Apropos Carey

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Cluss' article "The 'Best Paper in The Union' and its 'Best Men' and Political Economists" with extracts from Marx's letters

These notes by Marx on Henry Charles Carey's views consist of fragments from Marx's letters to his pupil and comrade-in-arms Adolph Cluss, that were inserted by the latter in his article "The 'Best Paper in the Union' and Its 'Best Men' and Political Economists". The article by Cluss was published in the American working-class newspaper Die Reform. It contained criticism of the ideological discord among the German petty-bourgeois émigrés and their infatuation with the theories of bourgeois economists. Cluss reproduced whole passages from Marx's letters, making some changes or additions evidently for the sake of coherence, of which he wrote to Marx on September 11, 1853, referring jokingly to his own work as a plagiarism. Marx's authorship is also evident from their similarity to and frequently full coincidence with what Marx wrote on Carey's views to Engels (June 14, 1853) and Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852). In his letter to Engels of October 8, 1853, Marx took a favourable view of Cluss' work but at the same time he stated definitely: "In his attack upon the Neu-England Zeitung he—aptly as I think—makes use of sundry passages from my letters about Carey, etc." (Ibid.) Since the text belonging to Cluss is also based on Marx's advice and instructions and his description of petty-bourgeois émigrés, and also because this form is more convenient for the reader, in this edition the article is published in full, and Cluss' text is given in smaller type. Marx's notes, as a separate publication, appeared in Russian in the journal The U.S.A., No. 5, 1977.

[Die Reform, No. 48, September 14; 1853]

The "uneducated" public having ceased to pass judgment on it, the Neu-England-Zeitung of Boston has, with. commendable modesty and anticipating the significance of its insipid Grenzboten radicalism, reached the conclusion that it is the "best newspaper". For some time now, that newspaper has performed some grotesque antics. It resembles an overladen and frail little craft that has put out from the coast of the old world on a voyage of discovery. Suddenly the vessel finds itself out on the high seas and, would you credit it, they have forgotten to bring a compass, a pilot and a captain who can navigate! They are now at the mercy of the winds and the waves. At this juncture a worthy old gentleman tries to lecture the unthinking crew on the seriousness of the situation; but he is still sermonising when a laughing nymph appears in the distance to chaff at him, and she disturbs the edifying devotions by delighting in the confused doings of those trusty gentlemen. One man after another goes onto the after-deck from amongst this motley rabble, and keeps turning the wheel and trimming the sails. The general confusion is only made worse by the contradictory but always well-intentioned instructions of the pseudo-captain, calling for the squaring of the circle, "higher unity", the true, correct course to Canaan, the milk-and-honey world of the future—and this after he had, down in his cabin, just seen himself, and felt like, a second Jean Paul.

Today, as in a final burst of energy, as in death-throes, new and larger sails are suddenly hoisted, while tomorrow fatigue sets in as after the agitation of a consuming fever. Overworked and on the verge of collapse, the crew reef the sails again. They try to put the disorderliness of the chaos from their minds by conjuring up "interesting" family quarrels. Seeking to conceal the contradictions of reality, in the midst of which they feel helpless, they allow that much-vaunted "higher unity" of ideal, free communal activity to go to pieces by decreeing differences between the European and the American outlook. The Athenian citizen, whose threadbare probity and woollen rags thrown proudly over his shoulder one has just admired as he delivered his sermon on freedom, steps into the background, and new actors come forward. Can one expect them to understand that modern bourgeois civilisation is based on the slavers of wage-labour, after one of the family had in his stupor completely failed to see yesterday that ancient civilisation was founded on absolute slavery? Most certainly not.

In the struggle between the "European and the American outlook" the spokesman for Europe is "Leonidas"-Confucius-Ruge, the Pomeranian aurora borealis, representing half a dozen Southern German dictators groping around in a half-light. Everyone knows that he preaches something he has christened humanism, and that occasionally he has someone sound his praises to John Bull as the third great German philosopher alongside Strauss and Feuerbach. Ruge's "outlook" can be summed up briefly. In the writings of the philosopher Kant he discerns a system of limited freedom, in those of Fichte the principle of absolute freedom, and in those of Hegel the principle and system of absolute freedom through the medium of dialectics. Herr Ruge has always displayed an instinctive aversion to dialectics and he has always taken up its easier aspect, that of becoming entangled in contradictions, but not that of mastering them. It is therefore natural that he should constantly malign dialectics as being sophistry, as, for example, in the works of Marx. Ruge describes his humanism as the introduction in society of the principle and system of absolute freedom. So far as we are able to understand it, this humanism of Herr Ruge, his unity of practice and theory, consists in passing off his de facto clumsiness as theory to the men of practice and his peculiar and feeble thinking as practice to the theoreticians. Ever since Feuerbach, Bauer, Strauss and others successively dispatched one another from the scene, and no prince of science existed any longer, and since even the materialists pushed their noses in, a state of mind has occurred in old Ruge infected with which, quoting silly Gretchen, his translator into German-American said:

And all this does my brain impair, As if a mill-wheel were turning there.

