A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  57.Jonathan Sperber accounts in detail, and with reasonable consideration, the relationship between Marx and Urquhart in Sperber, Karl Marx, pp. 306ff.

  58.On Cobden and the Muslims, ‘Debates in Parliament’, New York Daily Tribune, 9 March 1854, MEGA I/13, pp. 71f, MEW 10, p. 83, CW 13, p. 14.

  59.On the Grand Mufti and Christian societies, ‘Declaration of War – On the History of the Eastern Question’, New York Daily Tribune, 15 April 1854, MEGA I/13, pp. 150f, MEW 10, pp. 169ff, CW 13, pp. 11–25.

  60.The nine articles on Spain with the common headline ‘Revolutionary Spain’ were published in the New York Daily Tribune between 9 September and 2 December 1854, MEGA I/13, pp. 416–66, MEW 10, pp. 433–85, CW 13, pp. 389–446. The fragments of the article ‘Spain – Intervention’ are reproduced in MEGA I/13, pp. 473ff, MEW 10, pp. 631–4, CW 13, pp. 654–9. Marx wrote about the designation ‘liberal’ 1 December 1854, MEGA I/13, p. 448, MEW 10, p. 474, CW 13, p. 435. The priority of the Spanish liberals for example in Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Liberalismus’, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), p. 751 and E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish (eds), Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce (London and New York: Longman, 1978), p. 3. On economic liberalism, see Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Wirtschaftlicher Liberalismus’, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982).

  61.Developments in India came under discussion in various early articles by Marx: ‘The Russian Humbug – Gladstone’s Failure – Sir Charles Wood’s East Indian Reform’, New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 162–5, MEW 9, pp. 127ff, CW 12, pp. 120–4; ‘The Turkish War Question – The New York Tribune in the House of Commons – The Government of India’, New York Daily Tribune, 20 July 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 204–14, MEW 9, pp. 176–87, CW 12, pp. 174–84; ‘Layard’s Motion – Struggle over the Ten Hours’ Bill’, ibid., 22 July 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 220–5, MEW 9, pp. 188ff, CW 12, pp. 185–91; ‘The War Question – Doings of Parliament – India’, 5 August 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 244–7, MEW 9, pp. 212ff, CW 12, pp. 209–15; and ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, 8 August 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 248–53, MEW 9, pp. 220ff, CW 12, pp. 217–22. The last of these is where the controversial statements quoted can be found. Marx never really felt at home discussing the problems of India. He could not write an overview of India, he explained in a letter to Engels on 13 August 1858, MEGA III/9, p. 201, CW 40, p. 339.

  62.Edward Said, Orientalism (Stockholm: Ordfront, 1978), pp. 154–7.

  63.Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures (London: Verso, 2008), in particular pp. 227ff.

  64.‘The Revolt in India’, New York Daily Tribune, 4 April 1858, MEW 12, pp. 238ff, CW 15, pp. 305–8, and ‘The Indian Insurrection’, New York Daily Tribune, 16 September 1857, MEW pp. 285ff, CW 15, pp. 327–30. Marx wrote an additional series of articles on the Indian rebellion, but they do not have the same fundamental interest at all. Engels analysed the military operations in other articles.

  65.Marx, ‘Revolution in China and Europe’, New York Daily Tribune, 14 June 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 147–53, MEW, pp. 95–102, CW 12, pp. 93–100. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2012).

  66.‘History of the Opium Trade’, New York Daily Tribune, 20 and 25 September 1858, MEW 12, pp. 549–56, CW 16, pp. 13–20. Marx, ‘Chinese Affairs’, Die Presse, 7 July 1862, MEW 15, pp. 514ff, CW 19, pp. 216ff. The quote, pp. 515 and 217 respectively.

