Spencer A. Leonard - Marx and Engels on Imperialism: Selected Journalism, 1856-62

Marx and Engels on
Imperialism

For my students

Marx and Engels on
Imperialism

Selected Journalism, 185662

Edited by
Spencer A. Leonard

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Published by Lexington Books

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marx, Karl, 1818-1883, author. | Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895, author. | Leonard, Spencer A., editor.

Title: Marx and Engels on imperialism : selected journalism, 1856-62 / edited by Spencer A. Leonard.

Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This volume is the first to compile the journalistic works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dealing with imperialism. Here Marx and Engels examine capitalist state policymaking, mass democracy, the Second Opium War, the suppression of the 1857 Indian Revolt, the rise of credit agencies, the global significance of the US Civil War, and more Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022041032 (print) | LCCN 2022041033 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498559232 (cloth) | ISBN 9781498559249 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism.

Classification: LCC JC359 .M376 2023 (print) | LCC JC359 (ebook) | DDC 325/.32dc23/eng/20221005

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041032

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041033

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Single-Volume Journalism Collections

AB: Articles on Britain. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971.

AJME: The American Journalism of Marx & Engels: A Selection from the New York Daily Tribune. Edited by Henry M. Christman. New York: New American Library, 1966.

CWUS: The Civil War in the United States. 2nd ed. Edited by Andrew Zimmerman. New York: International Publishers, 2016. First Edition in 1937.

DNYT: Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx. Edited by James Ledbetter. New York: Penguin, 2007.

FIWI: The First Indian War of Independence, 18571859. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960.

KMCM: Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: His Dispatches and Other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa. Edited by Shlomo Avineri. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969.

KMOI:Karl Marx on India: From the New York Daily Tribune (Including Articles by Frederick Engels) and Extracts from Marx-Engels Correspondence 18531862. Edited by Iqbal Husain with an introduction by Irfan Habib. New Delhi: Tulika, 2006.

MEOB: Marx and Engels on Britain. 2nd ed. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962. First edition in 1953.

MOG: Marx on Globalisation. Edited by Dave Renton. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001.

OC: On Colonialism: Articles from the New York Tribune and Other Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1972. First published in 1960.

OCh: Marx on China, 18531860: Articles from the New York Daily Tribune. With introduction and notes by Dona Torr. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951.

SFE: Political Writings. Vol. 2Surveys from Exile. Edited by David Fernbach. New York: Verso, 2010. First Edition in 1973.

UR: Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution. Edited by Robin Blackburn. London: Verso, 2011.

Except for Capital and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, All Citations Are to the Marx-Engels Collected Works

MECW: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Collected Works. New York: International Publishers, 19752004. Note that all citations of the writings of Marx and Engels are to this edition except where otherwise stated and with the exceptions of the Communist Manifesto, where I refer to the standard (Samuel Moore) translation in no specific edition, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and Capital.

Single-Volume Editions of Marx Used Here

Capital:A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Capital:A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 3, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1991.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Edited by C. P. Dutt. New York: International Publishers, 1963.

Marx and Engels have, on balance, been well served by their English editors. This is true of both the scholars responsible for editing their collected works as well as those that brought out various individual works and compilations. A partial exception to this general picture, however, is the treatment accorded the disparate mass of journalism written by Marx and Engels in the 1850s and early 1860s.

For these writings, there have been two general selections: Henry M. Christmans 1966 The American Journalism of Marx & Engels, which has long been out of print, and James Ledbetters 2007 Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, which, at the time of writing, remains in print. Both volumes introduce general readers to Marxs journalism from the New York Tribune. But, apart from the journalism that they edited, neither Christman nor Ledbetter were deeply immersed in the writings or political activity of Marx and Engels in the history of Marxism. Christman, a self-described non-Marxist democratic socialist, was a professional editor of other peoples writings. In addition to Marxs journalism, he brought out selections of writings by figures as disparate as Indira Gandhi, V. I. Lenin, Huey Long, Golda Meir, Muammar Qaddafi, Walter Reuther, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Walt Whitman. Ledbetter, for his part, is a journalist. A former staff writer at the Village Voice, editor of Time magazine, Slate, and Reuters, and former deputy managing editor of CNNMoney, at the time of writing he edits Inc. magazine. While, perhaps, the lack of ideological encumbrance both men brought to the task proved a certain strength it was also a limitation. In selecting Marxs journalism, both chose pieces on the basis of their accessibility and literary merit. This is unobjectionable, indeed valuable, in itself. But, while solid enough as general introductions, neither volume has substantially informed, whether on the Left or in academia, the evaluation of Marx and Engelss legacy. The same is true of the small pocket edition of Marxs journalism, Revolution and War, published with no named editor in 2009 in Penguins Great Ideas series.

Better known among leftists than Christmans and Ledbetters selections are the many volumes incorporating Marxs journalism published by the various internationally affiliated Communist houses between the 1930s and the 1970s. In the English language, the most important of these were Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, Foreign Languages Publishing House and Progress Publishers in Moscow, International Publishers in New York, Lawrence & Wishart in London, and Peoples Publishing House in Delhi and Mumbai. Theirs was a coordinated publishing venture that brought out identical volumes in different countries. The volumes of Marx and Engelss journalism that they published were of varying quality, all of them compiling writings by country or by questionBritain, China, colonialism, India, Ireland and the Irish Question, the Spanish Revolution of 1854, the US Civil War, etc. Shlomo Avineris