Surveys from Exile: Political Writings

Introduction

The Triumph of Reaction

In August 1850 Marx recognized that the revolutionary period of 1848 was at an end. A new revolutionary outbreak was not possible until the next cyclical trade crisis, and if Marx still believed that revolution would surely follow in the wake of this crisis, he no longer believed that a proletarian revolution could succeed in Germany until modern industry had developed more substantially. The development of the revolution, which had earlier seemed a matter of a few years, had now to be counted in decades.¹

If the 1850s and early 1860s found Marx essentially a spectator of the political scene, this was by force of circumstance, not his own choice. After the split in the Communist League in September 1850, Marx continued to work at rebuilding the League as the nucleus of a proletarian party in Germany and at propagating the ideas of scientific communism on an international scale. But as the reaction consolidated itself throughout Europe, he found himself fighting a losing battle. The Central Committee of the Communist League, which was moved to Cologne following the split, was arrested en bloc in May 1851, and the League’s German organization completely destroyed. Marx still attempted to hold together the London district, now once again the League’s centre. However, the atmosphere of exile, always demoralizing, was doubly so for the German Communist refugees now that they were cut off from their comrades in Germany. Their community was riven by petty suspicion and intrigue, and many of the best Communists left to start a new life in North America. Marx and Engels themselves suffered the effects of exile. They collaborated with a Hungarian, Bangya, in producing a text attacking their political rivals among the German exiles,² and had a nasty shock when this Bangya turned out to be himself an agent of the Prussian police.

A great deal of Marx’s energy was devoted to the defence campaign for the Cologne Communist prisoners, who were only brought to trial in October 1852. After the trial, at which seven of the eleven accused were sentenced to between three and six years’ imprisonment for ‘attempted high treason’, Marx wrote an exposé of the case and of the Prussian political police in general.³ But the Cologne convictions sealed the fate of the Communist League, and on 17 November the League was formally dissolved, on Marx’s proposal.

The dissolution of the Communist League and the virtual disappearance of the German workers’ movement for a whole decade indicates the immense gap between the programme Marx and Engels laid down in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and the real development of the proletariat at that time. With the collapse of the League Marx was plunged into twelve years of almost complete political isolation. Exiled in London, he had next to no contact with events in Germany, while the greater part of the German Communist workers in London had followed Schapper and Willich.⁴ Marx and Engels could have counted scarcely a dozen allies in the 1850s, and only one or two non-Germans. Yet Marx’s confidence in the future that his theory predicted for the workers’ movement never abated, and in their most extreme isolation he and Engels continued to regard themselves as the true representatives of the workers’ party.

His political isolation in the 1850s was compounded by much personal suffering. The first decade of exile was an extremely hard time for Marx and his family. They experienced grinding poverty and had frequently to resort to the pawnshop for loans. Marx was already troubled with the liver disease that was to plague him for the rest of his life, and several of the children that his wife bore died in infancy. In November 1850 Engels moved to Manchester, where he was to work for his family’s cotton business for the next twenty years. He was thus able to prevent the Marx household from starving, and consistently sent financial help until Marx’s circumstances improved. While Marx and Engels were geographically separated they exchanged letters regularly, sometimes daily. By far the greater part of the Marx-Engels correspondence dates from the 1850s and 1860s, and it provides a valuable supplement to their other writings, on both general theoretical and political questions.

