Avrom Landy dives deep into the newly opened Marx-Engels Institute archives for this invaluable study of primary sources for Marx and Engels’ early thinking on the United States. The second part focuses on the U.S. in the 1850s with its beginnings Pacific trade, rise of cotton-producing slave power, the crisis of 1857, and the struggle over chattel slavery. Part one here.

‘Marx, Engels and America: The 1850s’ by Avrom Landy from The Communist. Vol. 6 No. 6. September-October, 1927.

This is the theme that characterized both Marx’ and Engels’ thinking throughout the entire decade from 1850 on. Scarcely had they recorded the facts of a new period of prosperity than they began to scan the horizon for an approaching crisis. They searched for the starting point of the revolution in the objective crises as they had their origin now in China, now in America, and now in Europe itself. Personal hardship gave way to intense satisfaction at the prospect of an imminent revolution. In this period, their attention is concentrated on the contradictions of capitalist industry and the world market. The existence of a class conscious proletariat and its organized vanguard, without which a proletarian revolution is impossible, in spite of the anarchy of capitalist production, is tacitly assumed. Given a crisis, the revolution, they were convinced, would take on a socialist character. The reason for this lay in their conviction that the revolution would occur within the limits of Europe, the center of the capitalist world with a numerous proletariat with the experiences of the French revolution and English Chartism behind it.

There interest in America was limited by its bearing on the development of the revolution in Europe.

On September 23, 1851, for example, Engels writes to Marx: “Let us hope the Australian gold-stew does not retard the commercial crisis. At any rate, it is momentarily creating a new, for the most part fictitious, market and is driving cotton up, since the sheep-flocks are being neglected.”

Less than a year later, on April 20, 1852, he writes to Marx again, saying: “According to all regulations, the crisis must come this year, and it probably will; however, when one considers the present, entirely unexpected elasticity of the East Indian market and the confusion brought in by California and Australia, as well as the cheapness of most of the raw materials which keeps the products of industry equally cheap and the absence of all large speculation, one is almost tempted to prophesy an extraordinarily increased endurance to the present period of prosperity.”

On August 20th of the same year, Marx even expresses the doubt that the approaching crisis might bring the revolution on much more quickly than would be desirable. “In France, according to the Gazette Agricole,” he writes, “a deficit of the next harvest of a third below the average, which, according to J.B. Say, means famine in France. — In Germany medium harvest. In England already a flow of money from the Bank for corn purchases. Incidentally, insane speculation in the City. Last week bankruptcy on the Stock Exchange. Finally, in North America, as I see from the New York Herald, the most insane speculation in railways, banks, housing-construction, unheard-of expansion of the credit system, etc. Is that not approaching the crisis? The revolution might come earlier than would be desirable for us. Nothing worse than when the revolutionists must provide for bread.”

In an undated letter to Marx, written sometime during the summer of 1852, Engels writes: “The crisis certainly appears to be wanting to come, even if the recent failures were only forerunners. But France stays in the sauce, and that is quite a bit. — The small panic in the gold market seems past, the consols and railway-shares are rising fast again, money is easier, speculation still distributed over corn, cotton, steam- boats, mining-operations, etc.….I do not believe in a longer prosperity than October or November,…Besides, it still depends very much on the intensity of the crisis whether it will produce a revolution at once — at once, that is, in six to eight months. The bad harvest in France has the air as if some- thing might happen; but if the crisis becomes chronic and the harvest better, in the end, than expected, it may still last till 1854. I admit, I wish I still had a year left to study; I still have much to go through. Australia harms, too. First by its gold and the cessation of all its other exports, as well as the stronger influx of all commodities conditioned by it; then by drawing off the surplus population here at the rate of 5000 a week. California and Australia are two cases which were not foreseen in the Manifesto: the creation of great new markets out of nothing. They must still be included.”

