 1850) described it as the free trade in poison and showed the complicity of the British government with the producers, merchants, shippers and smugglers in the "hazardous operation of poisoning an Empire". He also quoted R Montgomery Martin, a devout Christian and Treasurer of the Diplomatic Consul Service in China, about the effect of opium:

  "'Why, the slave-trade was merciful compared with the opium trade. We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans, for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase their nature, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls. But the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated the moral being of unhappy sinners, which every hour is bringing new victims to a Moloch which knows no satiety. and where the English murderer and Chinese suicide vie with each other the offerings at his shrine." (New York Tribune, 20 September 1858.)

As the effect of opium on the Chinese was devastating they continued to resist its import and this in turn meant the continuance of the wars which had already lasted for 16 years. Finally, after the bombardment of Canton, carried out by the Bible-banging Sir John Bowring, Britain received by the Treaty of Tiensen the legalisation of the opium trade.

In 1868 the Emperor of China sent a letter to Queen Victoria, appealing to her both as a queen and as a woman, asking her to join with him in suppressing the hideous opium curse. The letter offered anything that might be desired in the way of concessions to British trade if the curse could be removed but no reply was received from the queen, nor was any sent. Obviously the queen was advised by her ministers, and they had already made their views public. In Parliament, Sir John Hobhouse said the government had done nothing to stop the opium trade because it was profitable. Lord Melbourne said. "We possess vast territories peculiarly fitted for raising opium"; he was referring to "the jewel in the crown", Mother India, where the British were supreme landlords. Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister, had declared war on China without the sanction of Parliament.

Chester Holcombe in his book The Real Chinese Question claimed that at the height of the trade some 1,700,000 acres of land were required for opium destined for the Chinese market. In 1878-79 the colossal amount of 91,200 chests of opium were imported into China; each contained 125 lbs. (about 5.089 tons), from which the British capitalist class received £8.25 million in revenue—at today's prices, worth about £239m. At one point China was receiving only opium in exchange for her two imports of tea and silk. For every chest of opium exported from India, the British government received £88.50 (now about £2,966). the Indian farmer £26-£27. and the Chinese £10.50 (Holcombe). In fact, the import duty which China was allowed to charge was fixed by the British at 1/6 (7½p) a pound—a revenue the Chinese authorities did not want. Even so, the tremendous scale of smuggling protected by the guns of the British Navy considerably reduced the revenue collected. In 1879 they took less than £1 million (£29 million today).

In 1875 the Chinese government submitted to all governments represented at Peking, practically all European governments including Russia, and also America, a detailed complaint about the opium trade and requested action to bring it to an end. Nothing was done. Now in 1985 it is the American and European governments who are appealing to the Chinese government about the smuggling of drugs through Hong Kong. Pakistan, Korea and other Far Eastern countries are also being asked to co-operate to stop the traffic. They may agree in principle, but the Nelson eye will be turned because of its profitability.

The black vampire of drugs will suck people dry as they try to escape from the capitalist system itself. The addict sees no future, but there is one. It does not lie in some strawberry fields, but in actively and energetically promoting the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.

Jim D'Arcy

Anti-Trumpism (2019)

Pamphlet Review from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Resisting Trumpist Reaction (and Left Accommodation). Marxist Humanist Initiative. New York, 80 pages. 2018.

This is an odd pamphlet from a group entitling itself ‘Marxist’ in that it argues that workers should vote for a ‘centrist neo-liberal’ to stop Trump being re-elected in 2020 just as it says that they should have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Their argument is based on the premise that ‘Trumpism’ is some sort of modern form of fascism and that Trump wants to replace political democracy in the US by an openly authoritarian regime. Political democracy in the US (such as it is) is not under threat, but even if it were the answer would not be to line up behind pro-capitalist politicians.

The pamphlet claims that the position Marx took up of supporting the North in the US Civil War and the separation of Ireland from Britain vindicates their position. Marx supported the one to hasten capitalist development in America and the other to undermine the power of the landed aristocracy in Britain, both issues long since settled by history and of no relevance today.

Their argument is that Marx also had in mind that both would free workers from ‘supremacist’ ideas – racism and anti-Irish prejudice. Maybe (not that it did) but this would not imply voting for the Democratic Party today. That’s not going to change anything. Rather would it suggest some other way of overcoming the prejudices of Trump voters. Such as a straightforward campaign to explain that their problems are caused by capitalism and that it is their interest to unite with other workers to establish the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life. A message that should be equally directed at Democratic Party voters.

