Karl Marx Read online

  Chartism took its name and inspiration from the People’s Charter of May 1838, which had six fundamental demands: universal male suffrage; secret ballots; annual parliaments; salaries for MPs; abolition of the property qualification for MPs; an end to rotten boroughs. Though beset by constant arguments between the advocates of violent insurrection and those who put their trust in ‘moral force’, the Chartists remained a potent threat to the established order for much of the next decade. One of their newspapers, the Northern Star, sold more than 30,000 copies a week, and since most of these were bought in pubs or factories the actual readership was far higher. Pitched battles were fought with the police, most notably in Birmingham and Monmouthshire, after which several of the leaders were jailed or transported. A Chartist petition presented to Parliament in 1842 – unsurprisingly rejected – had 3,317,702 signatures and was more than six miles long. That summer a two-week general strike in support of the Charter paralysed the Midlands, the North of England and parts of Wales.

  In April 1848, as Europe’s anciens régimes tottered and fell, the Chartists announced that they would assemble on Kennington Common, just south of the Thames, and march on Parliament. The news provoked such panic among the governing classes that the Duke of Wellington himself, victor of Waterloo, was brought out of retirement to prevent the demonstrators from crossing the river. It was Chartism’s last hurrah. Three years later, big crowds did gather in the centre of town – but for the International Exhibition in Hyde Park. With its industrial wealth, middle-class resilience and ubiquitous police, England had apparently weathered the revolutionary storms rather better than its Continental neighbours. Even so, a kind of submerged radicalism lingered on. Henry Mayhew’s book London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851, recorded that ‘the artisans are almost to a man red-hot proletarians, entertaining violent opinions’.

  Karl Marx had little time for the Chartists’ leader, Feargus O’Connor, a brilliant but increasingly demented Irish demagogue. He was more impressed by O’Connor’s two lieutenants, George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, whom he had met briefly during his first visit to England in the summer of 1845. Engels wrote a series of articles about Germany for Harney’s Northern Star that year and invited him to join the communists’ correspondence network soon afterwards. Harney and Jones both attended the second congress of the Communist League in November 1847, at which Marx and Engels were asked to compose their manifesto.

  Alarmed by the galloping optimism of these German revolutionists, Harney tugged desperately on the reins. ‘Your prediction that we will get the Charter in the course of the present year, and the abolition of private property within three years, will certainly not be realised,’ he warned Engels in 1846. ‘The body of the English people, without becoming a slavish people, are becoming an eminently pacific people … Organised conflicts such as we may look for in France, Germany, Italy and Spain cannot take place in this country. To organise, to conspire a revolution in this country would be a vain and foolish project.’ Engels ignored the cautionary signals. Immediately after the Kennington Common rally of April 1848 he told his communist brother-in-law, Emil Blank, that the English bourgeoisie would be ‘in for a surprise when once the Chartists make a start. The business of the procession was a mere bagatelle. In a couple of months, my friend G. Julian Harney … will be in Palmerston’s shoes. I’ll bet you twopence and in fact any sum.’ After a couple of months – and indeed a couple of years – Palmerston was still Foreign Secretary.

  What went wrong? On 1 January 1849, Marx reviewed the failed revolutions of 1848 and looked ahead to the coming year in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. ‘England, the country that turns whole nations into proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace, that has already defrayed the cost of a European Restoration, the country in which class contradictions have reached their most acute and shameless form – England seems to be the rock against which the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb.’ The world market was dominated by England, and England was dominated by the bourgeoisie. ‘Only when the Chartists head the English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to that of reality.’

  In short, the future of world revolution depended on Harney and his colleagues – a heavy responsibility for Marx to lay upon them, though also a handsome tribute to their prowess. Alas for his prediction, they were already disintegrating into factions and splinter groups. Encouraged by Marx and Engels, George Julian Harney broke with O’Connor in 1849 and founded a succession of evanescent if lively journals – the Democratic Review, the Red Republican (whose greatest achievement, during its brief six months of existence, was to publish the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto) and the Friend of the People.

  To the disgust of Marx and Engels, Harney practised what he preached about the ‘brotherhood of man’ – a phrase Marx detested, since there were many men whose brother he would never wish to be under any circumstances. The emollient Harney spread his political favours widely, applauding Marx’s ‘rascally foes’ among the Continental democrats – Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Ruge, Schapper – and somehow contriving to keep in with all sides when the Communist League fell apart. Marx thought him not so much wicked as merely impressionable – ‘impressionable, that is, to famous names, in whose shadow he feels touched and honoured’. In his private correspondence with Engels, Marx nicknamed the indiscriminate cheerleader ‘Citizen Hiphiphiphurrah’ – or sometimes ‘Our Dear’, a mocking reference to his cloyingly fond and attentive wife, Mary Harney. ‘I am fatigué of this public incense so tirelessly used by Harney to fill the nostrils of les petits grands hommes,’ he complained in February 1851.

