Nevertheless, Marx spoke of ‘the revolutionary army’ and pointed out that its core consisted of regular troops that had developed into experienced partisans. But the great mass of warriors were smallholders and moreover lived rootless existences. Once a city had been conquered, it was carte blanche for the soldiers to rape women and girls for three days.
He concluded: Taiping was obviously the devil personified as the Chinese imagination pictured him. But it was also only in China that this devil was possible. His prerequisite was a petrified social life.
For the first time, it could be said that Marx here portrays a far-off country in exotic colours; unlike in the case of India, he does not relate the violence of the rebellious troops to the corresponding violence of the foreign masters.66 At the same time, he emphasized in his previous reporting how dependent on China Great Britain had become. Thanks to the uprising, prices on a range of goods would rise in London. That is to say, both countries were entwined with firm global ties.
When Marx wrote about the treaty on mutual trade relations that the British and the Chinese signed in 1858, his article became the subject of a dispute with Charles Dana. Marx vented his wrath in a letter to Engels in December 1858. Dana had printed his earlier articles about China as anonymous editorials without complimenting Marx at all for his efforts. But when this article was published, it was said to be written by an ‘occasional correspondent’; moreover, Dana had the audacity to polemicize with it. Marx had established that the Chinese had legalized the import of opium and probably also the cultivation of the dangerous poppy in China through the treaty. Now he was experiencing the triumph of members of the British government drawing the same conclusions he had.
Marx was and remained an enemy of colonialism, particularly British colonialism. His fundamental attitude appeared most clearly in an article he wrote in 1857 about an attempt by the English to win dominion over Persia. His picture of British actions was extremely dark. He spoke with disgust about the cunning and ruthless tricks of British diplomacy in Asia, sparing no colour in depicting the repulsive behaviour of the intruders.67
The image of Marx’s views on European – particularly British – colonialism changes markedly if one is not satisfied with a single quotation out of context from one of his many articles on India. Marx was no Orientalist in Said’s meaning, and he did not believe in what Rudyard Kipling would later call ‘the white man’s burden’ with the task of raising other races up to the heights of civilization. He never wavered in his belief in the positive significance of the railroads, the telegraph, and steam power. But he viewed the situation of the colonized peoples with the same eyes that he viewed the working class of the industrialized countries. They paid for the blessings of civilization with sweat and toil without themselves being allowed to take part in them.
He did not believe that the Taiping or Sepoy rebellions would lead to any real liberation. Something like that presupposed far-reaching industrialization. But this industrialization was not bound to Europe and North America out of necessity. People in far-flung corners of the world were no less suited to it than, for example, the British.
The United States and the World
The American Civil War of 1861–65 also threw a long shadow over Europe. Slavery had gradually come to be regarded as its most decisive issue. The Northern states fought to abolish this inhumane system; the Southern states wanted to keep it.
Long before the war, slavery had led to political controversies of the first order. The idea of equal freedom and rights for everyone obviously conflicted with the system according to which certain people were the owners of other people and could therefore freely use (and abuse) them. In the United States, the Founding Fathers could shut their eyes to this consequence; several of them – with Thomas Jefferson at their head – themselves held slaves. In the French Revolution, the most radical groups gave prominence to the absurdity of slavery; the idea that everyone, regardless of race or even gender, should enjoy the same rights and freedoms including the vote gained a number of zealous advocates. But when former Black slaves in the French colony of Haiti made a revolution, France under Napoleon I responded by attempting to crush the rebellion. He did not succeed; the French were compelled to leave the island and a free republic was proclaimed. In its new constitution, the equality of the races was particularly emphasized.68
During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the slave trade was banned in many countries including Great Britain and the United States. The question was whether the states could really guarantee that no trade was occurring. New slaves were constantly being offered for sale on the market. There was a suspicion that, despite the ban, ships under the flag of the United States were transporting people under customarily inhumane conditions over the Atlantic. The question, raised by the Bishop of Oxford, turned up in the British Parliament and Marx reported on it in an 1858 article for the New York Daily Tribune. The government dismissed it: searching vessels under the American flag was out of the question since it would lead to open conflict and perhaps war. There was, moreover, the conjecture that the supply of new slaves was being guaranteed by Spanish ships that were also supplying Central and South America with new blood through ‘the infamous traffic’, as Marx wrote.69
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1860, eleven of the thirty-four American states seceded from the union and formed what they called the Confederacy. The formation of this new state was the immediate cause of the war, which began on 12 April 1861. The Confederacy was fighting for its independence, the Union to restore the country as it had been before the secession; but the issue of slavery had always been important and gradually stood out as the dominant one. The secessionists won a series of military victories in the beginning, but in the long run the Northern states – usually called the Union – would win by force of its superior economic and industrial strength.
