A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  The 1850s were a highly volatile, not to say turbulent, period in British politics. The Empire was growing, war was raging, and new conflicts constantly seemed imminent. The contradictions between the traditional aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were sharpening, at the same time as discontent among workers and other lower classes was perceived as a distant but threatening noise in Parliament.

  Henry Temple, third Viscount Palmerston – commonly called Lord Palmerston – occupied a unique position in Marx’s reporting. He was born in 1784 and was thus a man well on in years in the 1850s and early 1860s. His career had been exceptionally long: he made his debut in the House of Commons in 1807 when Napoleon I was the subject of the day in British politics. Over the decades he found himself close to the centre of power, finally crowning his career in 1855 with the position of prime minister.

  In 1853 when Palmerston was home secretary, Marx wrote a long series of articles with the collective title ‘Lord Palmerston’. The articles were intended both for the Chartists’ The People’s Paper and for the New York Daily Tribune, but only certain articles ran in the latter. This series would soon come out as a pamphlet, and it enjoyed a certain degree of success.

  Marx always had an ironic perspective on Palmerston: he was not a statesman equal to his tasks, but he was a clever actor for any role, Marx said. He harboured no great plans, but got himself entangled in trifles. He was not worthy of any great opponents, but he always knew instead how he could choose insignificant people for his duels. When it proved opportune, he became a supporter of the Whig Party, which soon made him foreign secretary. He was contemptuous of the people: the common man had no rights. But he was pleased to appear as a benefactor.48

  This series of articles is highly retrospective. Palmerston’s exploits during the 1830s and 1840s are put under the magnifying glass. In many later articles, Marx castigated the prime minister’s more current efforts. In 1855 when Neue Oder-Zeitung was Marx’s main newspaper, he again devoted several articles to the British statesman. He reported the rumour that Palmerston was a Russian spy and therefore little inclined to inflict a decisive defeat on the Russians in the Crimean War. But he countered with another rumour – that the same man belonged to a secret society in Italy. In another article, he reads the physiognomy of the entire British ruling class from Palmerston’s conduct.49

  Briefly put, Marx had no high opinion of Palmerston. There were, however, even greater nobodies than he. One such nobody, the subject of Marx’s particular contempt, was Lord Aberdeen (or, with his official title, George Hamilton-Gordon, fourth Earl of Aberdeen). Lord Aberdeen was prime minister as England entered the Crimean War. Marx excels in virulence when describing how the Earl presented the declaration of war in Parliament. Ostensibly, Marx introduced his article with something completely irrelevant. The French, he wrote, could not understand Shakespeare’s greatness because he so freely combines the sublime with the low, the grisly with the ridiculous, and the heroic with the burlesque. But there were limits to the contrasts: Shakespeare had never let a jester deliver the prologue to a heroic drama. This had just taken place in the British Parliament. Lord Aberdeen had performed the role of the jester brilliantly when he gave official confirmation that the country was at war with Russia. Only a farce could follow such an introduction, Marx sighed.50

  On the other hand, he harboured great admiration for another British politician of the time: Benjamin Disraeli. Ideologically, the distance from the conservative Disraeli was even greater, but Marx also had an eye for intellectual acuity and quality among those who held opposing opinions. He returned time after time to Disraeli’s merits, usually in contrast to Palmerston’s arbitrary mediocrity. His praise was never greater than in 1858, when he described how Disraeli, now chancellor of the exchequer, submitted his budget to Parliament. He praised the clarity of the analysis, the simplicity of the proposal, and the dexterity – judgements he never would have squandered on Palmerston or Aberdeen, or for that matter Gladstone.51

  Those who say that Marx hurled abuse at Jews in a kind of self-hate are building on a fragile foundation. It is true that he often pointed out that people he did not like for some reason were Jews. But he thought highly of Disraeli, the only British prime minister ever of Jewish ancestry, despite the fact that he was conservative. Marx did not say a word about his family background.

  The 1850s, like the early 1860s, were a turbulent time in British politics. But these were also the years when the economy was flung between boom and bust, great profits and crises. Marx was deeply engaged with these dramatic changes. But like other newspaper writers, he devoted less space to them in his journalism. Only now and then did he comment on the signs of dramatic declines, supporting his statements with statistics. Cotton production was collapsing, and other branches of industry were following, he wrote in 1855, adding that when the working class experienced the decline, it would come to life again after a few years of passivity.52

  But the real crisis only came in 1857. It was an important one in Marx’s life. In its shadow, he wrote the substantial manuscript that goes under the name Grundrisse, which is not only a preparatory work for Capital but is an important work in itself. He also devoted a few newspaper articles to the dramatic course of events. He described the collapse on the Hamburg stock exchange, which had repercussions in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. London was not unaffected.53 Similar convulsions in France also came into focus.54

  Marx’s fascination for the course of events was bound up with his conviction that a deep economic crisis would trigger a new revolution. So it had been in 1789, 1830, and 1848; so it would also be in the future. Previously, Great Britain had succeeded in resisting the atmosphere of rebellion, but it would not be so the next time, he declared in one of his articles on the subject. He added that even Russia had been shaken: serfdom was being questioned there (it was finally abolished in 1861).55

  But the crisis of 1857–58 blew over without a revolution. This did not mean that Marx became less attentive to the oscillations of the market. So, for example, the readers of Die Presse were informed in 1861 that the American Civil War was threatening British industry because imports of cotton, an important raw material, were about to be choked off.56 Nevertheless, there were other aspects of the war that above all occupied Marx the journalist.