  67.On the linking together of China and Great Britain, see the aforementioned article ‘Revolution in China and Europe’, New York Daily Tribune, 14 June 1853, MEGA I/12, pp. 147–53, MEW 9, pp. 95ff, CW 12, pp. 93–100. The article that led to the conflict with Dana is called ‘The British and Chinese Treaty’, New York Daily Tribune, 15 October 1858, MEW 12, pp. 584–9, CW 16, pp. 46–50. His letter on the matter to Engels, 17 December 1858, MEGA III/9, pp. 259f, MEW 29, pp. 376f, CW 40, pp. 362f. ‘The War Against Persia’, New York Daily Tribune, 14 February 1857, MEW 12, pp. 117ff, CW 15, pp. 177–80.

  68.On the rebellion in Haiti, see for example Philippe R. Girard, Ces esclaves qui ont vaincu Napoléon: Toussaint Louverture et la guerre díndépendance haïtienne (1801–1804) (Rennes: Les Perséides, 2013) and Carolyn Fick, Haïti, naissance d’une nation: La Révolution haïtienne vue d’en bas (Rennes: Les Perséides, 2013).

  69.Marx, ‘The British Government and the Slave-Trade’, New York Daily Tribune, 2 July 1858, not yet in MEGA, MEW 12, pp. 507ff, CW 15, pp. 570–74.

  70.Marx, ‘The American Question in England’ and ‘The Londoner Times and Lord Palmerston’, New York Daily Tribune, 11 and 21 October 1861 respectively, MEW 15, pp. 304ff and 318ff, CW 19, pp. 7–16 and 21–6.

  71.For a brief and pithy account of Great Britain during the Civil War and in particular in connection with the Trent affair, see Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform 1815–1870 (London: Clarendon Press, 1962), above all pp. 308–12. (The book is included in The Oxford History of England.)

  72.Marx’s last articles in the New York Daily Tribune were published 25 December 1861 and 10 March 1862 respectively, MEW 15, pp. 395ff and 439ff, CW 19, pp. 110–14 and 172–7. He had by then written several reports on the Civil War and the official hesitation of Great Britain in Die Presse, for example 20 October and 7 November 1861, MEW 15, pp. 329ff and 339ff respectively, CW 19, pp. 32–42 and 43–52. On the Trent affair in Die Presse, 18 January and 2 February 1862, MEW 15, pp. 445f and 454ff, CW 19, pp. 145–8 and 153–6.

  73.On Napoleon III and the war against Austria, New York Daily Tribune, 24 January and 1 February 1859, MEW 13, pp. 161ff and 177ff, CW 16, pp. 148–53 and 167–70. On the prospects of war in the New York Daily Tribune, 31 March 1859, MEW 13, pp. 280ff, CW 16, pp. 261–6.

  74.‘Anti-Semitism in Vienna’, in the New York Daily Tribune, 6 June 1859, MEW 13, pp. 333ff, CW 16, pp. 320–7. ‘The Peace’, New York Daily Tribune, 28 July 1859, MEW 13, pp. 420ff, CW 16, pp. 412–15.

  75.On the rumours of an impending Franco-British war, see ‘The Invasion Panic in England’, New York Daily Tribune, 9 December 1859, MEGA I/18, pp. 22ff, MEW 13, pp. 545ff, CW 16, pp. 545ff. ‘Mazzini and Napoleon’, New York Daily Tribune, 11 May 1858, MEW 12, pp. 420ff, CW 15, pp. 485–9. Napoléon-Louis Bonaparte, Extinction du pauperisme (Paris: Pagnerre, 1844). Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his mental health in the New York Daily Tribune, 23 October 1858, MEW 12, pp. 594ff, CW, pp. 54–8.

  76.The King’s abdication and his successor, New York Daily Tribune, 23 October and 3 November 1858, MEW 12, pp. 604ff and 613ff, CW 15, pp. 65–9 and 74–7. The matter was later commented on in several articles that followed rapidly. ‘Public Feeling in Berlin’, New York Daily Tribune, 28 April 1860, MEGA I/18, pp. 412ff, MEW 15, pp. 39ff, CW 17, pp. 367ff.