Adam Buick

Marx the journalist (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the first two years of his exile in England Marx actively involved himself in German refugee politics. He was still a member of the central committee of the Communist League and was in contact with the League's members who had stayed in Germany. His English contact was Harney whom he met again at a banquet organised by the Society of Fraternal Democrats at the end of 1849. In April 1850 Harney, for the Fraternal Democrats, together with Marx. Engels and Willich for the German Communist League and Adam and Vidil for the French Blanquists signed a declaration setting up a “Universal League of Revolutionary Communists" committed to “the overthrow of all privileged classes, their subjection to the dictatorship of the proletariat under which the revolution shall be maintained sine die until the communist society, the final organisation of the human family, has been realised". In June Harney started to publish his own paper The Red Republican, in whose November issue was published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto, identifying Marx and Engels as its authors.

Throughout 1850 Marx and Engels contributed a regular column to the Revue of the Neue Rheinische Z'eitung which was published in Hamburg. Among the things they commented on was the political scene in Britain, such as the death of Sir Robert Peel and the prospects of the Chartist movement, but the bulk of the material they sent on Britain concerned the economic situation there. Some time in the autumn of 1850 Marx came to the conclusion that there was a direct connection between economic crises and revolution. He read through the back numbers of the economist and a volume of Thomas Tooke’s History of Prices which had just been published to try to understand the economic crisis of 1847 which had preceded the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. The result was the detailed account of the course of this crisis which appeared in the Revue.

Marx's position about there being a direct link between crises and revolution led him to a further conclusion: that in the then period of prosperity there was no immediate prospect of revolution; the revolutionary wave sparked off by the 1847 crisis was over and it was pointless to continue to try to provoke an immediate revolutionary uprising. This was a revision of the view Marx had expressed as recently as April 1850 in the statement he had signed with the Blanquists and Harney and it led to a split in the Communist League. It also led Marx to break with Harney who, as a romantic revolutionary, sympathised with those, including Marx’s opponents in the Communist League, who wanted to continue plotting a more or less immediate insurrection. When Harney's position became known, Engels at Marx's request immediately stopped contributing articles to his paper, which had in the meantime changed its name to The Friend of the People. Their other pre-1848 contact, Ernest Jones, was released from prison in 1850 and was soon involved in an acrimonious dispute with Harney over the use of the title of O'Connor’s paper The Northern Star, which ceased publication in 1852. Marx and Engels took Jones's side in this dispute and in 1851 Engels was contributing instead to Jones's Notes to the People which later became The People's Paper.

The split in the Communist League occurred at a meeting of its central committee held on 15 September 1850. According to the Minutes. Marx explained his opposition to the policy of plotting immediate insurrection on the grounds that workers must be told that "if you want to change conditions and make yourselves capable of government, you will have to undergo fifteen, twenty or fifty years of civil war", by which he meant many years of intense class struggle, certainly involving occasional violent confrontations with the state, rather than "civil war" in what has become the literal sense. This was to remain Marx's view for the rest of his life and represented a return to the pattern for the evolution of working class political consciousnss which he had outlined, on the basis of experience of the English Chartist movement, before the bourgeois-revolutionary interlude of 1848-9. He first acted on this when he participated, through Jones's People's Paper, in the English working class movement between 1852 and 1856.

But Marx's immediate concern was to earn a living. If he can be said to have had a profession it was journalism. He had been the editor of a democratic newspaper in Germany in 1842-43 and again in 1848-9. It was as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that he had met in 1848 an American journalist. Charles Dana, who was touring Europe. Dana was the editor of the New York Daily Tribune, one of America's leading newspapers. It had been founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley and took up a generally democratic position on the issues of the day. Three years later Dana, who was anxious to increase the paper's circulation among the German immigrants (and refugees) who had come to America after the final failure of the German bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1849. wrote to Marx asking him to contribute a scries of articles on this revolution. Marx gladly accepted this offer but. although it was submitted in Marx's name, this series — later published as Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany — was in fact written by Engels, partly because Marx had not yet acquired the confidence to write directly in English. Dana was very pleased with the contributions Marx had sent him and Marx became the regular London and European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune for the next ten years. The first article written by Marx — an introductory article on the political parties in Britain in the context of the then impending General Election appeared on 21 August 1852. The last article appeared in March 1862. Marx's first articles were written in German and translated into English by Engels — indeed, Engels throughout this whole period continued to write articles in Marx’s name — but later Marx began to write in English himself; which explains the peculiar grammar and vocabulary of some of the earlier articles.