For Ruge was in the habit of singing tile praises of the reigning prince of science to the public as loudly as possible, in order to win renown himself. Out of all that has come an olio podrida of contradictions, which, in the absence of dialectics, has very recently had a democratic gravy poured over it, and, in the form of a box of humanism, appearing not, it is true, in the world theatre but in Janus, blissfully introduced itself to a "very select" public, which unfortunately had almost completely dispersed before the box was constructed.

Of the European press Herr Ruge had in the last few years thrust himself on The Leader, edited in London by his friend Thornton Hunt who, logically, was extolled in Janus as the "most outstanding writer among the English socialists". This unctuous coward had preached communism in order to divert attention from Chartism, and we denounced him in the American press for it at that time. Today that charge is justified before our party. Hunt had forced his way into the Chartists' Executive with the intention of delivering the Chartists into the hands of the finance-reformers (the industrial bourgeoisie). In order to trap Ernest Jones he preached physical force and talked of nothing but rifles, at a time of the most splendid prosperity and in the most unfavourable of circumstances. In recognition of his efforts he was thrown out of the official position he held with the workers. Good! Nowadays the scoundrel has thrown off his mask. He has become one of the most respectable gossips of the middle class, and he declares Bright, that ideal of the modern English bourgeois, to be a genuine "old Englishman" and the most disinterested of humanitarian enthusiasts with regard to the unfortunate Indian people, and stated recently that he would even prefer despotism to a "raving republic". That is the sort of pitiable figure that the puffed-up "higher unity" cuts. Behind it, whenever real conflicts arise, we see bragging arrogance in all its superficiality!

[Die Reform, No. 49, September 17, 1853]

Let us now turn to the "American outlook" which represents the counterpart to the family row in the Neu-England-Zeitung. For the most part this outlook consists of trivialities and latterly of sententious ideas taken from street ballads which, apparently strung together in public. houses under the influence of Philadelphian lager, provide the sort of material to fill a cess-pit whose outer walls are cemented with untruths, dirty tricks and platitudes. A few Philadelphian Romans, notably a certain Herr Pösche, currently busy earning his spurs as a cheer-leader for Cushing in Pierce's glorious army of place-hunters, are flourishing as matadors of this school. A bourgeois conservative economic theory, of the kind that socialists of all parties are busy fighting—that propounded by the American Carey and the Frenchman Bastiat—is being trotted out to the credulous public as the latest German-American discovery, the "higher unity" of political economy. We shall see that wherever this grand higher unity ventures into contact with real life, it becomes a willing tool in the hands of the powers that be. The editors of the Neu-England-Zeitung appear not yet to have stained their chaste convictions with studies of such a demanding material nature as those that political economy involves; for we see daily that [...] discussion of social questions[...] everyone who feels like voiding his bowels. The said doctrine was last demolished, together with M. Bastiat, before the socialist tribunals of Europe in 1849, in the course of a discussion in Proudhon's Voix du peuple. As far as European society is concerned, historical developments have long since cut the ground from under that particular theoretical representation of a specific historical epoch.

In America, where today the social contradictions are much less sharp than in radically undermined Europe, this theory found its champion in the economist Carey. Its conservative-bourgeois opponent (taking the view of the more recent English school) has already appeared in the person of Professor Wayland. His Principles of Political Economy has been introduced as a textbook at most of the academies of New England, much to the annoyance of Carey's adherents.

Let us summarise briefly the main points of the doctrine which is compiled by Bastiat in his Social Harmonies with grace and in easily comprehensible form, but propagated by Carey without any talent for presentation or for summing up and precision. One cannot deny C. H. Carey a certain amount of positive knowledge and even some original and attractive ideas.

His chief merit is that he has indeed cultivated a native product, grown directly from American soil without any foreign admixtures. His science is of anything but universal character, it is pure Yankee science. It attempts to demonstrate that the economic conditions of bourgeois society, instead of being conditions for struggle and antagonism, are rather conditions for partnership and harmony. (Very fine in theory, but modern industrial towns demonstrate how things work out in practice!) Those economic conditions can be broken down as follows:

1) Rent, the share of the landowner,

2) Profit, the share of the capitalist,

3) Wages, the share of the worker in the value of the finished product.