Classes and the State

Marx and Engels began to analyse the experience of the 1848 revolution in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue, five issues of which were produced during 1850. Besides the Reviews of international economic and political developments that they wrote for the Revue,⁵ this journal also contained Marx’s articles later known as The Class Struggles in France and Engels’s on the Reich Constitution Campaign. After the demise of the Revue, Engels wrote the series of articles Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany⁶ and Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Engels called The Class Struggles in France, ‘Marx’s first attempt to explain a section of contemporary history by means of his materialist conception.’⁷ Here Marx began, for the first time, to develop a systematic set of concepts for coming to grips with the phenomena of a politics which is certainly that of class struggle – the struggle of groups whose existence and interests are defined by the relations of production – but which is nevertheless politics, practised in the field of ideology and coercion that gives it its specific character. Marx continued his analysis of French developments in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this work, dealing with the coup d’état of December 1851, he confronts the paradox of a state power that appears not to express the rule of a social class at all, but to dominate civil society completely and to arbitrate class struggles from above.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx had described the executive of the modern state as simply ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’.⁸ In the rather rarefied presentation of the Manifesto the development of industrial capitalism is seen as having simplified class distinctions, to the point that a numerically small bourgeoisie and an ‘immense majority’ of proletarians confront one another, with intermediate classes rapidly disappearing. Furthermore, the rapid social changes of bourgeois society have swept away all ‘ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’,⁹ so that the class struggle can be fought out in explicit and demystified terms. The proletariat can unashamedly avow its class interest, and the ideologies that attempt to present the particular interest of the ruling class as the general interest increasingly fail to deceive the masses. To turn from the Manifesto to The Class Struggles in France and the Eighteenth Brumaire is to turn from a theory that is abstract, although valid at its own level, to a concrete analysis that is correspondingly complex. In the space of less than four years France experienced a whole series of political transformations. The actors that appeared on the political stage were by no means readily identifiable as representatives of social interests, but included such heteroclite and esoteric entities as the Legitimist and Orleanist monarchists, the Montagne and the party of Order, the ‘pure’ republicans, the Society of 10 December, and the almost comic figure of Louis Napoleon himself. Marx’s project in these essays is essentially to decode these and other political forces, to explain why the different classes in French society represented themselves in this way in the political arena, and why their struggles were fought out as struggles between different forms of state.¹⁰

The starting-point of Marx’s explanation is the relatively undeveloped character of French capitalism. ‘The struggle against capital in its highly developed modern form – at its crucial point, the struggle of the industrial wage-labourer against the industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon.’¹¹ Industrial capitalism, in other words, was only one of the modes of production found concurrently in France, and the great majority of the French population were still involved either in peasant or petty-bourgeois (i.e., artisan) production. The lower strata of the middle class had not yet sunk into the proletariat, and in place of the industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat, which the Manifesto presents as the only two classes characteristic of developed industrial capitalism, Marx distinguished a much richer variety of classes and fractions of classes, of which great landowners, financial bourgeoisie, industrial bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie (of various gradations), industrial proletariat, lumpenproletariat and small peasant proprietors are only the most prominent. (The German ‘Fraktion’ has the primary meaning of a parliamentary party, but Marx also uses it for sections of a class that are the basis of different political parties. In order to preserve Marx’s concept, we have used the English ‘fraction’ even in some contexts where it is not in general usage, as indeed Marx himself did when he wrote in English [see below, p. 259].)

Given this plurality of classes, it is not surprising that Marx had to qualify the simple model of one ruling class presented in the Manifesto. Marx’s analyses of France imply rather the existence, on the one hand, of a ruling bloc composed of a plurality of classes or fractions of classes; on the other hand, within this ruling bloc, of a single dominant class or fraction. The Orleanist monarchy of 1830–48 was the rule of the ‘financial aristocracy’ (i.e., financial bourgeoisie) and the big industrial bourgeoisie, while the Restoration monarchy of 1815–30 had been the rule of the large landowners. In the bourgeois republic of 1848–51 these two wings of the bourgeoisie, still organized under their monarchist banners, ‘had found the form of state in which they could rule jointly’.¹² However, within this ruling bloc Marx identifies the financial bourgeoisie as the dominant fraction, under both the Orleanist monarchy and the 1848 republic. ‘Our whole account has shown how the republic, from the first day of its existence, did not overthrow the financial aristocracy, but consolidated it.’¹³ Although the economic interests of the industrial bourgeoisie were opposed to those of the ‘financial aristocracy’, and they had even supported the February revolution, they were forced, when the revolution brought with it the threat of the proletariat, to rally round the class that had recently been their adversary.

Since every propertied minority must rely on the exploited masses to fight its battles for it, it can only exert political power by presenting its own particular interest as the interest of society in general. It is thus always necessary for the propertied classes to appear on the political stage in ideological disguise. If ‘the legitimate monarchy was simply the political expression of the immemorial domination of the lords of the soil’ and ‘the July monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus’,¹⁴ Marx goes on to stress that this ideological disguise also imprisons those who wear it. Although the ‘superstructure of different and specifically formed feelings, illusions, modes of thought and views of life’ is created by a class ‘out of its material foundations and the corresponding social relations’, yet ‘the single individual, who derives these feelings, etc., through tradition and upbringing, may well imagine that they form the real determinants and the starting-point of his activity’. The disguise, therefore, has its specific effects on the political struggle. Although as the party of Order, the coalesced bourgeoisie ‘ruled over the other classes of society more harshly and with less restriction than ever they could under the Restoration or the July monarchy’, at the same time the republic undermined the ‘social foundation’ of this political rule, since the two fractions of the bourgeoisie ‘had now to confront the subjugated classes and contend with them without mediation, without being concealed by the Crown, without the possibility of diverting the national attention by their secondary conflicts among themselves and with the monarchy’.¹⁵