  London and the World

  Paris may have been the capital of the nineteenth century, in Walter Benjamin’s sense: the agenda for most cultural issues was set there. As regards economic and political power, however, no metropolis could compare with London. This became increasingly clear in particular during the decades that Marx and his family lived in the city. Many of the leading politicians, with Lord Palmerston at their head, may have cut a poor figure on the international arena. Behind their often clumsy words, however, there was a force as regards industrial resources, worldwide communications, and money with which no glittering Continental rhetoric could compare.

  This power was the reason that Marx and many others were surprised by the rather feeble efforts of Great Britain during the Crimean War. It was also the reason that the rule over India and the subjection of China were seen as a confirmation of British efficiency and ruthlessness.

  As we have seen, the Crimean War – which from the start was called the ‘Russian War’ – was an important (in fact, long dominant) topic in Marx’s journalism. It was now a question of looking at this war from a broader perspective than that of the British Parliament.

  Most of what Marx wrote on the subject is commentary. He brings in his own sources – often directly from the sultan’s foremost advocate in London, David Urquhart, a well-informed but deeply reactionary journalist and politician. In the literature, it is sometimes suggested that he was close to Urquhart, but the only thing that united him and his informer was their loathing of Tsarist Russia. It is true that Urquhart appreciated Marx’s articles and had contacted him personally – in fact, Urquhart even got him to write a few articles for his own newspapers. But Mar
x did that chiefly for the money, and broke off contact when he did not receive compensation he considered reasonable.57

  Marx took pains to counteract the image of the Ottoman Empire as exotic beyond measure in contrast to the completely normal Great Britain. In his eyes, Islam was neither stranger nor more oppressive than Christianity. When Richard Cobden of the Manchester School warned against alliance with the ‘fanatical Muslims’, Marx pointed out that Cobden nevertheless could have directed his accusatory glance towards his own country, where the Church had a firm grip on state power.58

  In another article, he reported on all the obstacles the Grand Mufti had put in the way of an alliance with Christian states. In the next breath, he talked about how Christian churches fought tooth and nail over the sole right to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Marx obviously wanted to strike a balance. Religions always had their breeding grounds in the shortcomings of society. People everywhere sought relief from a harsh reality through the soporific drugs of religion. Religious leaders built their position of power on pious dreams of a better existence in the name of one or another tendency of faith.59

  But at the end of 1854, another topic besides the Crimean War captured Marx’s attention: Spain. In Western Europe, Spain was almost as exotic as Turkey, he said. He had equipped himself well to make the country less foreign, at least for American readers. He had learned Spanish so well that he not only read fluently, but according to Spanish acquaintances could eventually speak it admirably, although he had problems with pronunciation.

  In Spain, a power struggle between the keepers of tradition and the modernizers had been raging for decades. Marx was fascinated by the battles and contrasted Spain’s development with that of France. In France, they had made a revolution in three days, and then that was enough. In Spain, they had been holding out for three years, and were prepared for new clashes a decade later. Storm clouds were once again gathering on the horizon.

  Marx wrote eleven articles on the topic for the New York Daily Tribune. Eight of them were published; two have been lost, and only a few fragments of one have been preserved. Perhaps the editorial staff found there was too much Spanish history. Marx provided a proper history lesson in which the focus was primarily on the years around 1812, when the Spanish liberated themselves from Napoleon’s rule and the typical contradiction between reactionaries and modernizers was established. Marx pointed out that the latter were the first in the world to designate themselves liberals, and that the name then spread to other countries. It is an assertion that still holds true.60

  But Marx also followed developments in more distant countries, above all India and China, from his British outpost. He started there, as he otherwise did, from the conviction that the contemporary period was a stage in a long process of advance. This idea found expression in a few sweeping judgements in his most talked-about – one could say notorious, or at least deeply controversial – article on British rule in India. India had succumbed to many conquerors, he pointed out. But the British were the first to carry the country up to a higher level of development through telegraphs – and soon also railroads and steamer traffic.

  This reorganization entailed immense suffering for the people, but was still a necessary step forward. The bourgeois civilization pushing through the changes was certainly shamelessly hypocritical. The British were seeking new fortunes in far-off lands, although they made a show of being driven by nobler intents.61

  Marx’s attitude towards India and its brutal modernization has long been controversial. Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary scholar and critic of modern society, saw him as a representative of Western Orientalism. In one India article, Marx quoted Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, the great poem on Eastern poetry in its meeting with its Western counterpart; in Said’s opinion, he thereby revealed himself to be a Romantic in his view of the East. Said even argued that ‘Marx’s theoretical socio-economic views become submerged’ in the prevalent image of India.

