Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

had a circulation of 200,000 throughout America. The policies advocated by the paper and inspired by Greeley were surprisingly radical: it gave much space to Fourierist ideas, favoured prohibition and protection (at least as a short-time measure) and opposed the death penalty and slavery. This rather curious mixture of causes often aroused Marx's contempt:

The Tribune is of course trumpeting Carey's book with all its might. Both indeed have this in common, that under the guise of Sismondian philanthropic socialistic anti-industrialism they represent the Protectionists, i.e., the industrial bourgeoisie of America. This also explains the secret of why the Tribune in spite of all its 'isms' and socialistic humbug can be the 'leading journal' in the United States.195

Dana had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 and been very impressed. In August 1851 he asked Marx to become one of the Tribune's eighteen foreign correspondents and write a series of articles on contemporary events in Germany. Marx, who was still thinking of finishing his 'Economics' and could not yet write good English, wrote to Engels in the same letter that told him of the Tribune's offer: 'If you can manage to let me have an article on the German situation written in English by Friday morning, that would be a great beginning.'196 A week later he wrote: 'In the matter of the New York Tribune, you must help me now as I have my hands full with my "Economics". Write a series of articles on Germany, from 1848 onwards. Witty and straightforward. The gentlemen in the foreign department are very outspoken.'197 Engels complied and the first article appeared in the Tribune in October. In all, eighteen articles (all by Engels) were published and were a great success. 'It may perhaps give you pleasure to know that [your articles] are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of persons, and are widely reproduced.'198 The secret of the authorship was very well kept and for years the articles were reprinted, under the title Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, with Marx as their author.199

In April 1852 Dana asked Marx to write regularly for the Tribune on English affairs. Marx wrote in German and sent the manuscript to Engels to be translated. In January 1853, however, he wrote to Engels: 'For the first time I've risked writing an article for Dana in English.'200 During the same year, as relations with Russia became tense, Marx enlarged his subject-matter and was soon writing about all aspects of world politics. His articles were highly appreciated and in January 1853 his fee was increased to £2 per article. A contemporary writer described Dana as regularly 'plunged in the reading of "Karl Marx" or "An American in Paris" '. At the beginning of 1854 Marx received through Dana an offer from an American magazine for articles on the history of German philo-

sophy from Kant onwards. The articles were to be 'sarcastic and amusing' and yet to contain 'nothing which would hurt the religious feelings of

the country'.201 Marx wrote to Engels that if they were together it might be possible but 'alone I would not wish it',202 and the matter was not

pursued. In the same year, relations between Marx and the Tribune became strained: Dana often altered Marx's articles and sometimes took the first paragraphs of an article to serve as an editorial, printing the rest as a separate and anonymous article. In all, 165 of the Tribune's editorials were taken from Marx's articles, though in fact Dana preferred the articles that (unknown to him) had been written by Engels. Marx insisted that either all or none of the articles should be signed and after 1855 they were all printed anonymously. During 1853 the Tribune printed eighty of Marx's articles and about the same number in 1854, but only forty in 1855 and twenty-four in 1856. At the beginning of 1857, Marx threatened to write for another paper since the Tribune, whose panslavist tendencies were becoming more pronounced, was printing so few of his articles: Dana thereupon agreed to pay him for one article a week, whether printed or not.

In April 1857 Dana invited Marx to contribute to the New American Cyclopaedia. The Cyclopaedia was the idea of George Ripley, a friend of Dana's since Brook Farm and literary editor of the Tribune. It eventually comprised sixteen volumes, had more than 300 contributors and was a tremendous success. A strict objectivity was aimed at, and Dana wrote to Marx that his articles should not give evidence of any partiality, either on political, religious or philosophical questions. Although Engels saw in I )ana's proposition 'the opportunity we have been waiting for for so long to get your head above water'203 and constructed schemes for getting a number of collaborators together, this proved impossible. Marx was asked to do articles mainly on military history and was severely handicapped when Engels fell ill with glandular trouble. He could give no plausible explanation for the embarrassing delays and was reduced to pretending that the articles had been lost in the post. Most of his contributions were written in 1857-58, but he continued to send a few until the end of i860. At two dollars a page it was a useful source of income. The reason for the end of Marx's collaboration is not known. In all, sixty-seven MarxEngels articles were published in the Cyclopaedia, fifty-one of them written by Engels, though Marx did a certain amount of research for them in the liritish Museum.