We can see that Carey is much too experienced to link the existence of classes with the existence of political privileges and monopolies, as for instance the newly-fledged Roman youths at Philadelphia would, or before them s. v. Heinzen, and thus to see social harmony as being unconditionally invented and patented for all time with the great French Revolution. Carey seeks rather for economic reasons behind economic facts, though in so doing he fails to transcend the as yet indistinct, hazy and fluid class relations of America. He therefore only proves that he regards a point of transition in the development of society as the normal condition of its life. Most characteristic is the argument of Carey's school against the English economists. It attacks Ricardo, classical champion of the bourgeoisie and most stoic opponent of the proletariat, describing him as a man whose works provide an arsenal for anarchists, socialists, in brief for all "enemies of the bourgeois order". With fanaticism it attacks not only Ricardo but all other leading economists of modern bourgeois Europe, and reproaches these economic heralds of the bourgeoisie with having split society and with forging weapons for civil war by cynically providing the proof that the economic foundations of the various classes are bound to give rise to an inevitable and constantly growing antagonism between them.

The Frenchman Bastiat is an unqualified Free Trader; the Philadelphian Roman youths parrot his views about the "blessings of free trade" with naive credulity. Carey himself began his economic career as a Free Trader, and at the time he would come up with some good jokes, for example that one should couple bourgeois France with China on account of her preference for protective tariffs. As is usually the case with advocates of free trade, he blamed all the discord in society on improper interference by the state in ventures which were the prerogative of private industry and the like. This was all Yankee, Yankee from head to foot. Nowadays Mr. Carey has become sour, he sighs and complains together with the Frenchman Sismondi about the destructive effects seen in the centralising big industry of England, which for him engenders the "evil principle" in society.

He would be highly surprised if he knew how German greenhorns saw the avalanche-like growth of the power of big capital as the formation of so many snowballs full of "Anglo-Saxon" enthusiasm for decentralisation and individualism.

Apart from the fact that Carey totally overlooks the transforming, revolutionary element in the destructive effects of industry, he is nevertheless again too much of a Yankee to make industry as such responsible, yet that would be the only logical conclusion to be drawn from his argument. He makes the English personally responsible for the effects of their industry, not to mention the fact that Ricardo is in his turn made responsible for England. Caught in this contradiction, he must necessarily burrow himself deeper and deeper in the petty-bourgeois element, advocating the long since discarded patriarchal association between agriculture and manufacturing. But the mark of the Yankee with Carey and his adherents is this: under the pretext and, we ought to admit it, with good will and with the conviction of speaking for the "most numerous and the poorest class", they throw down the gauntlet to the English bourgeoisie. Sismondi did that by condemning modern industry and expressing his longing to return to the old method of manufacture; nowadays, however, they do it by preaching protective tariffs. Accordingly all they are really aiming at with all their philanthropic talk is artificially accelerating the English development of the industrial bourgeoisie in America. This is a philanthropic and utopian gesture in the competitive struggle between England and America, this most interesting of phenomena confronting present-day bourgeois economists. The ingenious aspect of economics is revealed here in all its glory.

As this is completely overlooked even by Carey's school, it would of course be unfair of us to assume even an inkling of all this in the thinking of a "State-haemorrhoidarius" and the newly-fledged political economists of the Neu-England-Zeitung, since they are stuck in the bourgeois mire right up to their ears and are not even remotely aware of the historical significance of the school of thinking which they themselves have learned by heart.

[Die Reform, No. 50, September 21, 1853] In the competitive struggle between America and England we see the latter pushed increasingly into the position of Venice, Genoa and Holland, which were all forced to lend their capital on interest after the monopoly of their trading power had been broken. Genoa and Venice helped Holland to emerge, Holland provided England with capital, and now England is obliged to do the same for the United States of America. Only today all the conditions in this process are of a much larger scale than they were at that time. England's position differs from that of those countries in that the main factor for them was a monopoly of trade, which is easy to break, whilst she possesses a monopoly of industry as well, which by its very nature is tougher. On the other hand the English bourgeoisie's surfeit of capital is all the more colossal, so that it is obliged to build railways in both continents, and to invest capital in gas-lighting in Berlin, in the vineyards of Bordeaux, and in Russian factories and American steamers. All this provides one with material to support the most interesting observation that the attraction which English central capital exerts necessarily has its complement in a centrifugal force which pours it out again into all the corners of the world. If there wen to be a revolution, then the English would have furnished the European continent with all those lines of communication and all that production machinery for nothing. America is not waiting for revolutions. It is settling its accounts in a conservative bourgeois fashion by from time to time liquidating its business with England through bankruptcies. This is one of the secrets of its rapid rise, a regular phenomenon just like railway accidents and shipwrecks. That same lack of concern, that same mad frenzy of production which makes it possible for tens of thousands to be brought into the world who under different circumstances would never see the light of day, cold-bloodedly sends hundreds upon hundreds, propelled by steam, to an early death. The one is simply the complement of the other. The unscrupulous multiplying of the wealth of capitalist companies accompanied by complete disregard for human life! That is how the commentary reads on the "victory of individuality amongst the Anglo-Saxons"!