The sub-editors of the New York Daily Tribune felt free to alter the articles as they considered appropriate. Marx eventually objected to this, since not all of the changes were of a purely editorial nature. One of the sub-editors was pro-Russian and often toned down the anti-Russia views expressed by Marx in his articles on the Eastern Question and the Crimean War. As a result of Marx’s protests, it was agreed that his articles should no longer be published with his signature. The last article signed by Marx (though ironically in fact mainly written by Engels!) was “Prospect in France and England" which appeared on 27 April 1855. Even before that date, Dana had used some of Marx’s articles as unsigned editorials.

Marx was a conscientious journalist who always read up a subject before writing an article on it. But his main source of information was inevitably the London daily and weekly papers. Apart of course from The Times, the main dailies Marx relied on were the Daily News, The Globe, The Morning Advertiser, The Morning Chronicle, The Morning Herald and The Morning Post. Marx also occasionally, through his contact with Engels who was living there, used the Manchester Guardian. Marx gives a useful run-down on the London dailies and their polities in an article published in Die Presse of Vienna on 31 December 1861. The article describes the press scene at that time rather than in the early and middle 1850s, when Marx did most of his writing for the New York Daily Tribune, but it had not changed all that much during this period. As to weeklies, Marx relied on The Economist, The Leader, and Jones's People's Paper.

But Marx also did some direct reporting himself, especially for the articles he wrote in 1855 for the Neue Oder Zeitung. He attended political meetings and rallies in London and was present in the Visitors’ Gallery for some of the debates in the House of Commons which he reported.

Marx came to be the London correspondent of the Neue Oder Zeitung through Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). whose cousin. Max Friedlander (1829-1872). became one of the paper’s owners at the end of 1854. This paper had been published under this name since 1849 in Breslau on the river Oder (now Wroclau in present-day Poland) and, like the New York Daily Tribune, took up a generally pro-democratic position, though Marx had not agreed with the line it had taken during the German revolution when it had attacked workers’ organisations and “socialists". Marx contributed articles, some again written by Engels, some translations or German versions of articles he had sent to the New York Daily Tribune, throughout 1855. Marx's last article appeared on 8 October and the paper ceased publication soon afterwards. Marx seems to have felt freer to express his pro-working class position in the Neue Oder Zeitung than in the New York Daily Tribune, though this position is evident in the latter too, even if not so pronounced.

When collected together Marx’s articles do indeed provide an analysis of British politics and society in the 1850s by the same journalistic pen which wrote the much more widely known analyses of French politics over a shorter period, in the Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

The other paper for which Marx regularly wrote paid articles was Die Presse in 1861 and 1862. This was the leading liberal daily published in Vienna, indeed one of the leading papers in the Austrian Empire. Marx had had opportunities to write for it earlier than 1861, but had turned them down on political grounds. The contact was again Lassalle's cousin, Max Friedlander, who had in the meantime become the paper's editor. In 1861 and 1862 Marx contributed a number of articles to Die Presse, a large number of them dealing with the American Civil War. especially about relations between Britain and the United States but also covering other subjects.

Marx's work as a paid journalist came to an end with the publication of his last article in Die Presse on 4 December 1862.

Adam Buick

The Partnership of Marx and Engels (1936)

From the May 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

In our March issue, in the review of the life of Frederick Engels, reference was made to the articles appearing under Marx's name or attributed to him, which were realty written for him by his friend, Engels. In the interests of accuracy it is desirable that Engels' share in the great life partnership should be properly estimated, and it is evident that Gustav Mayer, Riazanov and others, have all erred in greater or less degree.

There is, of course, no question of belittling Marx's great work for the Socialist movement, but only of placing on record that Engels’ help entitles him to greater credit than has been allowed by many who have written on the subject in the past. We are indebted to Moses Baritz for the information below, based on a full examination of the correspondence that passed between Marx and Engels. This shows that the articles published in the New York Tribune and republished under the title Revolution and Counter-Revolution were all written by Engels at Marx’s request. Some of these, and later articles, were sent off by Marx — quite unaltered.

Engels wrote articles for the New York Tribune in this fashion from 1851 to 1862, and none of them appeared in Engels’ name. The last article (on the Civil War in America) was asked for by Marx in a letter written on March 3rd, 1862. Marx says: “The Tribune will print it as a letter from a Foreign Officer." It is evident, therefore, that Riazanov is wrong in suggesting that Marx wrote his own articles from 1852 onwards. It is true that Marx wrote to Engels on January 29th, 1853, saying that he had for the first time on the previous day risked writing an article in English for Dana of the New York Tribune, but of some 50 requests for articles that have been traced the majority are after that date. Eleanor Marx was quite wrong in attributing the Revolution and Counter-Revolution articles to her father, and it is strange that she should have given currency to this error. According to a statement made by Engels to Danielson (in a letter as yet unpublished in the original form) she was engaged on typing copies of her father's original letters addressed to various correspondents throughout the world, and can hardly have missed his numerous requests to Engels.