A few quotations from Marx’ article on Revolution in China and Europe, published in the New York Tribune for June 14, 1853, will help to make Marx-Engels’ outlook during this period even clearer. “The attention of our readers,” he writes, “has often been called to the unparalleled growth of British manufactures since 1850. Amid the most surprising prosperity, it has not been difficult to point out the clear symptoms of an approaching industrial crisis. Notwithstanding California and Australia, notwithstanding the immense and unprecedented emigration, there must ever, without any particular incident, in due time arrive a moment when the ex- tension of the market is unable to keep pace with the extension of British manufactures, and this disproportion must bring about a new crisis with the same certainty as it done in the past. But, if one of the great markets suddenly becomes contracted, the arrival of the crisis is necessarily accelerated thereby. Now, the Chinese rebellion must, for the time being, have precisely this effect upon England.” And again: “Since the commencement of the eighteenth century there has been no serious revolution in Europe which had not been preceded by a commercial and financial crisis. This applies no less to the revolution of 1789 than to that of 1848. It is true, not only that we every day behold more threatening symptoms of conflict between the ruling powers and their subjects, between the state and society, between the various classes; but also the conflict of the existing powers among each other gradually reaching that height where the sword must be drawn, and the ultima ratio of the prices be recurred to. In the European capitals, every day brings dispatches big with universal war, vanishing under the dispatches of the following day, bearing the assurance of peace for a week or so. We may be sure, nevertheless, that to whatever height the conflict between the European powers may rise, however threatening the aspect of the diplomatic horizon may appear, whatever movements may be attempted by some enthusiastic fraction in this or that country, the rage of princes and the fury of the people are alike enervated by the breath of prosperity. Neither wars nor revolutions are likely to put Europe by the ears, unless in consequence of a general commercial and industrial crisis, the signal of which has, as usual, to be given by England, the representative of European industry in the market of the world. It is unnecessary to dwell on the political consequences such a crisis must produce in these times, with the unprecedented extension of factories in England, with the utter dis- solution of her official parties, with the whole state machinery of France transformed into one immense swindling and stock-jobbing concern, with Austria on the eve of bankruptcy, with wrongs everywhere accumulated to be revenged by the people, with the conflicting interests of the reactionary powers them- selves, and with the Russian dream of conquest once more revealed to the world.”

The long expected crisis did not come until the fall of 1857. And this time it proceeded from America. The failure of their prophecies of an immediate crisis did not dampen Marx’ and Engels’ enthusiasm nor shake their conviction of the imminency of the revolution. They waited patiently, fully convinced of the fundamental correctness of their views. A new crisis meant a new revolution. That was their assertion in 1850 and their belief in 1857. And so we find Engels writing to Marx on October 29, 1857: “The American crash is beautiful and far from-being over. We may still expect the mass of importing houses to fall; till now only individual houses seem to have fallen. The reaction upon England also seems to have begun in the Liverpool Borough-Bank. So much the better. Now trade is pop once more for three or four years; we now have a chance.” And several weeks later, Marx records his own satisfaction at the turn of events in a letter to Engels dated November 13, 1857. “As much as I myself am in financial distress,” he states, “I have not felt so cosy since 1849 as at this outbreak. Besides, you may tell Lupus [Lupus, or Wilhelm Wolff, lived in Manchester. Biographically speaking alone, one might link his name with that of his two friends and speak of Marx-Engels-Wolff. He was one of Marx’ and Engels’ oldest friends and supporters, and when he died he left a small legacy to Marx. It is to him that Marx dedicated the first volume of “Capital”] for his peace of mind that I have shown the Tribune in a thorough article, now that the whole statement is before us, and even by the mere table of discount-rates of 1848 to 1854, that normally the crisis would have had to appear two years earlier. Even the delays explain themselves so ration ally that Hegel himself, to his great satisfaction, would have found the ‘Idea’ again in the ‘empirical divergence of the world of finite interests.” [Marx to Engels, Dec. 8. 1857: “Since Lupus has always kept account of our crisis-prophecies, tell him that the Economist of last Sunday declares that during the last months of 1853, all through 1854, autumn 1855 and ‘the sudden changes of 1856’ Europe has constantly had only a hair-breadth escape from the impending crash.”]

Thus far we have seen the limits of Marx’ and Engels’ interest in America during the fifties: the development of the revolution in Europe and primarily in England as a result of an economic crisis. At this point, however, the question arises: In what specific way could America affect the development of the revolution in Europe? Why should a crisis in America react upon England to such an extent as to lead to a revolution? The answer to this question is very important and will also serve to explain Marx’ and Engels’ later interest in the American Civil War.

In spite of the enormous strides in its industrial development, recorded by Marx and Engels in 1850, America was to them essentially a European colony. And as such Marx characterized it even as late as 1867. “The United States,” he stated in “Capital,” “are, speaking economically, still only a colony of Europe.” In other words, its chief business was the export of raw material for European consumption, and the import of industrial products primarily from England. Eco- nomically, therefore, America was chiefly an accessory of English industry, and as such, conditioned by it in its own development. “The economical development of the United States,” Marx said on this point, “is itself a product of European, more especially of English modern industry. In their present form (1866) the States must still be considered a European colony.” [Footnote to the 4th German edition of Capital. To this Engels later added: “Since then the United States has developed into the second industrial country of the world, without thereby losing its colonial character entirely.”]