  77.On the Swedish Crown Prince in the New York Daily Tribune, 5 September 1857, MEW 12, pp. 266f, CW 15, pp. 33–335. The best biography of Carl XV is in Swedish, Sven Eriksson, Carl XV (Stockholm: Wahlström and Widstrand, 1954). In English there is nearly nothing, apart from articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  78.George Ripley and Charles Dana, The New American Cyclopaedia: A Popular Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York: A. Appleton and Company, 1858). Engels’s letter to Marx about Bernadotte, 21 and 22 March 1857, MEW 29, pp. 180–7, CW 40, pp. 174–80. The article on Bernadotte is reproduced in German translation in MEW 14, pp. 154–63, and in the English original in CW 18, pp. 149–58.

  79.‘Ireland’s Revenge’, Neue Oder-Zeitung, 16 March 1855, MEW 11, pp. 117ff, CW 14, pp. 78ff, and ‘O’Connor’s Funeral’, 15 September 1855, MEW 11, p. 529, CW 14, p. 524. Stedman Jones goes through the attitude of the entire Marx family towards the Irish question and Fenianism, pp. 478–85.

  80.Sperber points out that the journalism of the ’50s and ’60s is usually overlooked, but himself does not make any in-depth study of them; Sperber, Karl Marx, pp. 291ff. Significantly more detailed is Jones, Karl Marx, in parti
cular pp. 353–63. He does not, however, devote himself to any comprehensive review of this journalism.

  10The Most Intensive Effort

  1.Jenny Marx’s letter to Conrad Schramm, 8 December 1857, MEGA III/8, pp. 211f, MEW 29, p. 645, CW 40, p. 566.

  2.Karl Marx to Engels the same day, MEGA III/8, p. 208, MEW 29, p. 232, CW 40, p. 217. To Lassalle, 21 December 1857, MEGA III/8, pp. 223f, MEW 29, p. 548, CW 40, p. 226. To Engels, 11 January 1858, MEGA III/9, p. 18, MEW 29, p. 256, CW 40, p. 244. Second letter to Lassalle, 22 February 1858, MEGA III/9, pp. 71ff, MEW 29, pp. 50f, CW 40, p. 270. On the disarray in the manuscript, to Engels, 31 May 1858, MEGA III/9, p. 157, MEW 29, p. 330, CW 40, p. 318. Letter to Lassalle, 12 November 1858, MEGA III/9, pp. 238f, MEW 29, p. 566, CW 40, p. 354.

  3.Karl Marx, ‘Einleitung zur Kritik der politische Oekonomie’, Die Neue Zeit 31 (1903). Max Adler, Marx als Denker: zum 25. Todestag von Karl Marx (Berlin: Volksbuchhandlung, 1908). Georg Lukács, Historia och klassmedvetande (Lund: Cavefors, 1968), pp. 43ff.

  4.Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1953).

  5.Antonio Negri, Marx oltre Marx (London: Pluto, 2003).

  6.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Imperiet (Göteborg: Glänta produktion, 2003), Multituden: krig oder demokrati i imperiets tidsàlder (Hägersten: Tankekraft, 2007), Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009) and Förklaring (Hägersten: Tankekraft, 2013). Among Slavoj Žižek’s many works, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) and Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012) can be mentioned. Žižek also belongs to those followers of Marx who, during the early 2000s, showed great interest in religion, and Christianity in particular. He declares himself an atheist and a materialist, it is true, but at the same time he asserts that in Christianity is found the same type of liberation thinking as in Marxism. In an interesting study, Swedish theologian Ola Sigurdson compared Žižek’s interest in religion with Terry Eagleton’s. Eagleton is a self-professed Catholic, and in that respect stands far from Žižek. But Sigurdson showed that both are united in their idea that both Christianity and Marxism raise the question of hope, or the hope in a future liberation. Ola Sigurdson, Theology and Marxism and Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), particularly the concluding chapter ‘An Anatomy of Hope’, pp. 163–203. Jürgen Habermas, one of the leading representatives of critical theory, or the Frankfurt School, has also become interested in religion, although from another starting point. He notes that two tendencies have become dominant in the present: on the one hand, a naturalism that intends to reduce everything human to nature, and on the other a number of religious orthodoxies that have won increasing political influence. In this situation, Habermas seeks a way beyond these extremes – a way that admits both the conquests of the natural sciences and the sincerity of religious feeling but provides independent space for secular human culture as its own independent field. Jürgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). It is worth noting that in these discussions of religion, Marx’s theory of the genuine expression of religion in capitalism – commodity fetishism – plays a negligible role. Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