Adoratski, director of the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow, states in a footnote to "Karl Marx: Ausgewahlte Schriften," that Engels wrote the Revolution and Counter-Revolution articles between September, 1851, and September, 1852. While the error here is not great, another publication for which the Institute is responsible, "Karl Marx; "Chronik Seines Lebens" contains many errors and should be revised. Scores of articles attributed to Marx in the N.Y. Tribune, Neue Oder Zeitung and Die Presse, Vienna, should be attributed to Engels.

Riazanov appears to have blundered when he asserts concerning the articles republished as "The Eastern Question," that Engels was responsible for the military articles and Marx for the ones on diplomatic and economic questions. Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Edward Aveling, in their preface, say the same. The correspondence indicates that Engels did more than that. Marx writes, for example, in a letter dated March 10th, 1853, saying to Engels : “Above all, this question is military and geographical and, therefore, not in my department. You must once again write this. The Turkish question is 'Spanish' to me. I cannot give you any standpoint (on this subject)." Marx went on to ask Engels to write on the encroachments of Russia in Turkey, the treachery of Austria, the ambition of France, the interests of England, and the commercial and military importance of the conflict.

Engels replied on March 12th, promising the article in a couple of days. Marx wrote on March 22nd acknowledging the article: “Your article on Turkey. Splendid. It has been sent.” Moses Baritz points out, in conclusion, that this very article on Turkey is the first one which Eleanor Marx says was written by her father!

Editorial Committee.

Marx on Colonialism (1970)

Book Review from the September 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, by Shlomo Avineri. Doubleday, New York. 19s.

In recent years there has been a steady flow of English language re-issues of and commentaries on the works of Marx and Engels. This new work, edited by Shlomo Avineri, Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, covers a range not attempted before in a single volume. About 400 pages consist of articles by Marx (including some written by Engels at Marx's request) on China, India, the Middle East and North Africa, preceded by excerpts from The Poverty of Philosophy, the Communist Manifesto, The Critique of Political Economy, and Capital, and followed by some relevant letters written by Marx and Engels.

Some idea of the wide scope of the articles is indicated by the fact that it takes in the Chinese Opium wars, the Crimean War, Turkey, British rule in India, the Anglo-Persian war of 1857, the Indian Mutiny, French and Spanish colonialism in North Africa, the British intervention in Mexico. (Part only of this range was covered in Marx's Eastern Question, edited by Eleanor Marx Aveling and Edward Aveling which has just been republished by Frank Cass at £9.90). Most of the articles in this new book were originally published as despatches to the New York Daily Tribune between 1853 and 1862.

The articles were well-informed and hard-hitting and the readers of the New York paper will often have gained a better insight into what was going on than would readers of the English Press or English history books.

Here is the opening paragraph of an article published on March 10, 1862:

The Blue Book on the intervention in Mexico, just published, contains the most damning exposure of modern English diplomacy with its hypocritical cant, ferocity against the weak, crawling before the strong, and utter disregard of international law. I must reserve for another letter the task of forwarding, by a minute examination of the despatches exchanged between Downing Street and the British representatives of Mexico, the irrefragable proof that the present imbroglio is of English origin, that England took the initiative in bringing about the intervention, and did so on pretexts too flimsy and self-contradictory to even veil the real but unavowed motives of her proceedings. The infamy of the means employed in starting the intervention is only surpassed by the anile imbecility with which the British government affect to be surprised at and slink out of the execution of the nefarious scheme planned by themselves.

Marx dealt in several articles with the wars fought to force the Chinese to admit the massive importation of opium, to the profit of respectable English merchants. Marx quoted from an English writer about the harm done to the Chinese.

Why, the slave trade was merciful compared with the opium trade. We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase their natures, corrupt their minds, nor destroy their souls. But the opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated the moral being of the unhappy sinners . . . 

If you turn to England in the Nineteenth Century a popular history book by C. W. Oman, Oxford Professor of History, published in 1913, you will find nothing about the opium trade. Instead Oman tells us:

The second struggle in which we became involved was a quarrel with China in 1856. The Governor of Canton acting with the usual stupid arrogance and obstinacy of Chinese officials, had seized a vessel flying the English flag, and refused to apologise for his act. This led to an expedition against Canton and ultimately to open war.

Much has been written of the building of railways and irrigation works in India under British rule, but Marx pointed out that this was a later development only after great harm had been done by the British overlords.