All these are facts which are naturally incomprehensible to the "sober non-violence and homely good sense" of Philadelphian Roman youths who have ingeniously managed to find out from some conservative review or other that the women workers of Lowell today are three times better off as regards their earnings than they were thirty years ago. According to that clever conclusion those women workers of years ago must have eaten only four and a half days a week and must have covered their nakedness with nothing more than a fig-leaf. That Lowell should only have come into existence during the last thirty years, or should have worked its way up from a quietly vegetating population of 200 souls to an industrial town of 36.000 souls; that today approximately a third of that population should consist of women workers who are living from hand to mouth on an average wage of three dollars a week, that is to say that their wages fluctuate to such an extent above and below this average that they can put a few coppers into the savings bank when times are good, only to use them up again when business stagnates completely or they are laid off for half the week; that these women workers should for the most part be condemned to celibacy, not by democratic decree but through pressure of circumstances—these are all things which a "democratic" candidate for high office must not see, even if one wanted to assume that he had the necessary powers of vision.

It is true that here in America we cannot deny the existence of that "equality of opportunity for the individual, which is the highest goal one (i.e. the Philadelphian Romans) can perceive". Yellow fever has for long enough been acting as a delegate of the Roman democrats and has demonstrated that principle in New Orleans. However, the possibility of equality. young Sir, lies beyond the range of vision of the bourgeoisie, and only the reformer who has perceived the full implications of the present conditions of workers has the requisite wider horizon, not hedged round by any kind of prejudice, to include it.

Having now sketched the heroes of both worlds, but, where the hero of the New World was concerned, having preferred to discuss political economy in the original rather than the dull and bloodless imitation which he is always repeating (and we have done this in order to be able to observe the decorum which we owe to the public, and to interrupt the personification of boredom in all its monotony and trite learning in all its gloom), we must add that each of the two parties is accusing the other of gross ignorance in matters of world history (a fact which we simply register), and that the editors occasionally christen these touching, "interesting" scenes a "struggle between materialism and idealism", with Heinzen appearing as godfather in the old disguise of Orlando Furioso.

The feud had become very vehement, and it seemed that the interplay of opposing arguments would end in a brawl rather than resolving itself in that "higher unity" which everyone had so hoped for. They therefore improvised a plan to produce unity through arbitration, a deus ex machina, summoned in the person of an "earnest" man, a former diplomat and envoy of some petty republic, unless the solemn protestations of the political sages and grandees of international law are - totally deceiving us, betraying to us with their carefully restrained judgments, as they do at every turn, the man who is already groaning under the burden of some future government office. He settles the "struggle" to the satisfaction of both sides, for both parties are adjudged to be at fault, and therefore neither has to make a more dishonourable retreat than the other. Though occasionally still grunting bad-temperedly, "Leonidas" walks peaceably along with his opponents, the "unknown Greeks", whose rôle in the comedy had been taken by the Philadelphian Roman youths. Moved, the choir of the priests of humanism sings "These sacred halls know not what vengeance is!" The curtain falls, but there is no Bengal flame to cast a red light on the patriotic tableau. The final scene is yet to come.

[Die Reform, No, 51, September 24, 1853]