  7.Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital: Der Rohentwurf des Kapital (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1968) and Roman Rosdolsky, ‘Kapitalets’ tillkomsthistoria (Göteborg: Röda Bokförlaget, 1977–79). Many have continued on Rosdolsky’s path. Fred Schrader, Restauration und Revolution: die Vorarbeiten zum ‘Kapital’ von Karl Marx in seinen Studienheften 1850–58 (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980) in particular deserves to be pointed out.

  8.‘Einleitung’, MEGA II/1.1, pp. 7*–23*. In the Marx Engels Werke (MEW), the Grundrisse was only published much later, in 1983 – long after the other volumes. In the preface to the nearby Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Lenin can confirm the significance of what Marx had said: MEW 13, pp. v–xxvi, in particular p. vii. Marx’s new, intensive occupation with Hegel’s philosophy in connection with the Grundrisse was hard to swallow in the Soviet tradition, where it was claimed that by the mid-1840s Marx had laid the foundations of his materialism in opposition to Hegel once and for all. See further Dieter Riedel, ‘Wie Hegel das richtig gesagt hat,’ Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung: Neue Folge (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), pp. 122ff.

  9.Michael Heinrich, ‘Entstehungs- und Auflösungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital,’ Kapital und Kritik (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2011), pp. 163 and 345–51.

  10.‘Gattungswesen’, MEGA II/11, p. 167, ‘Species-being’, CW 28, p. 176.

  11.‘Bastiat und Carey’, MEGA II/1, pp. 1, 3–15, CW 28, pp. 5–16. ‘Einleitung’, ibid., pp. 21–45 and 17–48 respectively.

  12.Letter from Marx to Engels, 16 January 1858, MEGA III/9, p. 25, MEW 29, p. 260, CW 40, p. 249. Letter from Marx to Joseph Dietzgen, 9 May 1868, MEW 32, p. 547, CW 43, p. 31. Hegel literature in Marx’s and Engels’s libraries according to MEGA IV, pp. 315–22. The Science of Logic is registered there as pp. 321f, number 553 in the current catalogue. Freiligrath, like Marx, was living in London at the time. On Marx’s studies of Hegel’s Logic, see MEGA IV/32, pp. 321f.

  13.Marx’s words on the manuscript to The German Ideology can be found in MEGA II/2, p. 102, MEW 13, p. 10 and CW 29, p. 264.

  14.‘definite individuals …’, MEW 3, p. 25, CW 5, p. 35. ‘Individuals producing …’, MEGA II/1.1, p. 21, CW 28, p. 17.

  15.The introductory arguments on individualism, production, and distribution in MEGA II/1.1, pp. 21–4, CW 28, pp. 17–26. John Stuart Mill on production and distribution in A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive; Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill 7–8 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973–74), pp. 199ff. His System of Logic can be found in the same source. Graeme Duncan, Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) concludes in a comparison between Marx and Mill. Unfortunately, the author does not go into their different views on the relationship between distribution and production. An independent and worthwhile commentary on Marx’s introduction is Stuart Hall, A ‘Reading’ of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse (Birmingham: Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1973).

  16.Jindřich Zelený, The Logic of Marx, trans. by Terrell Carver (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 15–22 and passim.

  17.The anatomy of humans and of apes in MEGA II/1.1, p. 40, CW 28, p. 42. For serious commentaries, see for example Heinrich, above all p. 178.