An Oriental government never had more than three departments: finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works (provision for reproduction). The British government in India has administered Nos. 1 and 2 in a rather philistine spirit and dropped No. 3 entirely, so that Indian agriculture is being ruined.
The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, transitory interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to that end it is necessary above all, to gift her with the means of irrigation and of internal communication.

Shlomo Avineri's introduction to the book discusses the problem, of which Marx was aware, that "stagnant Asia" did not fit into his European-based conception of evolution through feudalism and capitalism to Socialism: hence Marx's concentration on the impact of European capitalism on Asian countries rather than on the possibility of their own self-development. However, Avineri does not face up to the fact that capitalism is now established not only in japan and India but, in its State capitalist variant, in Russia; with China following the Russian road.

He discusses Marx's view that the total income received by British capitalists from British rule in India was less then than the cost to the British government of the Indian administration, so that in effect colonial rule was no more than an indirect way of subsidising a section of the British propertied class at the expense of the rest. He supports Marx's view on this as against Lenin's.

Edgar Hardcastle

Marx and the workers' movement (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx was not just a passive commentator on the British political scene in the 1850s. He was also a participant in the Chartist movement, at least until 1856, and in the campaign waged by David Urquhart (1805-1877) against what the latter saw as "the Russian menace".

After its failure in February 1848 and the repression which followed, Chartism was never again a mass movement. The National Charter Association, and its Executive, did however survive as an organisation, though many former Chartist leaders got involved in other movements. Fergus O'Connor, who had been elected MP for Nottingham in 1847 (the only Chartist ever to be elected as such) lost his seat in the 1852 election. He was later declared insane and died in a mental asylum in 1855 (Marx's generous obituary of him appeared in the Neue Oder Zeitung (NOZ) on 15 September).

Bronterre O'Brien formed a separate organisation in which emphasis was put on the social changes to be made once the Charter had given the working class political power, such as the nationalisation of land and the railways and the establishment of a single State bank. The O'Brienites became in fact a distinct sect within the British working class movement which survived into the 1880s, whose members Marx was to meet later during his second period of participation in the working class movement in Britain between 1864 and 1872.

Others campaigned to repeal the so-called "taxes on knowledge" — the stamp duty and taxes on paper and advertisements which artificially raised the price of newspapers to a level beyond which many workers could afford. Others, such as Harney, supported Urquhart's anti-Russia campaign. The Chartist Executive split in 1852 on the question of whether or not to co-operate with the middle class Radicals to achieve the aims of the Charter. Those who, grouped around Ernest Jones, wanted Chartism to continue to be a working class movement hostile to the capitalist middle class set up their own organisation.

Of the Chartist leaders in 1848 it was thus Jones who emerged as the champion of militant Chartism in the 1850s. He had been released from his two-year prison term for sedition at the end of 1850 and in 1851 started his own paper, Notes to the People, which the following year became a weekly called The People's Paper. Marx, who was in close touch with Jones, contributed articles to this paper from 1852 to 1856.

In the 1852 General Election, as Marx reported in the New York Daily Tribune (NYDT), Chartists put up a number of candidates, including Jones at Halifax. He polled — and this was not reported by Marx — a mere 37 votes, a confirmation that the vast majority of workers were excluded from the vote, but also of the decline of Chartism since 1847, in the same constituency, Jones had polled 280 votes. But the Chartist movement had always had its ups and downs, corresponding with periods of depression and prosperity.

The early 1850s were a period of prosperity, though not of working class inactivity. The widescale emigration of the period temporarily put the working class in a stronger bargaining position. Successful strikes for higher wages became more and more frequent. The culminating point of this strike movement was the year 1853. Jones decided that the time was ripe for a Chartist campaign in the industrial districts of England and in June left London for the North to address a number of mass meetings, a speaking tour given good coverage by Marx in the NYDT.

While Jones was in the North one of the biggest industrial disputes of the 1850s was brewing: the lock-out of the Preston cotton workers. Preston was one of the three main centres of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, the other two being Ashton and Stockport. In the summer of 1853 the cotton spinners of Stockport went on strike for a 10 per cent wage increase — which they won, thanks to financial aid from other groups of workers. In the autumn the cotton spinners of Preston, joined by the weavers, made a similar demand on their employers.The employers' answer was a general lock-out and by October 18,000 workers in Preston were without work or wages.

