Marx and no-marks.

On the Daily Telegraph's 140 year beef with Karl Marx and why its columnists insist on getting Marxism wrong. (Yes, this edition has real broad appeal!)

Previously: Blue Balls: A short history of British Press rage at people who've "Never Kissed a Tory"
Worrying about right-wingers' romantic lives is a perennial British press obsession. And it goes back to at least 1831...

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Never let it be said that The Daily Telegraph doesn’t commit to a grudge. Over 140 years since his death, Karl Marx is still riling up the paper’s writers. In the first of two columns today that took time to fulminate about Marx and Marxism, Philip Johnston — the bull-headed assistant editor and leader writer — grumbled:

Britain has long welcomed political dissidents to its shores. After the wave of failed revolutions in continental Europe in 1848, thousands of exiles sought refuge here because there were no significant immigration restrictions (not much has changed, then).

Among them was a 31-year-old German philosopher expelled from his homeland and then from Belgium and France for seditious behaviour. His name was Karl Marx, and he settled in London and spent the rest of his life in the city. Had he not been allowed to scribble away in the Reading Room of the British Museum, might millions have been spared the misery of communism? Marx had cause to be grateful for being granted safety in Britain and yet spent his life agitating against the very system that provided it.

Yes, I agree, Philip; socialists should be banned from libraries; it only gives us lots of ideas that lead to disappointment. Communists probably shouldn’t be allowed to own books either. It would certainly avoid the kind of situation I found myself in earlier this year when I had The Communist Manifesto — a Penguin Classics edition, no less — confiscated when entering Parliament.

The security guard who temporarily seized my copy of that 175-year-old piece of seditious literature explained that I might use it in some sort of protest. Presumably a very pointed reading in one of Parliament’s many subsidised bars; places where far less palatable sentiments than “A spectre is haunting Europe” are constantly averred.

I suspect Johnston’s taste for historical counterfactuals is as hypocritical as many of his other political positions. While he’s happy to imagine Herr Marx barred from the British Museum’s Reading Room — which then housed the British Library collection — I suspect he wouldn’t be so keen to speculate on the state of the planet had Britain not colonised India, propped up the nascent Saudi Arabia, or joined the United States in aiding the 1953 Iranian coup d'état which overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh for the crime of wanting to ensure oil companies weren’t ripping off the country.

Johnston continues:

As Marx said, history repeats itself. In recent decades the UK has, either wittingly or deliberately, imported thousands of dissidents and radicals, granted political asylum because they seek to foment revolution in their own countries and are unable to return.

Just as columnists persist in referring to just two books by George Orwell — Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm — and even then a handful of quotes and ideas, they are prone to having quarter-assed notions about what Marx actually wrote. The disorder most often manifests in misremembering a single line from the opening of Marx’s essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Last weekend, the unbearable Dominic Sandbrook opened his Times essay with a similar mischaracterization:

History never repeats itself, whatever Karl Marx might have said. 

Marx didn’t say “history repeats itself”. Instead, he suggested that Hegel expressed a similar sentiment “somewhere” and used the idea to make a joke that he expanded into a larger and more complex point:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce…

… Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.

Ironically, the Telegraph’s very first attack on Marx, in an unsigned column published in August 1872 — 20 years after The Eighteenth Brumaire… was written — makes a similar argument about historical echoes:

The mistake in treating of Karl Marx and his disciples is in regarding them as presenting new forces. What are they but the old revolutionary leaven offspring of the first French Revolution, endeavouring to graft upon the discountenanced stock something of that sagacity which characterises the British Trades Unions? 

We know pretty well the value of the revolutionary fraction. It has failed in France, it has failed in England… Germany doubtless has her Socialist Republicans; still, they could not hinder unity nor secure a majority in Parliament. Russia may be a soil fertile in opportunities, for there is a large infusion of Communism in her villages; yet it is Alexander, not Bakounine, who wields imperial power. 

As a political engine, the International is a bugbear; it may give trouble but it cannot conquer, because it is hostile to the strongest instincts of humanity. 

Johnston concluded his column today by imagining:

Go to Highgate Cemetery and you might hear the ghost of Karl Marx laughing at what he would have called the bourgeois gullibility that allows our enemies to plot our downfall from within.