Moreover, the ideological representation of class interests defines a distinct stratum of ideologists attached to each class. Writing about the Montagne, Marx stresses that what made the democratic ideologists representatives of the petty bourgeoisie was not that they were themselves shopkeepers, but that:

Their minds are restricted by the same barriers which the petty bourgeoisie fails to overcome in real life, and … they are therefore driven in theory to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social situation drive the latter in practice. This is the general relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class which they represent.¹⁶

In certain circumstances the ideological forms in which the class struggle is necessarily fought out can place a party in power that does not represent a well-defined class or fraction at all. After the defeat of the June insurgents, political power was temporarily held by the ‘republican fraction of the bourgeoisie’, which Marx explicitly notes ‘was not a fraction of the bourgeoisie bound together by great common interests and demarcated from the rest by conditions of production peculiar to it’, but rather a coterie of ‘writers, lawyers, officers and officials’.¹⁷

What enabled these ‘pure republicans’ to hold power was the fact that the class bloc that was overthrown by the February revolution had ruled through the political form of the monarchy. The ideologists who stood for republicanism as such, and who did so for specific reasons of French history, thus found themselves in a privileged position in the new order, but, resting on no firm class base, their reign was soon brought to an end with the developing class struggle.

This brings us to the key question of representative democracy. How in Marx’s theory can a minoritarian propertied class stably exercise political power through a democratic constitution?

The first point to note is that Marx consistently refuses to idealize the forms of political democracy, to see this particular form of state as privileged in the expression it gives to the forces of civil society. It is not and cannot be in the parliamentary arena that class struggles are resolved. Marx repeats in his more substantial autopsies of the French 1848 revolution what he had stressed as a practical imperative in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: political democracy is brought into being by the struggle of classes and is overthrown by the same struggle. Any illusion to the contrary is parliamentary cretinism – ‘that peculiar epidemic which has prevailed over the whole continent of Europe since 1848 … which holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, and all understanding of the rough external world’.¹⁸

Marx by no means dismisses the value of parliamentary democracy for the exploited classes, and indeed he refers to it as ‘political emancipation’.¹⁹ He insists only that the social antagonisms that survive political emancipation cannot be resolved by pure reason or the vote of representatives within this particular emancipated sphere.

Rather than defending the results of universal suffrage, Marx directly attacks the ‘magical power’ which ‘republicans of the old school’ had attributed to it,²⁰ and brings his bitter irony to bear against the attempt to set abstract standards of justice against the outcome of the class struggle. When the Provisional Government disputed ‘the right of the barricade fighters to declare a republic’ on the grounds that ‘only a majority of the French people had that authority’, Marx commented that ‘the bourgeoisie allows the proletariat only one form of usurpation – that of fighting’.²¹ The possible contradiction between universal suffrage and the class interests of the proletariat was highlighted by the events of May and June 1848. When the Constituent Assembly elected in April proved to have a large reactionary majority, the Paris proletariat attempted to overthrow the Assembly, unleashing against it the desperate insurrection of the June days. Far from condemning the Paris proletariat for attempting to force its will on French society, Marx extolled its ‘bold, revolutionary battle-cry … Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!’²²

That said, Marx does not present in these texts an explanation of how capitalist class rule can be stably maintained through a representative state with universal suffrage. Indeed he was not to be confronted with such a phenomenon until late in his life, precisely because universal suffrage was not conceded in any country (as opposed to being won briefly in periods of revolution) until and unless the threat of working-class revolution had been allayed. In 1850, therefore, universal suffrage appears in Marx’s theory of the state as an internally contradictory phenomenon. ‘It gives political power to the classes whose social slavery it is intended to perpetuate: proletariat, peasants and petty bourgeoisie. And it deprives the bourgeoisie, the class whose old social power it sanctions, of the political guarantees of this power.’²³ Marx does not just imply that universal suffrage has to be set aside eventually ‘by revolution or by reaction’,²⁴ but that it produces of itself an untenable situation, and in fact he goes as far as to assert:

In the older civilized countries, with their highly developed class formation, modern conditions of production, and an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved through the work of centuries, the republic is generally only the political form for the revolutionizing of bourgeois society, and not its conservative form of existence.²⁵

In the case of the Second Republic, universal suffrage certainly was an unstable form, even if Marx’s generalization from this was to be proved wrong. The disaffection of the proletariat, peasantry and petty bourgeoisie led the bourgeoisie to trust in monarchy as against parliamentary democracy, and the only monarchy that could find a viable popular base was that of Bonaparte.