Marx’s sympathies were always on the side of the North. This was fully apparent in the articles he managed to publish in the New York Daily Tribune before the war put obstacles in the path of his further contributions. He reported indignantly on the reactions in the British government – led by Palmerston – and in the British press. Palmerston paid lip service to the abolition of slavery, but in reality the North was causing concerns for him as well as The Times and other newspapers. The struggle of the Southern states for the freedom to enslave other people was met with deep understanding, Marx said, while the genuine desire of the Northern states to oppose slavery was questioned. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also played an important role in the British debate. In an open letter to the Earl of Shaftesbury, she pointed out slavery as the real cause of the war, thereby compelling many leading British to show their hands.70
But officially, Great Britain was neutral in the conflict. Slavery, of course, had no advocates in the government or in Parliament. But in his inauguration speech, Lincoln declared that the states that already allowed slavery would be permitted to keep it during his administration. From that, the British government concluded that the slave issue played no role in the Civil War. Palmerston and his ministers even leaned towards the opinion that the Southern states had the right to leave the Union.
The Southern states saw their chance, in particular as they concluded that British industry was completely dependent on cotton imports from the American South, and in that certainty they sent two negotiators to London – both die-hard advocates of slavery. They travelled on a British vessel, the Trent, and from that they believed that they would be able to break the marine embargo that the Northern states had imposed. But the vessel was boarded despite its British flag. The event roused enormous indignation, and Palmerston seemed to be leaning towards the opinion that the boarding was reason enough for the British to go to war with the Northern states.71
Marx wrote in detail about the Trent affair, just as he also otherwise covered the Civil War. But only one of his articles on
the Trent affair managed to be published in the New York Daily Tribune before his contract came up and he became a contributor to Die Presse instead. In his eyes, leading politicians and leading British newspapers were playing a complete double game. Even if they were opponents of slavery and the slave trade they nevertheless supported the political association of the slave owners. In Marx’s opinion, the Civil War was from the very beginning a question of Black liberation, and the British who questioned that were prevaricators who were chiefly guarding their own economic interests. He related with pride that those primarily affected by the rapidly decreasing cotton imports, the workers in Lancashire, never wavered in their support for the United States. In a few articles in Die Presse, he even argued that the Trent affair had developed into a conflict between the English government and the English people.72
Marx’s view of the United States was marked to a great degree by the positive encounter with Charles A. Dana and by his good experiences of the newspaper that Dana gave him the opportunity to write for. Add to that how a number of his friends and comrades-in-arms, with Joseph Weydemeyer at their head, carved out an existence in the new country and it is understandable that his image of America was rather bright. There were opportunities not only for technological and economic development, but for a more just society as well.
His image of Europe after the revolutions was significantly darker. Great Britain inspired a certain hope, but the class struggle there was also more bare and raw than anywhere else. France under Napoleon III was the object of his particular loathing. Not much new in relation to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte emerged in the many articles where he touched upon French development under the new emperor.
He followed the war between France and Austria in 1859 with a perspective of antipathy. Both regimes were odious to him but he still seems to have endured the reactions in Vienna more easily. The French cause might have seemed good – it was Italy’s freedom from the Habsburg Empire that was at stake. But the false popularity of the French emperor was so repugnant in Marx’s eyes that he was unable to express any joy over French successes. In addition, the maxim that no one can fundamentally liberate anyone else applied. The freedom of Italy must be the Italians’ own affair.
From the very beginning, Marx casts suspicion on Napoleon’s reasons to go to war. The emperor had been the object of an assassination attempt perpetrated by Italians; in Marx’s opinion, he should have perceived that as a warning. In his adventurous life before his promotion, he had been a member of a secret Italian organization with the unification of the country as its goal. The assassination attempt was a signal: be faithful to the promises you made in the society, or we will kill you!
It was a long time, however, before the struggles broke out. Most still hoped for peace, but Marx insisted defiantly: there would be war.73
And there was war. The Austrians’ setbacks triggered ominous moods in Vienna. A scapegoat was needed and the Jewish minority was selected, as they often were. Jews were being assaulted in the streets, Marx said. The war ended quickly, and Austria was compelled to hand over parts of its former Italian territory. But, Marx wondered, had Italy actually won anything? The Habsburgs kept their western border and therefore still had the key to northern Italy.74
In the eyes of many, Napoleon III now stood at the height of his career. France had staked more during the Crimean War than Great Britain, and had won the decisive battle. Now the powerful Habsburg double monarchy had also been beaten. Who would be the next victim? Was it possibly Great Britain’s turn? Rumours buzzed in London. Or was it Prussia, rapidly becoming ever stronger?
Marx reproduced the rumours of war with great seriousness. He was still just as negatively disposed towards the battle-happy emperor. He reproduced with enthusiasm Giuseppe Mazzini’s rhetorically brilliant reckoning with Napoleon. Mazzini, the creator of La Giovine Italia, was otherwise not a man Marx regarded highly. But this text, in Marx’s opinion, lacked almost entirely ‘that false sublimity, puffy grandeur, verbosity, and prophetic mysticism’ that otherwise marred his writings. Here the author spoke directly to the point, and he succeeded in completely reviewing what a humbug the French emperor was.