By the end of 1857 the commercial crisis had compelled the Tribune to dismiss all its foreign correspondents apart from Marx and one other; and in 1861 Greeley, disturbed by Marx's views, asked Dana to sack him also. Dana refused, but the publication of further articles by him was

K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

suspended for several months. A few were published at the end of 1861 and the beginning of 1862, but in March 1862 Dana wrote to Marx that the Civil War had come to occupy all the space in the newspaper and asked him to send no more articles. In all the Tribune published 487 articles from Marx, 350 written by him, 125 written by Engels (mostly on military matters) and twelve written in collaboration.

Marx's articles were not merely a means of earning his living: in spite of his low opinion of his own work, he consistendy produced highly talented pieces of journalism and was, in the words of the Tribune's editor, 'not only one of the most highly valued, but one of the best-paid contributors attached to the journal'.204 Marx was far removed from the conventional sources of news and so made much more use of official reports, statistics, and so on, than the majority of journalists. In addition he managed to tie a large number of his articles in with his 'serious' research, which gave them added depth. Some of his press articles on India, for example, were incorporated almost verbatim into Capital. Considering the strong views he held, his articles were remarkably detached and objective. In many areas - opposition to reactionary European governments, for example - he saw eye to eye with the Tribune and could express himself forcefully, but where there was a divergence he contented himself with the straight facts.205

Although Marx started writing exclusively on England (about which he was exceptionally well informed), by 1853 he was dealing with Europe too, where the dominant topic was the approach of the Crimean War. Here he was concerned broadly to defend the values of Western European civilisation, as expressed in the 'bourgeois' revolutionary movements of 1789 and later, against the 'asiatic barbarism' of Russia. His almost pathological hatred of Russia led him to his bizarre view of Palmerston as a tool of Russian diplomacy and prompted an 'exposure', in a series of articles, of Palmerstonian duplicity.206 Some of these articles were written for the Free Press, run by David Urquhart, a romantic conservative politician whose Russophobe views Marx characterised as 'subjectively reactionary' but 'objectively revolutionary'.207 In writing for the Press, Marx was particularly anxious to combat Herzen's faith in the socialist vocation of Russia and the writings of his old friend and colleague Bruno Bauer who saw Russian absolutism as the rebirth of Roman statecraft, the incarnation of a living religious principle as opposed to the hollow democracies of the West. This was the one point on which Dana was critical of Marx, considering his attitude to France and Russia as exhibiting 'too German a tone of feeling for an American newspaper'.208

Marx also devoted a considerable number of articles to the Far East and particularly India. In general he regarded the phenomenon of col-

146 54

22.MEW VII 312

23.Cf. W. Schieder, 'Der Bund der Kommunisten im Sommer 1850', International Review of Social History (1968).

24.N. Plotkin, 'Les Alliances des Blanquists dans la Proscription', Revue des Revolutions Contemporaries, ixv (1951) 120.

25.Ibid.

26.MEW VII 550.

27.K. Bittel, Karl Marx. Neue Rheinische Zeitung - Politisch-Oekonomisch Revue

(Berlin, 1955) p. 16.

28.Ibid.

29.Jenny Marx to Weydemeyer, Reminiscences, pp. 236 ff.

30.MEW VII 5.

31. Ibid.

32.MESW 1 118.

33.Ibid., 139.

34.For a thorough evaluation of Marx's account in terms of the socio-economic background see R. Price, The French Second Republic (London, 1972).

35.MESW 1 163.

36.Ibid., 174.

37.Ibid., 222 f.

38.Ibid., 227.

39.ME W VII 218

40.Ibid., 220.

43.MEW viii 221.

44.Ibid.

45.Ibid., 222.

46.Ibid., 294.

47.Ibid.

48.Ibid., 295.

49.MESW 1 120.

50.MEW VII 421.

51. Ibid., 431.

52.Ibid., 440.

53.MESW 1 231.

54.Ibid., 244.