Bonapartism, at first sight, seems to upset Marx’s theory of the state as the organized rule of a class, or even a class bloc. Marx himself wrote, ‘France therefore seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual, and indeed beneath the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seems to have reached the compromise that all classes fall on their knees, equally mute and impotent, before the rifle butt.’²⁶ However, Marx goes on to resolve this paradox by analysing the Bonapartist regime, if not as the organized rule of a class bloc, nevertheless as the determined product of the class struggle.

There are three basic elements to Marx’s analysis of Bonapartism: the opposition state/society, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Marx’s formulations as to the relations between these elements are often rather clumsy, as his concepts are being painfully born out of the analysis of contemporary political phenomena, but the basic relationships are clear enough. Firstly, Marx stresses the continuity of the French state apparatus from its perfection by the first Napoleon through to the 1848 republic. This executive power had been gradually strengthened by the struggle against revolution, until it became a ‘frightful parasitic body, which surrounds the body of French society like a caul and stops up all its pores’,²⁷ and indeed strives for power of its own. Under Louis Bonaparte the executive power appeared to have cut quite adrift from any class base, but Marx defines its relationship to two distinct social classes.

On the one hand, Marx introduces the peasantry as the passive class base of Bonapartism: ‘Bonaparte represents a class, indeed he represents the most numerous class of French society, the small peasant proprietors.’²⁸ This representation, however, despite the term used, is of a quite distinctive kind. If the peasantry were a necessary precondition of Bonaparte’s rule, Marx assuredly does not see the Bonapartist regime as a ‘dictatorship of the peasantry’ in the way that he speaks of the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ and ‘dictatorship of the working class’. In fact, due to their isolation in the productive process, and France’s poor means of communication, the peasants were ‘incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name’, so that ‘their representative must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over them, an unrestricted governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above’. Indeed, Marx goes so far as to say, ‘The political influence of the small peasant proprietors is therefore ultimately expressed in the executive subordinating society to itself.’²⁹

But this being so, Bonaparte’s ‘representation’ of the peasants complements without the least contradiction his representation, in a quite different sense, of the bourgeoisie itself. Marx not only sees the bourgeois parliamentarians as having paved the way for Bonaparte by their attack on universal suffrage, but more crucially presents the ‘extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie’ as having ‘invited Bonaparte to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing part, its politicians and intellectuals … [in order] to pursue its private affairs with full confidence under the protection of a strong and unrestricted government’.³⁰

How is it that the bourgeoisie can entrust political rule to a power other than itself? How can it be sure that Bonaparte will protect its interests so well, especially given that, once the state machine dominates civil society, depriving all – including the bourgeoisie – of political rights, the class that has voluntarily abandoned political power cannot similarly win it back? Marx does not explicitly answer this question, but the answer in fact lies in the nature of the capitalist mode of production itself. As Marx was to explain in Capital, political violence is not continuously needed to extract surplus-value and ensure the expanded reproduction of capitalist relations, which in this respect differ fundamentally from the feudal or slave modes of production. All that is needed is the basic juridical framework that protects the free exchange of commodities, labour-power being itself an exchangeable commodity. Once pre-capitalist obstacles to capitalist development have been cleared away, the bourgeoisie does not have to direct the state itself, as long as the state power is one that will maintain this juridical framework and repress any revolutionary challenge to it.

In these circumstances, however, the executive power for its part is just as dependent on the capitalist mode of production, for as a ‘parasitic body’ it itself lives off the surplus-value produced by the workers and is as threatened as the bourgeoisie by proletarian revolution. Bonapartist state and French bourgeoisie thus shared a fundamental unity of interest; while there was certainly room for conflict between them, this could only be secondary in relation to their common antagonism to the proletariat. The peasantry, on the other hand, were only an instrument for Bonaparte’s ambition. Unable to organize themselves independently, they needed only the few token gestures in their direction required to avert spontaneous revolt. It is thus not surprising that the Bonapartist regime, besides maintaining the basic functions of the capitalist state, took active measures to further the development of French capitalism, measures probably more far-reaching than a bourgeois-democratic regime would have been able to carry out.