Once again a solidarity campaign was launched by the trade unions to raise money from other sections of the working class. Ernest Jones joined and played a prominent part in this campaign. he suggested the calling of a "Labour Parliament", to be composed of delegates from workers and trade unions in the Lancashire area. In November a Chartist meeting in Manchester voted for the calling of such a congress, referring to the need for "a united and mass movement of the working classes, based on a national organisation, and guided by one directing body" (quoted by Marx in NYDT, 12 December 1853). The Labour Parliament did not in fact meet until March 1854, by which time the Preston workers were well on the way to defeat. Marx was elected an honorary delegate and, unable to attend, sent a fine statement of his faith in the capacity of the working class to emancipate itself, which was published in the People's Paper.

Marx covered extensively the 1853 strike wave for the NYDT, describing his series of articles on the subject as his "history of strikes" (letter to Engels, 30 September 1853). Basing himself on an analysis of economic trends, he had said right from the start that the Preston workers were likely to fail as they had left their demand for a wage increase too late. They should have demanded it earlier in 1853 or in 1852 as there were signs, even in September and October 1853, of a downturn in activity. Under these circumstances, Marx argued, the employers were likely to welcome a stoppage of work while they cleared the surplus stocks that were building up.

This may well have been one of the employers' considerations, but they probably did not expect that the workers would put up such a fight before being finally defeated. The lock-out had begun in October 1853. By March 1854, when the Labour Parliament met, the Preston workers had still refused to give in. The employers then resorted to employing blacklegs, both men and women, from the agricultural districts of Ireland. The workers naturally opposed this and the employers had a number of their leaders arrested for "molesting and obstructing" the blacklegs. The workers held out for another month or so before going back in May without the wage increase they had originally demanded, though the charges against their arrested leaders were not proceeded with. This was a defeat for the working class, but the Preston workers' determination and the support they had from other workers, which had allowed them to hold out for seven months, must have had some effect on the employers, making them think twice before again taking on the cotton workers in this way.

Marx, as we have noted, did not really expect this and other strikes to succeed in view of the changed economic situation. This is not to say that he was not in favour of the strikes taking place. Far from it. The workers had to test the situation. As Marx said, in a comment which shows the extent to which he had grasped trade union tactics:

Under certain circumstances, there is for the workingman no other means of ascertaining whether he is or not paid to the actual value of his labour, but to strike or to threaten to do so" (NYDT, 17 October 1853).

Further, if workers did not fight to maintain their living standards they would be reduced to the level of slaves, incapable of emancipating themselves. Criticising those socialists and others who opposed strikes Marx wrote:

I am, on the very contrary, convinced that the alternative rise and fall of wages, and the continual conflicts between masters and men resulting therefrom, are, in the present organisation of industry, the indispensable means of holding up the spirit of the labouring classes, of combining them into one great association against the encroachments of the ruling class, and of preventing them from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well-fed instruments of production. In a state of society founded upon the antagonism of classes, if we want to prevent slavery in fact as well as in name, we must accept war. In order to rightly appreciate the value of strikes and combinations, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the apparent insignificance of their economical results, but hold, above all things, in view their political consequences. Without the great alternative phases of dullness, prosperity, over-excitement, crisis and distress, which modern industry traverses in periodically recurring cycles, with the ups and downs of wages resulting from them, as with the constant warfare between masters and men closely corresponding with those variations in wages and profits, the working classes of Great Britain would be a heartbroken, a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass, whose self-emancipation would prove as impossible as that of the slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome. We must not forget that strikes and combinations among the serfs were the hot-beds of the mediaeval communes, and that those communes have been in their turn, the source of life of the now ruling bourgeoisie (NYDT, 14 July 1853).

This, of course, is the same perspective of a political movement — here described as "one great association" — of the working class developing out of trade union struggles that Marx had learnt from the experience of the pre-1848 Chartist movement and had expressed both in the Poverty of Philosophy and in the Communist Manifesto. For Marx, it was this that was the importance of the 1853 strike wave. Even if the strikes failed economically, they would have helped raise the political consciousness of the workers:

. . .  should, as I suppose, the depression prove lasting, the work people will soon get the worst of it, and have to struggle — very unsuccessfully — against reduction. But then their activity will soon be carried over to the political field, and the new organisation of trades, gained in strikes, will be of immense value to them (NYDT, 17 October 1853).

and,

I have repeatedly stated that the turn-outs of the men, by beginning at too late an epoch, when the opportunities afforded by the unprecedented prosperity were already vanishing away, could not prove successful in an economical point of view, or as far as their immediate end was concerned. But they have done their work. They have revolutionized the industrial proletariat, and, stirred up by dear food and cheap labour, the political consequences will show themselves in due time (NYDT, 16 December 1853).