  The latter may seem excessive: in Marx the telegraphs, railroads, and steamers still have the last word. The quote from Goethe deals with the pleasure that could shoot forth out of the suffering that had consumed ‘myriads of young souls’. No doubt it is the victims of civilization he was talking about, regardless of whether they were in Great Britain, India, or China?62

  It is otherwise telling that it is Goethe, one of his literary favorites, that Marx refers to. But he did not study Persian or Arabic, as Goethe did, and despite his first-rate knowledge of classical Greek, he was not tempted, as many others in the Europe of his time were, to learn the most cherished language of the Orientalists: Sanskrit. His frame of reference remained Western; he had deeper knowledge of the path from Homer to Goethe. He approached India more from the outside, though he was roused by the hunger for knowledge that was typical of him.

  Said’s picture has been questioned by Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian literary scholar and political commentator, who in his article ‘Marx on India: A Clarification’ emphasized that India in 1853 was an entirely new topic for Marx and that what he said was not characterized by the deep insights that were otherwise characteristic of much of what he wrote (it is worth noting, for example, that Marx repeated Hegel’s peculiar statement that India was a country without a history). Ahmad also calls attention to an oft-forgotten sentence in one of Marx’s articles in which his views on the blessings of civilization appear more clearly than elsewhere. He said there that the Indians would not themselves enjoy the fruits of everything the British were now scattering about in their country until the working class had seized power in Great Britain, or until the Indians themselves had become strong enough to cast off the British yoke. The subjugated people were thus weighed down under the same yoke as the industrial workers in far-off Great Britain.63

  This was the conviction that got Marx to entertain certain hopes for the Sepoy uprising that broke out in India in 1857 and continued through 1858. Sepoy was the name given to Indian soldiers serving in the British Army. They were used rather ruthlessly in the procession of British wars and conquests in Asia and had no opportunities to make a career in the army. In addition, they saw their home districts in northern India taxed even more harshly. The spark that set off the rebellion was the rumour that the ammunition they had been issued was greased with beef and pork fat, in the provocative indifference for various Indian taboos that generally distinguished British rule in the country. The rebellion called for major British efforts before it could be put down.

  Marx wrote a few articles on the insurrection. His position was obviously a split one. The English conquerors could equip the country with modern technology that was necessary for the real liberation of the people. The Sepoy warriors had succeeded in besieging Delhi, it is true, but they lacked leaders and their dream was of a pre-modern India.

  In another article, Marx reproduced what had been reported chiefly in British newspapers about the atrocities that the rebels had committed against Englishmen. Marx agreed that the outrages were appalling, but at the same time pointed out that the British conquerors had maimed, raped, and killed both Indians and Chinese with the same frenzy. The Indians were thus not exotic creatures equipped with a particular Oriental cruelty. The British and other rulers only imagined that their own indifference to the suffering of others was more justified; they were good Christians.64

  China was also an important topic of Marx’s articles. In the first one dealing with the country he took up Hegel, although without mentioning the philosopher’s name; he hid it behind the circumlocution ‘a most profound yet fantastic speculator on the principles which govern the movements of Humanity’. This philosopher had upheld the thesis on the unity of opposites. Marx found examples of this unity in the relationship between Great Britain and China. In China the ‘Taiping Rebellion’, inspired by a doctrine that had one of its roots in Christianity, was underway. The rebellion – or revolution, as Marx said – started from below; its spread would have been unthinkable without the farmers’ gro
wing discontent.

  The name of the movement, incidentally, meant ‘complete equality’. There were leaders in it who did not at all live up to the ideal, and spent their days in luxury and affluence. But the goal was to create a more modern China. The British chose to back the other side, that of tradition and empire. The rebellion was put down only in 1864. It is probably the bloodiest war in history, even if the calculations of the number of dead are extremely vague. It is estimated that between 20 and 70 million people lost their lives.

  Marx did not go into a description of the background of the rebellion or previous events in his article from 1853, but above all provided an idea of how the world had come to constitute an intimately connected unity in which its antitheses were forced together. In this global perspective, the Taiping Rebellion constituted a step direction of modernity; an anti-feudal striving for freedom was the leading element. Stephen R. Platt, a contemporary historian who wrote a monograph on the great drama in China, agrees with him. When the British supported imperial power, they consciously chose the side of Chinese passivity and foreign dependency. With the help of opium, the people would keep calm. The British could ship their profits home.65

  Opium addiction is a theme by itself in Marx’s journalism. He even wrote a history in article form on the trade in this dangerous drug. As for China, he believed the reason it could be so oppressed by foreigners was that it itself was a fossil. This fossilized society had also called forth its internal enemy, the rebellious masses who under the slogan ‘Taiping’ – complete equality – went on the attack against their masters and also indirectly against the foreign invaders. Marx in no way idealized the popular violence but connected it with the severe poverty. People lived on looting and were then satisfied with crumbs. For the ordinary Taiping soldier, ‘a human head means no more than a head of cabbage’.