  18.‘nothing is simpler …’, MEGA II/1.1, p. 30, CW 28, p. 31. ‘Totality’, ibid., pp. 34 and 36 respectively.

  19.‘identical, but that …’, MEGA II/1.1, p. 35, CW 38, p. 36.

  20.MEGA II/1.1, p. 36, CW 28, p. 38.

  21.Hegel’s most exhaustive presentation on the concept of reflection can be found in The Science of Logic, Part II, Hegel 1969, pp. 393–478. A good elucidation of Hegel’s concept of reflection can be found in W. van Dooren, Het Totalitetsbegrip bij Hegel en zijn Voorgangers (Diss., Assen, 1965).

  22.‘greift über …’, MEGA II/1.1, p. 35, English translation ‘dominant moment’, p. 36.

  23.Hegel’s example of the character and customs of a people and their legislation can be found in G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 346f. On Verhältnis and Beziehung in Hegel, see above, p. 210.

  24.Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005), p. 56.

  25.‘Conceptual totality’, MEGA II/1.1, p. 27, CW 28, p. 38. Marx also spoke of a Gedankenkonkretum, which in the Collected Works is very freely translated as ‘a product of the thinking mind’.

  26.On ‘the unequal development’, see ibid.,
pp. 44f and 46 respectively.

  27.The reckoning with Karl Vogt, see, p. 530. Vogt was counted among the same grouping of materialists as Ludwig Büchner and Jacob Moleschott in this biological and philosophical debate. See Carl Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (Giessen: J. Ricker’sche Buchhandlung, 1855), in which he certainly does not allow any freedom from the fundamental laws of matter, whether for humanity, art, or anything else. Vogt and the others appear in the context of their times in the omnibus volume Kurt Bayertz, Walter Jaeschke, Myriam Gerhard, Weltanschauung, Philosophie und Naturwissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: Der Materialismusstreit (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007).

  28.On the history of Aristotelian logic, see Heinrich Scholz, Abriss der Geschichte der Logik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber, 1959) and Wilhelm Risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit (Stuttgart-Bad-Cannstadt: Frommann, 1964–70).

  29.On Hegel’s Science of Logic and Marx’s Capital, see Abbas Alidoust Azerbaijani, Aufhebung Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik in Marx’ Das Kapital (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

  30.MEGA II/1.1, pp. 26f, CW 28, p. 27.

  31.MEGA II/1.1, pp. 26f, CW 28, p. 27. The living work that brings the dead to life through consuming it, pp. 272 and 285f respectively.

  32.On the extremes, on the spiral or the increasing curve, MEGA II/1.1, p. 189, CW 28, p. 197.

  33.MEGA II/1.1, p. 132, CW 28, p. 138.

  34.Calculations of surplus value, MEGA II/1.1, pp. 277–309, CW 28, pp. 291–328. To Engels about arithmetical errors, 11 November 1858, MEW 29, p. 256, CW 40, p. 244. On the circulation of capital, MEGA I/1.2, pp. 563ff, CW 29, pp. 72ff.

  35.Letter to Engels 2 Apr 1858, MEGA III/9, pp. 121–5, MEW 29, pp. 311–18, CW 40, pp. 297–304. The summary in the Grundrisse, MEGA I/1.1, p. 43, CW 28, p. 45.

  36.Engels’s response, April 1858, MEGA III/9, pp. 126ff, MEW 29, pp. 319ff, CW 40, pp. 304ff.

  37.Marx’s letter 29 April 1858, ibid., pp. 134f, 323f, and 309f respectively. Marx himself was well aware of how elusive this portion of his presentation was, even in the finished work. To his old friend Joseph Weydemeyer – then residing in the United States – he wrote on 1 February 1859 that ‘the analysis of simple money forms is, you know, the most difficult because the most abstract part of political economy’, MEGA III/9, p. 295, MEW 29, p. 573, CW 40, p. 377.