Marx was a little over-optimistic here. There was to be no Chartist revival. After the defeat of the Preston workers, the Labour Parliament quietly disappeared. Jones returned to London. An important factor in this ebbing of working class activity was the fact that since March 1854 Britain had been at war with Russia in the Crimea (a war which, incidentally, both Jones and Marx urged the workers to support). The war dragged on for two years and it was only in 1855 that Jones relaunched agitation for the traditional Chartist demand for the reform of Parliament to achieve an effective universal male suffrage. Marx once again let his enthusiasm carry him away, declaring in the NOZ of 6 March 1855:

A few months more, and the crisis in the manufacturing districts will reach the 1842 level, if not surpass it. But as soon as its effect is generally felt by the working classes, the political movement, which among these classes has been more or less drowsing for the past six years and has retained only the cadres for new agitation, will begin again.

In June Marx attended a mass meeting in Hyde Park to protest against proposals before Parliament to tighten up the law on Sunday opening and drinking. It was obviously the first time that he had ever seen a meeting of this size and he was so carried away that he reported for the NOZ (28 June) that "the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park". In fact of course it was nothing of the sort and over the next few years even the Chartist "cadres", faced with the passivity of the working class, began to to become disillusioned and demoralised.

Marx continued his collaboration with Jones and the People's Paper during 1856. In April he made one of the speeches at a dinner held to mark the fifth anniversary of the paper's first issue, his first public speech in English. Once again he expressed his confidence in the ability of the working class to take humanity on to the next stage in social evolution.

1857 was an election year and Jones was, as on previous occasions, a candidate, this time in Nottingham, O'Connor's old constituency. This was the election Palmerston had called to get a vote of confidence for his administration and in which the Radicals suffered a serious reverse.

Jones' paper was now in financial difficulties and the working class appeared to be completely apathetic; there were no strike waves, nor political discontent. This led Jones to reconsider his whole strategy and to drop his opposition to collaboration with the middle class Radicals to achieve democratic reforms. In fact he went so far as to be prepared to give up all the demands of the Charter except universal suffrage, thus ceasing in effect to be a Chartist. The deal he hoped to make with the middle class radicals was their accepting universal suffrage in return for the Chartists (whom Jones presumed to speak for) giving up the demand for secret ballots. This deal was to be made at a Chartist-Radical conference which Jones was planning to call. When Jones made this proposal in November 1857 Marx broke with him; thus the article on the "Divine Right of the Hohenzollern" which had appeared on 13 December1856 turned out to be the last article marx wrote for the People's Paper.

Jones' Conference took part in London in February 1858, but did not result in much. Jones was disowned by other Chartists, including Bronterre O'Brien, who proclaimed their loyalty to all six points of the original Charter. Financial difficulties forced Jones to sell the People's Paper to a Radical newspaper group later that year and it thus appeared as a separate publication. Jones resumed his profession as a barrister, though he was again a candidate in Nottingham in the 1859 election.

The question of co-operation with the Radicals had been a controversial issue within the Radical movement right from the start, from the time of the first Chartist Convention in 1839. This was because the working class and the capitalist class did in fact have an interest in the extension of the franchise, the former to gain a weapon they could use later to achieve their own emancipation, the latter to weaken the political power and privileges of the landlord class. Not even Marx was opposed on principle to a co-operation between the working class and the capitalist middle class to achieve the democratisation of the British political system. What Marx was opposed to was the working class giving up its political autonomy and becoming just the tail-end of the middle class Radicals.

Marx always accepted that the Radicals had a role to play in the fight for political democracy in Britain. Indeed he was very interested in the conditions which might lead them to fight for this in a determined way. He described the Radicals as "the party of the self-conscious bourgeoisie: (NYDT, 25 August 1852), by which he meant the class-conscious section of the bourgeoisie, the section which realised that there was a conflict of interest between their class and the landlord class which could only be settled when the latter had been deprived of its power and privileges. Thus John Bright stated in a speech quoted by Marx in another NYDT article that "everything the country has gained since the revolution of 1688 . . . has been gained in a manly contest of the industrial and commercial classes against the aristocratic and and privileged classes of the country" (NYDT, 23 February 1853). This was the sort of talk from the capitalist middle class that Marx liked to hear. He wanted their "manly contest" against the landlord class to be successful, so as to create the conditions for a straight fight between the capitalist class and the working class, in which the newly-won vote would be a weapon in the hands of the workers.

So the question at issue between him and Jones was not over whether or not there should be an alliance between the working class and the capitalist class to achieve the Charter (effective universal suffrage) but over how this alliance should arise. Marx wanted, if you like, the middle class to ally itself to the working class rather than the working class to ally itself to the middle class.

