Freedom of the Press

Considered many things—a humanitarian, a philosopher, an economist—Marx has hardly ever been studied as a journalist. This is a shame, since his newspaper writing provides a look at some of his most important attributes.

Dispatches for the New York Tribune:
Selected Journalism of Karl Marx
Edited by James Ledbetter with a foreword by Francis Wheen
Penguin Classics, 2008

In this work, he was forced to write day-to-day and to follow events as they unfolded. When reading his articles we are able to see, in some sense, the way Marx’s mind worked. Unlike his more well-known writings, such as Capital or The Communist Manifesto, these articles did not always present fully finished arguments and completely thought out studies, but instead they were parts of what seemed to be longer works in progress. Indeed, reading his journalism, one can trace the ideas and studies that eventually were to form these latter works. Through these works we are able to see more of Marx the human, the sort of attitude he took; we see him struggling with difficult topics.

For a while it was in vogue to criticize Marx as a chauvinist or Euro-centrist, because of the quote, taken out of contest, in which he said that the British had a civilizing influence on India. Those who condemned him complained that this statement contradicted the “naïve” view that people had of Marx: an adamant proponent of equality and justice who spent his entire life working in poverty to understand the roots of human misery.

In reality, there was a contradiction, not within Marx’s personality, but in life itself. In June of 1853, Marx published “British Rule in India,” in the New York Tribune. In this article, while avoiding romanticism, Marx bemoaned the British destruction of the Indian social fabric. While at the end there is some question of the future, it is not fully worked out.

It wasn’t until a few months later, in an article entitled “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” that Marx came to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of British rule.

The question, Marx wrote, was not whether England had any right to conquer India—he was emphatic that they didn’t. But he also argued that it was better that a modern capitalist nation, such as Britain, conquer India, than some other nation that had not yet developed capitalism.

India had spent much of its existence being plundered by various foreign powers, but none of them, because of their own material backwardness, were unable to truly subjugate India, and thus became themselves assimilated.

The English bourgeoisie, if it wanted to enrich itself off of India, would have to lay down train tracks, would have to build factories, would have to build means of communication—it even had to develop an army of Indians.

While the British empire was drenched in blood and the Indian nation was subjugated, the English bourgeoisie, for their own interests and quite by accident, laid a material basis for capitalism to come about in India, and in so doing, also laid a basis for Indian national unity and the possibility of a united India that could eventually revolt and separate itself—as a nation—from Britain.

This pattern, Marx came to understand, was not uncommon in history:

In “The Indian Revolt,” first published four years later, Marx recognized that “[t]here is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.”

As mentioned, these articles all appeared in the New York Tribune, and were only a small part of Marx’s grand journalistic oeuvre.

Luckily, Penguin Classics has just released Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx. While it is short, only a few hundred pages (all his newspaper writing together takes up several volumes of the Marx and Engels Collected Works), the book offers a handy portrait of the periodical Marx.

Dispatches has a few dozen of Marx’s articles, in several different sections: economics, China, the U.S. Civil War, India, British politics and so on.

Marx’s humanitarian streak is evident in each article. In his discussion on Britain’s capital punishment laws, Marx exclaims “[W]hat a state society is that, which knows of no better instruments for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims … its own brutality as eternal law?”

The British press, particularly the London Times, was happy to write against slavery and at the same time denounce the North’s role in the war. Slavery, they argued, was bad. Their solution? Allow the American South to secede, and adopt a morally superior attitude. In their opinion, the North lost the moral high ground because, said the Times, the Union side either was, or could be seen as, fighting for purely economic reasons.

But Marx was no knee-jerk pacifist. He took up the Union side, and described how the economic as well as the humanitarian issues, not to mention the progress of human society itself, were inseparably intertwined.

Marx had no hesitation to speak (or write) his mind, even if it was quite unpopular, even amongst his allies. He criticized liberals in the Prussian parliament for their “feeble” (the words of the editor) lip-service to freedom of the press, lamenting that “the defenders of the press in this assembly have on the whole no real relation to what they are defending…”

Through these short works we’re able to see an important attitude, one of open-mindedness, the attitude of a scientist, not a religious zealot. Marx would sometimes contradict himself from one article to a later one—this is especially evident in the complete works; he wasn’t afraid to correct a mistake that had been made, even by himself. Such a style has unfortunately been forgotten by many Communists over the past nearly 200 years. Marx, it is clear, never would have been afraid to challenge what he saw as wrong, never worshiped ossified texts—even if they were written by someone like Marx.

Overall, the collection is worth reading on a number of levels. On a purely historical note, there is much to be learned about the American Civil War, the British society of the 1800s, China, India and so on. But there are hundreds of books on these subjects. Dispatches real use is in gaining a firsthand understanding the inner-workings of the mind of one of the most well known figures of the 19th century.