Karl Marx

The article that Marx apparently sent to New-York on 31 March 1854 underwent substantial alterations at the hands of the editors of the ‘New-York Daily Times’. The first part of the article is obviously garbled and contains theses that contradict Marx’s views. This includes in particular the assertion that it is necessary to consider the policy of the bourgeoisie not from a class standpoint but from a broad humanitarian standpoint. On the other hand, the article undoubtedly contains thoughts and formulations that stem from Marx. Above all, the characterisation of the English realist writers and the section on the Preston strike of 1853-1854, which Marx mentions in several articles.

From the English.

[“New-York Daily Tribune” No. 4145, 1 August 1854, leading article]

In view of the growing power of the bourgeois element in England, one naturally supposes that its old position towards the aristocracy is gradually being modified in accordance with the changed circumstances, and that the traditional relations between the two classes are beginning to become practically obstructive. In the course of the last five years, a number of remarkable events have taken place that accord with this assumption. About five years ago, the wealthy banker Jones Loyd was raised to the peerage with the title Lord Overstone; he had used part of his enormous fortune to purchase a large estate in the county of Northampton, and the aristocracy, true to its old policy, resolved to admit him into its ranks, not because he was a millionaire, but because he was “lord over extensive landed estates”. Now, what conditions did it impose on Jones Loyd? He was to give up all connections with banking and trade. And Jones Loyd submitted to this condition. It is, therefore, obvious that the aristocracy has in no way departed from its traditional conception regarding the necessary qualifications for a peerage. Will every member of the haute bourgeoisie (grande bourgeoisie), however, be as compliant as Jones Loyd? Probably not. Indeed, we even know a documented example of a high personage in which a peerage was refused during his lifetime and his sons were forbidden to accept it after their father’s death. We mean the memorable case of Sir Robert Peel. As son and grandson of a Lancashire spinning-mill owner and manufacturer, he strove in his last years to lead the great bourgeoisie, and although the peerage was within his grasp for a long time, he preferred to remain the first

member of the House of Commons of England and shrank from withdrawing from the sphere of public activity into the House of Lords. We have the compelling testimony of his life, according to which the centre of attraction of political power rests in the midst of the bourgeoisie. And if one interprets that clause in his will, by which he forbade his children, for all time, to accept the peerage for his public services, in the light of the events of 1848 – still fresh in the public memory – what a revolutionary example and precedent! Thus, even in dying, he took terrible revenge on the hereditary nobility for the many slights that had been inflicted on his sensitive disposition, on account of his plebeian origins, ever since the day he first went to Harrow as a boy. Lord John Russell followed Sir Robert Peel’s example. The peerage had long lain within his reach, but, although son and brother of a Duke of Bedford, he too refused to withdraw. Quite recently, his resolve must have been put to a severe test. The office of President of the Privy Council is almost always filled by a peer. When he accepted that office in the recent ministerial change, it was generally believed that he would be raised to the peerage. Not a bit of it! He preferred to remain a member of the House of Commons, to give up his seat, to appeal to the electors of the City of London, and to be re-elected by acclamation. Similarly, Sir William Molesworth saw in the rumour that he had almost been elevated to the House of Lords a disparagement of his political personality and saw to the dissemination of a firm démenti that he had ever had the intention of accepting a peerage.

So much for the peerage; it seems, however, as if the knighthood, since it confers no political power, has been thrown away to satisfy the parvenus of the bourgeoisie. Only thus can we explain the elevation of the head gardener of the Duke of Devonshire, Sir Joseph Paxton, and of a purveyor, Sir John Fox, to that rank. Will that, however, suffice the self-esteem of the bourgeoisie in all cases? Clearly not; for the engineer Stephenson contemptuously declined the beggarly honour, and quite recently his example was followed by the railway contractor Dargan, who, undoubtedly, believed that by accepting the honour he would place himself in a false position. In vain Her Majesty courts him, visits him at his substantial manor – an honour formerly vouchsafed only to the highest aristocracy; yet the coy bourgeois recoils from the outstretched hand of Her Royal Highness, while Queen Victoria, by taking the arm of the reluctant bourgeois, expresses the need of feudalism to be supported nowadays by the industrial leaders of the epoch.

While the bourgeoisie is thus gradually wresting power from the aristocracy, the question naturally arises of how the bourgeoisie is likely to use its newly acquired

influence? This matter must not be regarded from a class point of view, but only from a broad humanitarian standpoint; and the all-overshadowing question is: what effects may this transformation have on the destiny and social condition of the toiling millions of England?

Certain politicians of the so-called liberal school prattle much of the “union of the bourgeoisie and the working class”, but the idea is an absurd fantasy. A broad gulf separates the employer from the worker – the master from the servant. As far as domestic servants are concerned, Talfourd’s last critical words speak for themselves:

“How painful is the thought,” he says, “that around us men and women are growing up, ministering to our comfort and our needs, constant inmates of our dwellings, with whose inclinations and character we are as little familiar as if they were inhabitants of another sphere.”