In 1850 Marx and Engels had written:

Despite this split and the emergence of more extreme demands, the Chartists, remembering the circumstances under which the Corn Laws were repealed, still suspect that in the next crisis they will once again have to form an alliance with the industrial bourgeoisie, the Financial Reformers, and that they will have to help them defeat their enemies, forcing concessions from them in their turn. This will certainly be the position of the Chartists in the next crisis (Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue, May-October 1850).

This conclusion was based at that time on their experience of the abortive German bourgeois revolution and the roles the middle class and the working class had played in it. But greater familiarity with the English political scene did not lead Marx to alter this view. In one of a series of articles he wrote for the People's Paper analysing Gladstone's 1853 budget, he discussed what might happen if Gladstone's proposal to bring taxes on income from landed property into line with those on other incomes was rejected by the landed interest in Parliament:

If, however, the country party once more obtain the upper hand, the middle class cannot get rid of them without remodelling the rotten oligarchic parliament and then it is no longer in their power to agitate for a limited reform, but they must go the whole length of the people's demands. The people, of course, can never without abandoning their principles and their interests, join and appeal to the middle class but for the bourgeoisie, it would not be the first time that they are forced to throw themselves on the shoulders of the people (PP, 30 April 1853).

Marx felt, in other words, that the working class should concentrate on building up its own strong, independent political movement, which the capitalist middle class would then be obliged to offer concessions to, in order to win its support for the struggle against the landlord class. Jones had once favoured this policy too, and Marx had supported him for doing so, but Jones was now proposing to go to the middle class party — the Radicals — offering them concessions in return for working class support. For Marx, such a policy meant the working class "abandoning both their principles and their interests" and he severely criticised it.

Marx, it should be added, was equally critical of the capitalist middle class for not waging thoroughly enough the "manly contest . . . against the aristocratic and privileged classes of the country" of which Bright had spoken. He noted how they accepted aristocratic government as long as it pursued policies in their own economic interest and were only prepared to struggle against it when it departed from this tacit understanding by bringing in some measure to benefit the landlords at the expense of the capitalists. This led Marx to favour what the French call la politique du pire, to support the worst alternative, in this case to prefer a reactionary aristocratic government defending the privileges of the landlord class to an aristocratic government which pursued capitalist class policies. Only in this way, Marx suggested, could the middle class be goaded into taking action to end the political privileges of the landlord class, so clearing the way for the working class to use the resulting political democracy in its own interest, against the capitalist class.

Thus, in the same article on Gladstone's budget in the People's Paper, immediately preceding the passage we have already quoted, Marx wrote that the defeat of Gladstone's proposal to equalise taxes on landed and other incomes

would certainly promote the interests of the people. One thing is clear: as long as an aristocratic coalition does the work required from them by the manufacturing and trading class, the latter will neither make any political effort themselves, nor allow the working class to carry their own political movement (PP, 30 April 1853)

Marx was deluding himself if he really thought that a reactionary government, whether under Palmerston or the Tories, would lead to a "revolutionary" situation. Certainly Palmerston's victory in 1857 did goad the radicals into insisting more forcefully on the need for an extension of the franchise; but how wrong Marx's assessment was can be seen from the fact that Lord Palmerston's personal opposition to reform delayed, without inciting any serious popular discontent, any move in this direction till after his death in 1865 and that the Second Reform Act, when it came in 1867, was passed under a Tory government.

The 1850s ended with another lock-out that assumed national importance. For some years trade unions in the building industry had been agitating for a reduction in their working day from 10 to 9 hours. In the summer of 1859 one employer dismissed a trade unionist for having taken part in a delegation to him to put forward this demand. His fellow workers naturally responded by going on strike. The London building employers decided to use the occasion to try to break the power of the building trades' unions. They locked out their workers, saying that they would only re-employ those who agreed to sign a "document" repudiating trade unionism. Other trade unions throughout the country rallied round the building workers and the dispute continued for six months. It was finally settled in February 1860 in a draw: the workers dropped their demand for a 9-hour day and the employers withdrew "the document".

A direct result of the builder's lock-out and the solidarity movement around it was the creation of the London Trades Council in May 1860, at a meeting called by the builders' strike committee. Trades Councils, which already existed in some other towns and cities, were committees formed by delegates from the various trade unions in a particular area. They were mainly concerned with trade union matters, but also provided an opportunity for trade unionists to discuss broader political questions. Some of those who were prominent in the London Trades Council were very much interested in politics, not just matters of immediate concern to workers such as the law on trade unions or the extension of the franchise, but also in foreign questions like the American Civil War and the campaign for Italian unity. It was this new generation of working-class militants who were to replace Jones as Marx's contacts when he resumed participation in the working-class movement in Britain in 1864.

Adam Buick