If Marx’s mature theory adequately explains the symbiotic relationship between bourgeoisie and Bonapartist state, he was still unwilling, in 1852, to accept this as a viable situation. The early formulations of historical materialism, The German Ideology and the Manifesto in particular, assume an identity between what Marx was later to distinguish as the (economically) ‘ruling class’ and the (politically) ‘governing caste’.³¹ Only with the further development during the 1850s of Marx’s theory of modes of production did economy and polity emerge as fully distinct levels of the social formation.

Marx accordingly underestimated the tenacity of Louis Bonaparte’s regime. He optimistically predicted that a rapidly intensifying crisis would arise from the allegedly contradictory demands placed on Bonaparte by his need to appear as the the ‘patriarchal benefactor of all classes’³² – surely a normal functional requisite for any government. Marx’s hope that Bonaparte would ‘bring the whole bourgeois economy into confusion’³³ was not to be fulfilled, and indeed Marx offers no satisfactory reason why this should have happened.

Finally, it is clear from Marx’s analysis of the French executive that he saw the state as something more than just the instrument of ruling-class power. For Marx, the very existence of a state apparatus separate from civil society – which the bourgeoisie needs in order to maintain its supremacy – involves a specific oppression of civil society by the state, over and above the exploitation of the proletariat by capital which it perpetuates. The task of the proletarian revolution is not merely the abolition of capitalist exploitation, but also the liberation of civil society from domination by its state apparatus. In this context Marx introduces for the first time the concept of the revolution destroying the state apparatus, although still only in an oblique way, and as a task implicitly peculiar to France.³⁴ Only in 1871 was Marx to spell out, with reference to the Paris Commune, what precisely was involved in ‘smashing’ the state machine, and what form of organization the proletariat had to put in its place.

England

After completing his book on the Cologne Communist Trial, in December 1852, Marx returned to his economic studies, at least in so far as the needs of earning a living allowed him to do. The results of Marx’s theoretical work were slow to appear, and during the 1850s he published only the first two chapters of what was later to be Capital.³⁵ However, in the journalistic work that he undertook, particularly for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx was of necessity prolific, and the articles that he and Engels wrote for this paper between 1852 and 1862 fill several volumes of their collected works. Needless to say, there is much in these pieces, which range over a great part of the contemporary economic and political scene, that is not of lasting value, and there are even many issues on which Marx’s judgement turned out to be mistaken. Equally, however, there is much in Marx’s journalistic work that is of durable importance, and this work is important is a whole, as a moment of Marx’s political practice.

When Marx settled permanently in London, in 1849, he was thirty-one years old, and it was in England that he was to spend three-quarters of his adult life. In the 1850s this fact was of course not yet apparent, and Marx’s connections with the English working-class movement were not to blossom until the next decade, with the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association. Marx’s only real comrade in the English workers’ movement in the 1850s was Ernest Jones.³⁶ Marx passed on to Jones’s People’s Paper many of his Tribune articles and discussed his political work with him regularly until the Chartist movement finally collapsed in 1858.

It was unfortunate for the development of Marx’s politics that he found himself exiled in a country that was, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the most stable and crisis-free in the bourgeois world. English Chartism had been mortally wounded in 1848, and it was to be four decades before the period of mid-Victorian prosperity came to an end and a new socialist workers’ movement developed. The sluggish English environment undoubtedly acted as a brake on the development of Marx’s politics. While the worst years of reaction saw the steady maturation of Marx’s general theory and his critique of bourgeois economics, his political theory made little progress compared with the heady developments of the 1848 period. Revolutionary political theory can only develop in response to the new problems and tasks raised by mass struggle, and this was completely lacking in Marx’s England.

In England, the relationship between political power and civil society was quite different from that which Marx had studied in France and Germany. In Marx’s native land civil society was to a notorious extent dominated by the state, and Marx had attacked Hegel’s defence of the state bureaucracy as early as 1843.³⁷ In his writings on France, also, Marx had isolated the bureaucratic-military apparatus as the key bastion of the rule of capital. The British state of the mid-Victorian period did not possess the immense standing army and bureaucracy of its Continental neighbours, a fact which Marx was to interpret as facilitating the proletarian revolution. Yet the political rule of capital was none the less firmly established in Britain, though the forms it took were subtler and less conspicuous. In the absence of the stormy class struggles that had unveiled to him the nature of bourgeois rule in France, Marx was never able to get to the root of the peculiarities of the British state.