Marx’s own loathing was no less than Mazzini’s. But why was he so furious? One main reason, of course, is that Napoleon was the one who put a stop to the French Revolution that Marx attached such great hopes to. But the fact that in the presidential election that brought him to power, the emperor became a man of the people – especially the farmers – also played a role. He claimed to be able to solve the problems of modern poverty, or pauperism. Back in the 1840s, the decade of the utopias, he asserted in his pamphlet Extinction du paupérisme (The Extinction of Pauperism) that he possessed the answer to the question of how pauperism could be remedied. He even considered himself a kind of socialist; Marx’s contempt for his alleged ideology was at least as vivid as his contempt for Karl Grün’s or Arnold Ruge’s.75
Europe of the 1850s did, however, offer certain bright spots. While France was being oppressed by its usurper, Prussia had got rid of the king whose intolerant regime put a stop to Marx’s career both as an academic and as an editor-in-chief: Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In several articles, Marx reported on the rumours that the king had been seized by delusions; among other things, he believed he was a fish ready for the frying pan. The official historiography speaks of a stroke; however the matter stood, Friedrich Wilhelm handed over power to his brother Wilhelm, the future Wilhelm I, in the late 1850s. Marx followed carefully what was now happening, and could tell his American audience that the mood had changed fantastically in only two months. The tyranny of Friedrich Wilhelm IV was gone; his brother, with a much softer hand, remained. And freedom was expanding! Marx swore that Berlin was now the most revolutionary city in Europe alongside Palermo and Vienna. He was thinking, of course, of Garibaldi’s rebellion in southern Italy and of the seething discontent in the capital of the Habsburg Empire after the defeat against France. In Berlin, the feeling of relief after their former oppression had given people the courage to imagine a completely different society.76
The situation gradually calmed down in Vienna and Berlin, and the new Italian state of 1871 was the result of an entirely different development than what Garibaldi (and perhaps even Marx) had imagined: a cautious regime that placed the king atop its hierarchy.
But the gaze of Marx the journalist swept restlessly over Europe, registering sometimes hopeful, sometimes discouraging signs. Even the undeveloped Nordic countries sometimes captured his attention. In an 1857 article, he called attention to the Swedish Crown Prince – the future Carl XV – and his ‘resolute and energetic character’. He could very well create a Scandinavian union, thereby preparing the ground for a new conflict over Schleswig-Holstein.
The reason for these lofty thoughts about the Swedish Crown Prince are partially obscure. During the Crimean War, the Crown Prince had worked for Sweden to enter in on the side of France and Great Britain against Russia, but his plans did not gain a hearing. His dreams of a new Greater Sweden were not realistic; he soon also calmed down and was satisfied with more immediate causes for rejoicing such as women, parties, and hunting trips.77
Marx devoted a certain degree of interest in Sweden and House Bernadotte in another context as well. In The New American Cyclopaedia, which Charles A. Dana and his newspaper colleague George Ripley published, Marx contributed a few articles and Engels even more. It fell to Marx to write about Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and the strange career that brought him to Sweden. Engels had already informed him in a letter about Bernadotte’s military achievements, and especially emphasized the earlier indications of independence in relation to Napoleon.
In his article, Marx also gives an account of all the strange turns around the Swedes’ choice of Bernadotte for king, and their hopes that the French marshal would reconquer Finland from the Russians. They were astonished to discover that he would rather choose a union with Norway and conclude a peace treaty with
the Russians. But the Norwegians proved to be more independent than he thought, and despite his resistance created Europe’s most democratic constitution. Stockholm was actually too small for Karl Johan, and after the July Revolution of 1830 he hoped to be offered the French royal crown. But nothing came of it and he had to stay in the Nordic countries.
Marx summed up: Sweden had nothing to thank Karl Johan for. If the nation had recovered from earlier misery and misfortune, it was only due to their own energy and a long period of peace.78
Marx would devote particular attention to the issue of Ireland’s independence. In their letters, he and Engels could throw out sneering assessments about the Irish (as they did about many other people). But when it came down to it, Marx and his friends unswervingly supported the demand for Irish independence from England. Full of hope, they also followed the Irish workers’ struggle for freedom and human dignity. In one article, Marx could rejoice at the fact that Irish influence in the British Parliament was great and a thorn in the side of both aristocrats and Manchester liberals; in another he could depict with warmth the funeral of an Irish worker and Chartist leader active in London, Feargus Edward O’Connor.79
Nonetheless, the Irish issues were overshadowed by much else in Marx’s journalism. He had the entire world as his newsbeat; the wars and acute crises were always the focus of his attention. After 1864, Marx’s newspaper-writing rapidly became more and more sporadic, confined mainly to brief petitions and protests, often in the name of the International.
Over three periods, Marx would devote a large and crucial portion of his time to writing articles in newspapers and journals. Both of the initial periods took place in the 1840s, when he first managed Rheinische Zeitung and later the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The last period extended from 1851 to 1864. Marx no longer wrote as editor-in-chief but as a correspondent. On the other hand, his articles circulated over two continents; most of what he submitted was also published.
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