  Still, Harney’s ideological promiscuity had one merit: it left Marx once again without any loyal allies. ‘I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves,’ he wrote to Engels. ‘It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with these jackasses, all this is now over … I hardly see anyone here [in London] save Pieper and live in complete retirement.’

  Engels agreed wholeheartedly:

  I find this inanity and want of tact on Harney’s part more irritating than anything else. But au fond it is of little moment. At long last we have again the opportunity – the first time in ages – to show that we need neither popularity, nor the support of any party in any country, and that our position is completely independent of such ludicrous trifles. From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. Until then we shall at least have some peace and quiet … How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years.

  Like another Marx, they disdained any club that would want them as members: ‘merciless criticism of everyone’ was now their policy. ‘What price all the tittle-tattle the entire émigré crowd can muster against you,’ Engels asked, ‘when you answer it with your political economy?’

  This lofty contempt for tittle-tattle was gloriously disingenuous: Marx and Engels had an undiminished thirst for émigré gossip, and for the rest of their lives they never missed a chance to amuse or infuriate each other by trading scuttlebutt. The spluttering indignation reached new heights in February 1851 when Harney helped to organise a London banquet at which the guest of honour was Louis Blanc. Two of Marx’s few remaining allies among th
e London expatriates, Conrad Schramm and Wilhelm Pieper, were sent along to observe the proceedings – only to find themselves dragged out of the hall, denounced as spies and then kicked and punched by a 200-strong crowd, including many members of Harney’s ill-named ‘Fraternal Democrats’. Schramm appealed for help to one of the stewards, Landolphe, but to no avail. Then, as Marx informed Engels, ‘who should arrive but Our Dear; instead of intervening energetically, however, he stammered something about knowing these people and would have launched into long explanations. A fine remedy, of course, at such a moment.’ Engels suggested that Pieper and Schramm avenge themselves by giving Landolphe a box on the ears. Marx, predictably enough, felt that nothing less than a duel would provide the necessary satisfaction – and ‘if anybody is to be done an injury, it must be the little Hiphiphiphurrah Scotsman, George Julian Harney, and no other, and then it is Harney who will have to practise shooting.’

  Citizen Hiphiphiphurrah’s only use to Marx and Engels thereafter was as the butt for jokes. However, they stayed on friendly terms with Ernest Jones, who had not attended the infamous banquet. Having spent his childhood in Germany, Jones was deemed to be ‘unEnglish’ – the highest compliment they could pay any British citizen. (In 1846, still in the first flush of infatuation, Engels had described Harney as ‘more of a Frenchman than an Englishman’.) Marx contributed to Jones’s periodical, the People’s Paper, and in his articles elsewhere continued to praise the Chartists’ insistence on widening the franchise. ‘After the experiments which undermined universal suffrage in France in 1848, the Continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter,’ he wrote in the Neue Oder-Zeitung. ‘They overlook the fact that two-thirds of the population of France are peasants and over one-third townspeople, whereas in England more than two-thirds live in towns and less than one-third in the countryside. Hence the results of universal suffrage in England must likewise be in inverse proportion to the results in France, just as town and country are in the two states.’ In France, the suffrage was a political demand, supported to a greater or lesser extent by almost every ‘educated’ person. In Britain, it was a social question, marking the divide between aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one side and ‘the people’ on the other. English agitation for suffrage had gone through ‘historical development’ before it became a slogan of the masses; in France, the slogan came first, without any preceding gestation. Here we see once more the curious ambivalence of Marx’s attitude to his adoptive country. Unlike its peasant-infested neighbours, England had a large and sophisticated metropolitan proletariat: it was therefore more ‘advanced’ and ready for revolution. Yet England also possessed an immensely self-confident bourgeosie, the rock against which revolutionary waves broke in vain. Sometimes he persuaded himself that a political cataclysm in Britain was not only inevitable but imminent; at other times he was reduced to angry despair by the doltish conservatism of the inhabitants. But what could one expect? Marx, more than any other thinker of his generation, was a connoisseur of paradox and contradictions – since it was these very contradictions which guaranteed capitalism’s demise.

  ‘There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny,’ he said in April 1856, at a London dinner celebrating the fourth anniversary of the People’s Paper. ‘On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.’ Machinery, blessed with the power of shortening and fructifying people’s labour, had instead starved and overworked them. The new sources of wealth, by some inverse alchemy, had become sources of want. And Britain – the wealthiest and most modern industrial society in the world – was also the most ripe for destruction. ‘History is the judge – its executioner, the proletarian.’

  Even an after-dinner audience of English Jacobins, fortified with ‘the choicest viands and condiments of the season’, might have raised a quizzical eyebrow at this apocalyptic rhetoric. Could England – the financial and industrial centre of the world, the hub of the greatest empire ever seen, the throbbing heart of capitalism – really be so flimsy and frangible? To Marx, the paradox was more apparent than real. It was an ‘old and historically established maxim’ that obsolete social forces summon all their strength before their final death agony, and were therefore weakest when they seemed most intimidating. ‘Such is today the English oligarchy.’