The starting point of Marx’s writings on Britain was a review of Guizot’s pamphlet on the English revolution of the seventeenth century, which Marx saw as an attempt by Guizot to explain why bourgeois society in England had developed in the form of constitutional monarchy longer than in France. The stable political structure introduced by the English revolution of 1688, which Guizot could only ascribe to the superior intelligence of the English bourgeoisie, Marx attributed to the existence in England of a class of large landowners which had arisen under Henry VIII (from the confiscation and sale of church lands), whose estates were not feudal but bourgeois property, and who could therefore enter into a ‘lasting alliance’ with the developing commercial and financial bourgeoisie.³⁸

In 1852, in his first series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx turned his attention to the two-party system that had dominated British politics since the 1688 revolution. The Tory party was the class party of the large landed proprietors, ‘distinguished from the other bourgeois in the same way as rent of land is distinguished from commercial and industrial profit. Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive.’ ‘The Tories recruit their army from the farmers … [and] are followed and supported by the Colonial Interest, the Shipping Interest, the State Church party,’ in fact all the sections of the ruling class opposed to the dominance of industrial capital. The Whig party, ‘a species which, like all those of the amphibious class, exists very easily, but is difficult to describe’, consisted in fact of ‘the oldest, richest, and most arrogant portion of English landed property’, but were defined politically by serving as ‘the aristocratic representatives … of the industrial and commercial middle class’. ‘Under the condition that the bourgeoisie should abandon to them, to an oligarchy of aristocratic families, the monopoly of government and the exclusive possession of office, they make to the middle class, and assist it in conquering, all those concessions which in the course of social and political development have shown themselves to have become unavoidable and undelayable.’³⁹ Thus a symbiotic relationship is defined between the ‘economically ruling class’ and the ‘politically governing caste’ which in some ways parallels that between Bonaparte and the French bourgeoisie.

Thus far, Marx’s analysis is indisputable. The problems begin when he comes on to deal with the perspectives for future development. Marx held that constitutional monarchy was not the final political form of bourgeois society in England. Before the English propertied classes were mortally threatened by the proletariat, Marx believed that the industrial bourgeoisie would itself be forced to overthrow the traditional structures of the constitution, because its own ‘new requirements’ clashed with the interests of the landed proprietors and the old commercial and financial bourgeoisie.

For Marx, the highly mediated political expression of the power of capital provided by the Whig party was an anachronism which corresponded to a more backward state of capitalist development. Marx believed that as industrial capital grew to increasing preeminence over other forms of bourgeois property, the industrial bourgeoisie would push aside the old structures of the constitution that represented so many ‘faux frais’ (overhead costs) of production – the monarchy, Lords, colonies, standing army and Established Church – and take power directly into its own hands in the form of a democratic republic. The Free Traders were therefore ‘the party of the self-conscious bourgeoisie’ (in this sense, industrial bourgeoisie), which would necessarily strive ‘to make available its social power as a political power as well, and to eradicate the last arrogant remnants of feudal society’.⁴⁰ The economic strength of the Tories had been broken by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, but Marx held that the Tories still attempted ‘to maintain a political power, the social foundation of which has ceased to exist’ by means of ‘a counter-revolution, that is to say, by a reaction of the state against society’, an attempt which Marx believed ‘must bring on a crisis’.⁴¹

Even though the manufacturers, faced as they were with the working class as their own ‘arising enemy’, might ‘strive to avoid every forcible collision with the aristocracy’, yet ‘historical necessity and the Tories press them onwards. They cannot avoid fulfilling their mission, battering to pieces Old England.’ ‘When they will have conquered exclusive political dominion … the struggle against capital will no longer be distinct from the struggle against the existing government.’⁴²

As for the English working class, Marx believed that the Chartist programme of universal suffrage was the direct road to its supremacy. Universal suffrage was ‘the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class’.⁴³ Marx was of course wrong in his predictions. The industrial bourgeoisie managed to integrate itself politically and culturally into the old ruling bloc, and the aristocratic ‘mask’⁴⁴ was to remain for at least a further half-century to camouflage and mystify the rule of capital. The Chartists’ six points were one by one conceded by the ruling classes, but they did not lead, as Marx had hoped, to working-class political power.