Both continents were thus bound by the organic ties of world trade, the chief commodity of which was cotton in one form or another. And while English industry dominated the world with its products, Marx looked upon the cotton industry as the chief branch of British production. In his review in 1850, he even spoke of the nineteenth century as the Cotton Age. “The Golden and Iron Ages have long disappeared,” he wrote, “it was left for the 19th century with its intelligence, its world market, its colossal productive forces to call the Cotton Age into life.’’

Cotton, in Marx’ and Engels’ view, thus not only became the pillar of English wage-slavery, but acted as a powerful stimulus for the development of slavery in America, and this, in turn, became the foundation of wage-slavery abroad. “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England,” Marx therefore wrote, “it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.’’

By its demand for cotton, British industry not only drew America into world trade and allowed it to acquire a fundamental position in world economy, but determined to a large extent the character of its production.” …There is not the least doubt,” wrote Marx, “that rapid strides of cotton spinning, not only pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States, and with it the African slave trade, but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of the border slave-states. When, in 1790, the first census of slaves was taken in the United States, their number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly reached four millions.”

Cotton was thus the barometer by which Marx and Engels estimated the pace of the coming revolution. And while it was not long before Marx modified his early views concerning the necessity of slavery to the existence of bourgeois society, he continued to attribute a basic role to cotton and consequently to American cotton production resting on direct slavery. In this respect, America’s position in world economy was far from unimportant, especially from the point of view of the proletarian revolution. Nothing could occur at one end of the economic nerve without seriously affecting the other.

It is clear that from this point of view, the destruction of chattel slavery in America, the pedestal of European wage-slavery, would have far-reaching consequences for the working class; even a crisis in America, without resulting in the abolition of slavery, would not leave England unaffected.

There was another respect, however, in which America might have serious consequences for this revolution. During the crisis of 1857, Marx and Engels had expected the American crash to bring on the English and European revolution. When the crisis had passed and the revolution failed to materialize, a new problem presented itself to them. As long as America played the role of agricultural colony for England and Europe, supplying them with cotton and furnishing a huge market for their industrial products; as long as it did not itself become an independent industrial country, involved in its own capitalist contradictions, the modern class struggle and revolutionary labor movement, it occupied a problematic position in relation to the social revolution. For, not only was it unable to participate directly in the revolution, guaranteeing the support of a proletarian movement, but as a large section of that portion of bourgeois society which was still following an upward curve, it presented the danger of helping to crush the proletarian revolution in Europe. It was in this sense that Marx wrote to Engels on October 8, 1858, without specifically pointing to America. “We cannot deny that bourgeois society has experienced its sixteenth century for the second time,” he said, “a sixteenth century which I hope will sound its death-knell just as surely as the first pushed it into life. The actual task of bourgeois society is the production of the world market, at least in its outlines, and a production resting on the basis of it. Since the world is round, this seems to have come to a close with the colonization of California and Australia and the opening up on China and Japan. The difficult question for us is: On the Continent the revolution is imminent and will also assume at once a socialistic character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this small corner, since the movement of bourgeois society is still ascendant on a much larger terrain?”

There were a number of journals with this name in the history of the movement. This ‘The Communist’ was the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party from 1927 until 1944. Its origins lie with the folding of The Liberator, Soviet Russia Pictorial, and Labor Herald together into Workers Monthly as the new unified Communist Party’s official cultural and discussion magazine in November, 1924. Workers Monthly became The Communist in March ,1927 and was also published monthly. The Communist contains the most thorough archive of the Communist Party’s positions and thinking during its run. The New Masses became the main cultural vehicle for the CP and the Communist, though it began with with more vibrancy and discussion, became increasingly an organ of Comintern and CP program. Over its run the tagline went from “A Theoretical Magazine for the Discussion of Revolutionary Problems” to “A Magazine of the Theory and Practice of Marxism-Leninism” to “A Marxist Magazine Devoted to Advancement of Democratic Thought and Action.” The aesthetic of the journal also changed dramatically over its years. Editors included Earl Browder, Alex Bittelman, Max Bedacht, and Bertram D. Wolfe.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v06n06-sep-oct-1927-communist.pdf