On 17 March 1883, the Telegraph reported Marx’s death on the previous day with a small news story taken from a Reuters telegram nestled in the midst of other updates:

DEATH OF KARL MARX.
[Reuter’s Telegram.] 
PARIS, March 16 (Evening). — The Justice, one of whose editors is a son-in-law of Karl Marx, states this evening that the latter died yesterday in London. He spent two months at Argenteuil last summer but returned to London in October. 

The next day, a political vigil for Marx warranted a short paragraph in a list of stories that showed the paper was equally uninterested in the news of a German politician’s assassination and an eruption at Mount Etna:

THE LATE KARL MARX.
[Reuter’s Telegram]
NEW YORK, March 20.— A meeting was held here last night, at the Cooper Institute, in memory of the late Herr Karl Marx. A very large number of persons were present, the greater part belonging to the labouring classes. Resolutions were adopted, pledging the meeting to spread Herr Marx’s ideas throughout the world. Among the speakers was Most, the former editor of Freiheit. 

__ 

MURDER OF A STATE COUNCILLOR.
[Reuter’s Telegram]
GOTHA, March 20.— State Councillor von Wagenheim has been shot dead by a man who unsuccessfully applied to him for a Government post. The murderer subsequently committed suicide. 

__ 

ERUPTION OF MOUNT ETNA.
MESSINA, March 20 (Evening).— Since this afternoon a shower of small stones has been falling, proceeding from an eruption of Mount Etna. The atmosphere is thick and dark. 

While it considered Marx’s death and memorial minor events at the time, 140 years later, the spectre of Karl Marx is still haunting the offices of The Daily Telegraph. In an aside in her column today, Madeline Grant claims: …

For the Marxist… the individual life is not something to be cherished or valued per se but is merely a cog within the great march of progress.

In this case, Grant is using ‘Marxist’ as a catch-all for anyone to the left of Mussolini, but regardless it’s a misrepresentation of Marx’s thinking. He didn’t argue that individuals weren’t valuable as individuals but considered individuality to be a product of societal influences. In Theses On Feuerbach (1845, first published 1888), he wrote:

… the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. 

Treating people as “merely [cogs] within the great march of process” actually sounds very much like the central tenets of capitalism. What are Amazon fulfilment centre workers and drivers but treated like cogs in the machine?

The decline in the quality of the Telegraph’s output has been pronounced in recent years but it’s even starker when you consider the balance the paper showed when reviewing the first English translation of Das Kapital in February 1887, four years after Marx’s death:

The name of Karl Marx is known as one of the pioneers of the Socialist movement to thousands who never read a line of his contributions to the science of political economy. Whatever may be the value of his theory of civilisation, he was undoubtedly a good man and meant well; and, moreover, unlike the ruck of contemporary levellers, knew what he wrote and talked about. 

Though his manner was contentious, and though his reasoning may be false, at least he had drunk deep of the Pierian spring of knowledge, and his utterances deserve the respectful attention which belongs of right to every well-informed thinker and writer, let the philosopher’s conclusions be what they may. The English-speaking world will therefore not be unwilling to lend a respectful and attentive ear to ‘Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production’ (Swan Sonnenschein), by the deceased Socialist, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and edited by Frederick Engels. 

… [The book] is what the Socialists sometimes declare to be “the Bible of the working class”. It is not our present intention to enter into the vexed question of Karl Marx’s politico-economical theories as to the privileges and duties of the possessors of the earned and unearned increment and of the claims of labour to share in the profits of invested capital. There will be time enough for that in the “coming by and by”. Suffice it to say that the translation is well done and that the English version of ‘Das Kapital’ is worthy of the careful consideration of all who desire to be well-informed on a movement which is likely to puzzle and distress the makers of the history of the immediate future, in and out of Parliament. 

It’s a very long time since the staff of the Telegraph have “drunk deep of the Pierian spring of knowledge”, preferring instead the company’s own brand cocktail of spite and bile. Does it matter that columnists who refuse to understand what’s happening now continue to misrepresent Marx? Not really. He’s long dead and unlikely to be forgotten no matter how many Telegraph columnists wish he would be (How long before one suggests the bust at his grave should be removed?)

However, what the Telegraph’s continuing grudge should remind us is that history does repeat itself at that paper: first as calumny and then as arse.

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