The root of Marx’s error was his application to England of a political model worked out on the basis of Continental experience.⁴⁵ On the Continent, particularly in France, which Marx saw as the paradigm of bourgeois political development, the industrial bourgeoisie had joined more than once in revolution against the old ruling classes, and the Communist Manifesto indeed presents the ‘battering to pieces’ of the old regime by the industrial bourgeoisie as part of a historically necessary process. Marx had already had to recognize, with respect to Germany, that the general schema of the Manifesto could be distorted by relative backwardness;⁴⁶ he did not yet understand that it could be equally distorted, in a different direction, by England’s relative precocity.

The constitutional settlement of 1688 had a firmer basis than Marx ascribed to it. As the first capitalist nation, England acquired in the eighteenth century the unrivalled mastery of the world market that stimulated the industrial revolution. Under the constitutional monarchy, and with its market secured by the sea power already developed by the commercial bourgeoisie, the industrial capitalist class that began to form in the late eighteenth century had no fundamental quarrel with the traditional ruling classes. Significantly, it remained untouched by the rationalist ideology of the Enlightenment, which logically ‘should’ have expressed its interests, as, despite the ‘faux frais’ represented by the trappings of state, it did not face the obstacle to its development represented by the absolutist state that its counterparts on the Continent had to overcome. The industrialists rallied behind their elders and betters in the Napoleonic wars, which, for the English ruling classes, were less motivated by counter-revolutionary zeal than a continuation of the trade wars against the French monarchy. Jacobinism did evoke a certain response among the English artisans and petty bourgeoisie, but it was crushed by a united front of all the exploiting classes. The contradiction between the industrialists and the old ruling classes was already a secondary one, and the campaigns over the Reform Bill and the Corn Laws in no way ruptured the underlying alliance. Indeed, the repeal of the Corn Laws weakened the landlords’ economic strength only marginally (grain prices were only to fall substantially with the opening-up of the American prairies in the 1870s) and was a price that the Tories were prepared to pay. Further, the absence of a bureaucratic-military state apparatus in England made Marx’s expectations of a Tory counter-revolution, a ‘reaction of the state against society’, rather far-fetched. In April 1848, after all, the government could only resist the threat of Chartist insurrection by enrolling the bourgeois citizens of London en masse as a special constabulary.

The English working class were held in check by mechanisms just as effective as the Continental forces of repression. The industrial workers of the nineteenth century had no revolutionary tradition within historic memory to draw on, and the half-hearted reluctance of the Chartists to employ ‘physical force’ witnesses to the hold that the ideology of the ‘British Constitution’, Anglo-Saxon liberty and the rule of law had for them. Furthermore, the Chartist party consistently represented the ‘aristocracy of labour’, the 10–15 per cent of skilled craftsmen who, in the heyday of English capitalism’s world monopoly, enjoyed a highly privileged position over the unorganized mass of the working class. After the moral defeat of 1848 most former Chartists turned their energies away from politics and into building the ‘new model unions’ whose very existence depended on this division among the working class and ultimately on British imperialism. Two decades later, when it became clear to the ruling class that working-class suffrage was not a threat but that the great majority of workers would vote for the ruling-class parties, the Second Reform Bill enfranchised the bulk of the male working class. The Chartist demands, revolutionary had they been won by force, proved recuperative when they were given by grace of the ruling classes who allowed the workers into the hallowed pale of the British Constitution.

India, China and Imperialism

In his articles on India and China, written between 1853 and 1858, Marx confronted for the first time the relationship between the capitalist metropolises and their colonies and satellites. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels had portrayed bourgeois society as spreading homogeneously out from its original base and held that national differences were being abolished as the bourgeoisie of the most advanced nations forced other nations ‘to become bourgeois themselves’.⁴⁷ This analysis had obvious implications for the proletarian movement. If the lands that European capitalism drew into its world market were destined to run through the same development as the capitalist heartlands, then the proletariat could only wish to speed the process of colonization, as a necessary condition for the transition to communism on a world scale. It was on these grounds that Engels could write in 1848, for example: ‘The conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization.’⁴⁸

