The Books: Arguably, ‘Marx’s Journalism: The Grub Street Years’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

In a June, 2007 piece in The Guardian, Christopher Hitchens reviewed Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter, with a foreword by Francis Wheen. Hitchens manages to reference, in this one measly book review, P.G. Wodehouse (Cozy Moments cannot be muzzled … still laughing), JFK, Greeley Square, Jorge Semprun, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Adams, Isaac Newton – the list goes on and on. Hitchens clearly knows his stuff here, being, as he admits “both a Marxist and a journalist, and in some eclectic ways still am both of these things.” Hitchens is very impressed with the collection of the dispatches Karl Marx wrote (via London, in exile) for the struggling New York Tribune (which was in the midst of a newspaper war with the New York Times). Hitchens breaks it all down in the review, and it certainly makes me curious to read the book in question. Marx started out as a journalist, of course, and immediately got into trouble when he started writing about the importance of a free press. Newspapers he wrote for were banned. It was a hell of a game trying to even make a living, through hack work and freelancing about. Charles Dana recruited Marx to write for the New York Tribune in 1848. Marx, at that time, had become an editor of a paper that was shut down, and the authorities in Prussia deported him. Marx made his way to London, a gathering ground for exiles. Hitchens describes the deportation as “arguably the biggest mistake any reactionary government made in the whole of that year.” So Marx started sending in dispatches to the Tribune on all kinds of topics, and he worked his ass off to make ends meet. The New York Tribune didn’t pay him enough, the reason for that being its war with the New York Times, resulting in cost-cutting measures in order to compete. One does not need to be a Marxist scholar to see what warring corporations look/feel like to the working man dependent on them for his livelihood. But he had always been a bit of a rabble-rouser. He hated unfairness, he hated the inhumanity of bureaucracy, and was a fine critic of imperialism’s nastier consequences. And to be completely impoverished because a major corporation is warring with another corporation … it affected him directly, and certainly helped to hone his instincts for injustice in capitalism.

He sent begging letters to Charles Dana, asking for a salary raise. He couldn’t afford to buy newspapers at the rate they were paying him. But the Tribune turned him down. Without that outlet, Marx began to turn to his other interests, the result of which took monstrous form in the 20th century, but which certainly came out of a clear-eyed understanding that something STINKS in the way it is set up, with the little guy being purposefully squeezed out of his piece of the pie. And not just pie, for God’s sake. Food. Water. Shelter.

One of the things that is almost completely forgotten about Karl Marx (especially by those who hate Socialism in their 21st century “understanding” of it that they are blinded to or flat out unaware of the nuances of its founders’ downright humanist views) is how pro-America he was, at a time when almost nobody shared that view. America held up the torch for liberty, freedom, possibility to Marx, and he paid very close attention to what was going on there. He had never been to America. But he looked on from London at the War Between the States, and wrote a series of pieces that still resonate today with the prescience of a guy who had no “dog” in that fight but could see clearly what was RIGHT. He was an activist as well, not just a writer. He was one of the few people writing at that time who championed Lincoln, especially among the chattering classes in Britain who were afraid of what would happen if the cotton trade dried up, which, of course, was connected to the slave trade, which everyone had an interest in. Marx’s pieces on the Civil War stand alone, in their moral and ethical clarity. He was a lone voice. He was right about so much. He was pro-Lincoln, pro-Union, and pro-get-rid-of-the-bullshit-Southern-economy. Fascinating, especially when you consider that on the other side of the coin was the industrialist North.

Hitchens gives other examples of Marx’s prescience, especially when regards to Britain’s policy in India. Many of the things Marx worried about eventually came to pass 100 years later, almost exactly as he said they would. So, you know: boy was no slacker.

Here’s an excerpt from the section having to do with Karl Marx’s writing on the Civil War.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Marx’s Journalism: The Grub Street Years’, by Christopher Hitchens

If you are looking for an irony of history, you will find it not in the fact that Marx was underpaid by an American newspaper, but in the fact that he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country). I beseeched Wheen to make more of it in his biography, and his failure to heed my sapient advice is the sole reproach to his otherwise superb book. Now James Ledbetter, himself a radical American scribbler, has somewhat redressed the balance by reprinting some of Marx’s most lucid and mordant essays on the great crisis that preoccupied Greeley and Dana: the confrontation over slavery and secession that came near to destroying the United States.

In considering this huge and multi-faceted question, Marx faced two kinds of antagonist. The first was composed of that English faction, grouped around the cotton interest and the Times newspaper, which hoped for the defeat of Abraham Lincoln and the wreckage of the American experiment. The second was made up of those Pharisees who denied that the Union, and its leader Lincoln, were “really” fighting a war for the abolition of slavery. Utterly impatient with casuistry, and as always convinced that people’s subjective account of their own interests was often misleading, Marx denounced both tendencies. Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents and at that time a witness of his father’s embattled ambassadorship to London, wrote in his celebrated memoirs that Marx was almost the only friend that Lincoln had, against the cynical Tories and the hypocritical English Gladstonian liberals. Surveying the grim landscape of the English industrial revolution, he wrote, in The Education of Henry Adams, that it “made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.”

Marx himself, in reviewing a letter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s to Lord Shaftesbury (and how splendid to have the author of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon seconding the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), ridiculed the smarmy arguments of papers such as the Economist, which had written that “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro Freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue.” The Lincolnians, it was generally asserted, were fighting only for the preservation of the Union, not for the high-sounding cause of emancipation. Not so, said the great dialectician. The Confederacy had opened hostilities on the avowed basis of upholding slavery, which meant in turn that the Union would be forced to tackle emancipation, whether its leadership wanted to or not. See how he makes the point in so few sentences, and shows that it is the apparently hard-headed and realistic who are in practice the deluded ones: “The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of the Washingtons and Jeffersons was that now for the first time slavery was recognized as an institutional good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: ‘For us, it is a question of founding a great slave republic.’ If, therefore, it was indeed only in defense of the Union that the North drew the Sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?”

Written in 1861, this cut like a razor through the can’t of the pseudo-realists, while not omitting a good passing slap at the luckless Mr. Spratt (remember that Marx was teaching himself English as he went along). As war progressed, Marx and Engels were to predict correctly that the North would be able to exert industrial power as against Dixie feudalism, that iron-clad ships would play an important role, that the temporizing Union generals such as George McClellan would be fired by an impatient Lincoln, and that an emancipation proclamation would be required as a war-winning measure. For good measure, Marx helped organize a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers, and wrote and signed a letter from the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, congratulating Lincoln on his re-election and his defeat of the anti-war Democrats. No other figure of the time even approached his combination of acuity and principle on this historic point, which may contain a clue as to why the American Revolution has outlasted the more ostensibly “Marxist” ones.