Thanks to his manner of a whimpering Heraclitus, the "earnest" arbitrator had gained universal sympathy, extravagantly bestowed upon him by all the treasure-hunters who subscribe to the "science of the future", who were whimpering before him, and who, on their own admission, cast their pearls before the public as Californian gold-diggers would, still rough and unpolished. And lo, full of good cheer and with a happy heart a guest suddenly arrives on the scene, all the more worthy for being uninvited, who chooses, in the rôle of Democritus, to make fun of everything that is funny, and thinks all the evidence indicates that throughout the whole struggle there has been much ado about nothing. He scoffed at the whole fantastic notion of a special democratic mentality, which cannot conceive of the revolution as anything other than the "fiery hell-hounds" of the wire-pulling European Central Committee. He pacifies their lordships, saying they need have no fear of Bashkirs, and the Prussians and the Bavarians are not so bad either. He explains to them how, without the princehood of its princes, without the customary collection of youths in spiked helmets, with or without monkey-tail cockades, Germany might have stood a chance of Bashkirs. He chuckles at the tender "revolutionary" concern for the national independence of the thirty-six sovereigns, of the Prussian, Bückeburg, Darmstadt or Baden governments, and at the way imperial troops—imperial troops for the "German nation"—are preferred to Bashkirs. He laughs at people's dread of the impending floods of Bashkirs, at the festive bluster, at all the rubbish of political -wisdom, the moralising national manifestos addressed to the Prusso-Baden princelings, at the way they are urged faithfully to protect the thirty-six mother-countries with their half-and-half despotism from the Bashkirs, so as to prevent at all costs the premature outbreak of the great conflict, which the democrats do not expect to occur until fifty years after Napoleon's prophecy but which must not occur during their lifetimes. He laughs at the feeble and absurd efforts of democratic sects to reduce all the existing convulsions of European society, the whole enormous historical crisis, and the thousands of difficulties, complications and class problems to a superficial and insipid difference between Cossacks and republicans, and to treat the overthrow of a whole system of production with all the shocks for the world market, with all the class struggles and upheavals in industry that this inevitably entails as if it were just the plainest of pot-house fare, like some fraternal luncheon that has yet to be arranged. He laughs at the barbaric somersaults of Menchikoff, at the diplomatic absurdities of his superiors, Nesselrode-Libinsky, at the top-booted Don Quixote of the European counter-revolution, the mighty and formidable recruiter of Jews Nicholas, and at the "helpless voice" of his politically skilled opponents together with their high-ranking judge. He offers his congratulations on the final extinguishing of the "tiny spark [of revolution] flickering on", and on the final decaying of the whole theatrical apparatus of official democracy, but on the other hand whispers into the ears of the jousters, numb with astonishment at the proletarian audacity they have witnessed, that the material revolution without hollow-sounding words is for that very reason more inevitable today than ever, and that it was Russia's equal opponent.

Whispering is heard everywhere, and "righteous indignation" manifests itself amongst the democratic notabilities. The agitation grows and nobody notices that, having ended his scornful reprimand, the proletarian rogue has silently turned his back on the sacred halls of "higher unity". People clear their throats. Misunderstood and foundering, political wisdom fires a distress signal, which fades away in melancholy, and there appears the now inevitable factotum of governmental power in partibus. Slowly and discreetly, and with earnest, ominous demeanour and thoughtfully folded arms, the latter shakes off the fiercely snapping cluster of talents. Resplendent under his arms is the testament of Peter the Great, a history of Russia, bound in pigskin, is borne in and opened at his behest, and bundles of treaties on parchment are piled up round him. He begins to speak. Svyatoslav, Ivan Vasilyevich, Peter I, Catherine II and Nicholas file past, a series of irrefutable signposts pushed successively forward from Moscow to the Danube. What is the direction in which they point? To Constantinople, the fateful city of the Tsar. Is that understood? Tremble Byzantium! Who will save you? And who will save the world from the Cossack flood? Democracy? "It alone speaks out and vainly raises its helpless voice against Russia; the democratic party has got into disrepute in the City, at Westminster Hall and St. James's alike"—thus speaks the factotum himself. The German princes? They are themselves nothing more than the princelings of the Cossacks. Boustrapa? He wants to parade as a Cossack on the Rhine himself. Aberdeen?. Has he not once already allowed the Cossacks to get as far as Adrianople?

Who then is left? The Slav revolution? A miserable Montenegrin "Hölperlips". The pessimistic political sages no longer think much of that. What then? There is nothing, nothing else, nowhere is there salvation! Let us cover our heads and hide our tallow candles— l'Europe sera cosaque. But wait! Here comes the revolution, the great "mighty people's revolution", the "fourth estate" is on its way, the "estate" which has no more to do than to "launch itself against the Tartar flood of tsarist despotism" if it wishes later to see the "knife and fork question" resolved, an issue which has of course long since been resolved for the people of other estates. Indeed, forward with the "fourth estate", forward with the "people's revolution", forward into battle against Russia! Russia is the seat of "Europe's order based on sceptre, cross, sabre and money"!

The speaker has finished, his "helpless voice" falls silent. He throws back his head, looks about him, triumphant, "earnest", serenely cool.

Where is that other horseman, His mount has left the stable?

Dumbfounded, they cast an eye round the trusty company. "Thalberg not here?" No answer. The speaker's mournful gaze strays involuntarily out to the blue-vaulted sky. "Paradoxes," he stammers. In resignation he lowers his gaze, and on the street it lights upon the missing intruder, who is playing with a box of matches and laughing away.