In the early 1850s, Marx and Engels had still not freed themselves from the Eurocentric view of human development that imperialism itself had engendered. It was not that they had any illusions about the bourgeoisie’s ‘civilizing’ mission. When Marx first turned his attention to India, he wrote, ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’⁴⁹ But quite ignorant of Asian social history, Marx could describe Hindu society as ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative’, as a ‘passive sort of existence’⁵⁰ that had ‘no history at all’ and was ‘the predestined prey of conquest’.⁵¹ It was only European capitalism, he believed, that had drawn Asia into world history. Marx did not realize that capitalist exploitation in India was not simply more barbaric than its domestic form, but essentially different in nature. Thus, analysing the benefits that Britain derived from the Indian empire, Marx distinguished between the interests of the traditional ruling class – the ‘moneyocracy’ and ‘oligarchy’ that had ‘directly exploited’ India – and the interest of the industrial bourgeoisie. He argued that although it was the cheap cotton textiles of Lancashire that had been responsible for the ruin of native Indian industry, the British industrial bourgeoisie had itself eventually lost by this, and stood to gain by the creation of ‘fresh productive powers’⁵² in India as the basis of extended trade. Although capitalism, in its most vicious form, was imposed on colonized territories such as India from without, Marx still predicted for these countries the same historical trajectory as that of the capitalist metropolises themselves; the only possible course of development for backward Asia was to follow in the wake of the advanced Europe that exploited it. Industrialization within capitalist relations was the precondition for Indian liberation, and Marx believed that the British were laying the basis for all-round industrialization with the building of railways.⁵³ British capital, which by its initial impact had ruined India, would in the long run rebuild the Indian economy, as part of the global ‘material basis of the new world’ that it was the bourgeoisie’s historical mission to create. The social revolution that was to ‘master the results of the bourgeois epoch’ for human needs was still in the hands of the ‘most advanced peoples’ of western Europe.⁵⁴

On this premise, Marx could only see in the revolt that broke out in 1857 a blind reaction to the misery inflicted by the British. Although he denounced the oppression that had provoked the uprising, and the atrocities that accompanied its suppression, Marx did not acclaim the ‘Indian mutiny’ as a revolutionary struggle, as he did not accept that an independent India could have a viable path of national development ahead of it.⁵⁵

An exchange of letters between Marx and Engels in October 1858 shows their momentary awareness that international capitalist relations posed a problem for their theory of the proletarian revolution which they had not yet solved. Writing to Marx on 7 October, Engels explained Ernest Jones’s concessions to the bourgeois Reform movement in the following terms:

It seems to me that Jones’s new move, taken in conjunction with the former more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, is really bound up with the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.⁵⁶

The next day Marx wrote to Engels: ‘The difficult question for us is this: on the Continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist character. Is it not bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering that in a far greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant?’⁵⁷ The problem that Marx posed here and the implications of Engels’s remarks on the ‘bourgeoisification’ of the English proletariat are both momentous for the theory of scientific communism. Indeed, Engels’s thesis runs quite counter to the Communist Manifesto. It is very strange, then, that neither Marx nor Engels seriously attempted to solve this complex of problems. This gap in their theory was later to have dire consequences for the Marxist movement, as the European workers’ parties came to value their imperialist privilege so highly that they blindly followed their respective ruling classes into inter-imperialist war.

In his later years Marx was to revise considerably his views on the stagnant character of Indian society, and also to deny that the west European path of historical development was a necessary model for all societies.⁵⁸ But if in this respect he overcame his initial Eurocentrism, Marx still did not develop a theory of the way in which metropolis and colony are linked by capitalism in a relationship which substantially modifies the course of development of both.

From today’s vantage point, and with the development of the Marxist theory of imperialism from Lenin onwards, we can see the answer to Marx’s ‘difficult question’. The specific exploitation of what are now the ‘third world’ countries by the imperialist metropolises is not necessarily dependent on direct political occupation, but is effected quite adequately through market relationships and the movements of trade and capital. Capitalist relations of production force the underdeveloped countries into a vicious specialization in primary products, often turning over entire countries to a single crop. Industrial development in these countries is generally impossible without a strong protectionist policy, even a state monopoly of foreign trade, and comprehensive economic planning. The local bourgeoisie, however, typically remains weak and tied to imperialism, and is unable to overcome the imperialist division of labour. At the same time imperialism fosters in the metropolis a working-class interest in colonial exploitation, whether part of the proceeds is passed to a privileged ‘labour aristocracy’, as Lenin held, or whether, as seems more probable today, it enables the metropolitan working class as a whole to enjoy a more tolerable standard of living. On top