Lest any ambiguity about the respective inhabitants of the “two spheres” should arise, the ladies of the bourgeoisie compel their female servants – forgetting their own relatively recent emancipation from bondage – to wear “caps” as a sign of the lower sphere, and only rarely do they permit their maidservants to dress prettily, for fear lest the distinguishing marks not of land and soil, but of money, might disappear.

And as for the journeyman of all sorts – what is his relation to his employer? Everyone knows what resistance the employers put up against the Ten Hours’ Bill. The Tories, out of resentment at the recent loss of the Corn Laws, helped the working class to win it; but when it came into force, the reports of the district inspectors show with what shameless cunning and mean, malicious baseness it was circumvented. To every subsequent attempt in Parliament to bring about more humane conditions for the working people, the representatives of the bourgeoisie responded with the slogan of communism! Mr Cobden did that very often. For years the employers had intended to lengthen the hours of labour in the workshops beyond the measure of what is humanly tolerable and, by the unscrupulous use of the contract system, by playing one worker off against another, to force down the earnings of the skilled worker to the level of those of the unskilled. This system finally drove the Amalgamated Engineers to revolt against it, and the brutal remarks that were then current among the masters showed how little noble or humane feeling was to be expected of them. They displayed their gross ignorance into the bargain by engaging, through the employers’ association, a third-rate “literary man”,

one Sidney Smith, to defend them in the press and wage the war of words against their outraged workers. The style of the hired scribbler well suited the task set, and when the struggle was over and the gentlemen had no further need of literature or the press, they gave their hireling his marching orders. If the bourgeoisie does not strive after the learning of the old school, it does not, for that reason, now cultivate modern science and literature. The ledger, the desk, the business – that is education enough. In so far as its daughters enjoy an expensive education, they are superficially equipped with a few “accomplishments”; but as for a genuine cultivation of the mind and its endowment with a store of knowledge – of that one does not even dream.

The present splendid brotherhood of novelists of England – whose graphic and eloquent pages have conveyed to the world more political and social truths than all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together have uttered – have depicted every stratum of the bourgeoisie, from the “most eminently respectable” rentier and holder of government securities, who regards all kinds of business as vulgar, down to the small shopkeeper and attorney’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs Gaskell drawn them? Full of presumption, hypocrisy, petty tyranny, and ignorance: and their verdict was endorsed by the civilised world with the damning epigram it pinned upon this class: “subservient to those above, tyrannical to those below.”

The limited and narrow sphere in which the bourgeoisie moves is, to a certain degree, attributable to the social system of which it forms a part. Just as the Russian nobility lives uneasily between the pressure of the tsar above it and the fear of the enslaved masses below it, so the English bourgeoisie stands between the aristocracy on the one side and the working class on the other. Whenever the bourgeoisie has wanted to proceed against the aristocracy since the Peace of 1815, it has told the working class that its distress was the fault of some aristocratic privilege and monopoly. In this way the bourgeoisie was able to move the working class to assist it in 1832, when it wanted the Reform Bill. After it had obtained a Reform Bill for itself, however, it refused the working class such a bill – indeed, in 1848 it even confronted it with special constable truncheons. Next, the repeal of the Corn Laws was supposed to be the panacea for the working class. Well, this was wrested from the aristocracy, but the “good times” still did not come; and last year, as if to remove the last possibility for a similar policy in the future, the aristocracy was forced to agree to an inheritance tax on landed property – a tax from which the same aristocracy had selfishly exempted itself in 1793.

while it imposed taxes on the inheritance of movable property. With this scrap of a grievance, the last possibility of deluding the working class into believing that its harsh situation was due solely and exclusively to aristocratic legislation vanished. Now the eyes of the working class have been fully opened, and it begins to cry:

“Our St. Petersburg is in Preston!” And indeed, during the past eight months this town has witnessed a strange spectacle—financially supported by the trade unions and the workshops in all parts of the United Kingdom, a standing army of 14,000 men and women had stepped forward to wage a gigantic social struggle for power with the capitalists, while the Preston capitalists for their part received support from the capitalists of Lancashire.

Whatever forms this social struggle may take in the future, we have only seen its beginning. It seems destined to embrace the whole nation and to pass through phases unknown to history hitherto; for it must be borne in mind that, although the working class must still reckon with temporary defeats, great social and economic laws are at work which must finally ensure its triumph. The same industrial wave that has induced the bourgeoisie to rise against the aristocracy now compels the working class—now and in future supported by emigration—to rise against the bourgeoisie. Just as the bourgeoisie deals blows to the aristocracy, it will receive them from the working class. Merely the instinctive recognition of this fact fetters the action of that class against the aristocracy. The political emergence of the working class of late has taught the bourgeoisie to hate and fear open political movements. Its standing phrase runs: “Honourable men do not join with those, sir.” The big bourgeoisie apes the way of life of the aristocracy and strives to ally itself with it. Consequently, feudalism in England will not perish through the scarcely perceptible processes of dissolution on the part of the bourgeoisie; the honour of such a victory is reserved for the working class. When the time is ripe for this and the working class enters the arena of political action in recognised fashion, three mighty classes will confront one another—the first represents landed property, the second money, the third labour. And just as the second triumphs over the first, so it must, when its turn comes, give way to its successor on the field of political and social confrontation.