  One wonders if any of his listeners recalled the rather more cautious tone of his essay on the civil war in France, written for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850. ‘The original process always takes place in England: it is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos,’ he had argued then. But while England luxuriated in bourgeois prosperity ‘there can be no talk of a real revolution … A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis.’

  He had been waiting ever since, with some impatience, for the crisis to arrive – reading the runes, seeking out portents. ‘Provided nothing untoward happens within the next six weeks, this year’s cotton crop will amount to 3,000,000 bales,’ Engels informed him in July 1851. ‘If the CRASH in the market coincides with such a gigantic crop, things will be cheery indeed. Peter Ermen is already fouling his breeches at the very thought of it, and the little tree frog’s a pretty good barometer.’ A collapse in the fortunes of the textile industry would also have put an end to Marx’s regular subsidies from the petty-cash box at Ermen & Engels, but this was apparently a price worth paying for the general ruination of all the little tree frogs. He licked his lips at ‘the very pleasing prospect of a trade crisis’. By September, however, there was no sign of one. Instead, the discovery of gold in the South Australian state of Victoria might actually open up new markets and precipitate an expansion of world trade and credits, like the California gold rush of 1848. ‘One must hope the Australian gold business won’t interfere with the trade crisis,’ Engels fretted. He consoled himself with the thought that even if capitalism was rescued by Antipodean success, at least they would have been right about something: ‘In six months’ time the circumnavigation of the world by steam will be fully under way and our predictions concerning the supremacy of the Pacific Ocean will be fulfilled even more quickly than we could have anticipated.’ Australia – that ‘united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets’ – would then startle the world by showing what wonders could be performed by a nation of undisguised rascals. ‘They will beat California hollow.’ Anyway, the demand for Lancashire cotton was still slumping most agreeably, and soon ‘we shall have such overproduction as will warm the cockles of your heart’.

  A month later there was another cockle-warming bulletin from Marx’s Trojan horse in the capitalist citadel. ‘The iron trade is totally paralysed, and two of the main banks which supply it with money – those in Newport – have gone broke … There is the prospect, if not actually the certainty, of next spring’s convulsions on the Continent coinciding with quite a nice little crisis. Even Australia seems incapable of doing very much; since California, the discovery of gold has become an old story and the world has grown blasé about it …’ Two days after Christmas 1851, Marx sent a cheerful end-of-year message to the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath: ‘From what Engels tells me, the city merchants now also share our view that the crisis, held in check by all kinds of factors (including, e.g., political misgivings, the high price of cotton last year) etc., must blow up at the latest next autumn. And since the latest events I am more than ever convinced that there will be no serious revolution without a trade crisis.’ The downfall of Russell’s Whig administration in February 1852, and the installation of a Tory cabinet headed by Lord Derby, seemed likely to speed the happy day. ‘In England our movement can progress only under the Tories,’ Marx explained. ‘The Whigs conciliate all over the place and lu
ll everyone to sleep. On top of that there is the commercial crisis which is looming ever closer and whose early symptoms are erupting on every hand. Les choses marchent.’ Free trade and a falling cotton price might keep the English economy afloat until the autumn, but then the fun would begin.

  Engels was not so sure. Although the crisis certainly ought to come by the end of 1852 ‘according to all the rules’, the strength of Indian markets and the cheapness of raw materials suggested otherwise. ‘One is almost tempted to forecast that the present period of prosperity will be of exceptionally long duration. At any rate it may well be that the thing will last until the spring.’ It did; and perhaps Marx wasn’t entirely disappointed. ‘The revolution may come sooner than we would like,’ he wrote in August, noting a spate of bankruptcies and below-average harvests. ‘Nothing could be worse than the revolutionaries having to provide bread.’ Here he was hoist by his own explosive logic: if the revolution depended on economic catastrophe, as he insisted, it would of course inherit a breadless world. Nevertheless, for the next couple of years he still felt cheerfully certain that there were bad times just around the corner. ‘The state of the winter crops being what it is, I feel convinced that the crisis will become due.’ (January 1853.) ‘Present conditions … in my view must soon lead to an earthquake.’ (March 1853). ‘Les choses marchent merveilleusement. All hell will be let loose in France when the financial bubble bursts.’ (September 1853.)

  In the absence of a terminal economic crisis, Marx began to wonder if some other spark could light the conflagration. The Crimean War, perhaps? ‘We must not forget that there is a sixth power in Europe,’ he wrote in the New York Daily Tribune on 2 February 1854, ‘which at given moments asserts its supremacy over the whole of the five so-called “Great” Powers and makes them tremble, every one of them. That power is the Revolution … A signal only is wanted, and this sixth and greatest European power will come forward, in shining armour, and sword in hand, like Minerva from the head of the Olympian. This signal the impending European war will give …’