[Working for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx excoriated the
British empire’s opium trade that brought China under its influence
with a staggering human cost] [[link removed]]

DAMNING IMPERIALISM: MARX'S WRITING ON CHINA  
[[link removed]]


 

Nick Matthews
January 11, 2022
Morning Star
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Working for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx excoriated the British
empire’s opium trade that brought China under its influence with a
staggering human cost _

A watercolour depiction of British and Chinese soldiers facing each
other at Zhenjiang in July 1842, by military illustrator Richard
Simkin (1840–1926),

 

CHINA and Marxism have been much discussed lately. Hearing these
voices reminded me that Karl Marx himself had written extensively
about China. How his views have come down to us is quite a tale.

In the late 1840s, Charles Anderson Dana, like many well-to-do
Americans, took a trip to Europe.

In Paris he came across an uncompromising German radical who seemed to
understand everything that was going on in those revolutionary times.
This was of course Karl Marx.

Dana was the managing editor of the New York Daily Tribune and he
immediately thought Marx would make an excellent contributor to his
newspaper.

This was not initially possible, as in the fervour of those
revolutionary times, Marx headed to Cologne to edit the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung.

Following the failure of the revolution there in 1848, in which Engels
took a more active part, the Prussian authorities arrested the
paper’s staff and deported Marx.

After a short sojourn in Paris in 1850, a destitute Marx arrived in
London where he began to write for the New York Daily Tribune.

This was a remarkable newspaper, serious and radical, edited by Horace
Greeley, a socialist and a follower of Charles Fourier — and from
the 1830s and an important opponent of slavery.

Marx took his contributions very seriously and if he had never written
anything else, he would be remembered as an outstanding journalist.

Marx’s contributions to the Daily Tribune, some written by Engels,
amount to several thousand pages. Between 1851 and 1862 he wrote about
revolution and counter-revolution in Europe, British politics, the
Crimean war, India and imperialism, the US and slavery, while
maintaining a running commentary on economics, finance and trade.

One issue he returned to time and again was China. As Francis Wheen,
in the introduction to the Penguin Selected Journalism of Karl Marx,
tells us: “With the possible exception of human slavery, no topic
raised Marx’s ire as profoundly as the opium trade with China.

“It is difficult today to grasp the full degree to which opium
dominated Chinese society in the 19th century.

“The cost in human lives was enormous, not only because of the of
thousands of Chinese who were addicted to a drug that made normal life
impossible, but because by the time the century began, the British
colonial and mercantile classes were willing to spill substantial
amounts of blood in order to keep the narcotics flowing from India to
China.”

The splendours of the Orient had long fascinated the West — Chinese
textiles, porcelain and tea were all highly prized.

Adam Smith described China as “one of the richest, best cultivated,
most industrious, nations on earth.”

The problem for Western merchants was that while China produced things
the West wanted, the West did not produce anything the Chinese wanted.

The British East India Company found a solution to this problem. It
cultivated a crop, on its newly conquered lands in India, that created
its own demand. By 1810 it was shipping 325 tonnes of opium a year
into Canton.

When the Chinese tried to stop this trade in 1839, Britain went to war
to protect it.

Marx wrote a substantial amount about “the China trade,”
developing ideas about free trade and what we now call dependency
theory and underdevelopment.

Thanks to a remarkable Marxist historian, all these writings are
available to us: Dona Torr, who was a major influence in the British
Marxist Historians Group.

She had been a librarian at the Daily Herald and in 1920, a founding
member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

A courier during the 1926 General Strike, she travelled to Moscow and
worked as a translator for the fifth congress of the Communist
International.

As a fluent German speaker, she worked in the Marx-Engels Institute,
translating into English the Soviet-German edition of the complete
correspondence of Marx and Engels.

This made her name as a Marxist scholar back home, where her husband
Walter Holmes was a journalist for the Daily Herald and later, the
Sunday and Daily Worker. He had postings in Russia and China.

It is thought Torr went with him to China, to Manchuria when he
covered the Japanese attacks recounted in his 1932 book Eyewitness in
Manchuria.

She went on to edit the definitive collection of Marx’s writings
from the New York Tribune about China, published by Lawrence and
Wishart in 1951. It has run into 14 editions.

When I first read these articles, I was staggered at the clarity of
the writing, his understanding of the forces at play and the sharpness
of his conclusions considering the access to information he would have
had. I know he spent a lot of time reading in the British Museum
Library, but even so.

To ensure his readers fully understood what had been happening in
China, he wrote a two-part history of the opium trade in 1858.

As an outline of the events of the period, it “is as thorough and as
damning an indictment of imperialism as anything else he wrote,”
Wheen tells us.

More importantly for me, the Marx we know shines through. He saw that
the opium trade was a barrier to the economic development of China.

It corrupted the processes of customs and starved the country of
silver, the currency used to pay for the opium. In turn, the Chinese
had to minimise non-opium imports and maximise exports to the West.

This trade imbalance distorted Western markets and in 1859, in an
article entitled Trade with China, Marx explains, accompanied by
detailed trade statistics, that the structure of Chinese society and
economy, its land tenure, taxation and husbandry was self-sustaining.

Unlike in India where Britain had the power to undermine these
structures by converting “the Hindu self-sustaining communities into
mere farms, producing opium, cotton, indigo, hemp and other raw
materials, in exchange, for British stuff. In China the English have
not yet wielded this power, nor are they likely to do so.”

For me the most prescient of his articles is the one of 1857 entitled
Whose Atrocities? which concludes: “Meanwhile in China, the
smothered fires of hatred kindled against the English during the opium
war have burst into a flame of animosity which no tenders of peace and
friendship will be likely to quench.

“For the sake of Christian and commercial intercourse with China, it
is in the highest degree desirable that we should keep out of this
quarrel and that the Chinese should not be led to regard all the
nations of the Western world as united in a conspiracy against
them.”

_You can’t buy a revolution, but you can help the MORNING STAR, the
only daily paper in Britain that’s fighting for one by joining the
501 club._

_Just £5 a month gives you the opportunity to win one of 17 prizes,
from £25 to the £501 jackpot._

_By becoming a 501 Club member you are helping the Morning Star cover
its printing, distribution and staff costs — help keep our paper
thriving by joining!_

_Join here [[link removed]]_

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]