Marx submitted articles to Horace Greeley, whose Tribune, published across the country in daily, semiweekly, and weekly editions, was the largest newspaper in America, important to the development of abolitionist feeling and to the founding of the Republican Party. Marx’s columns were often published in all three editions, sometimes unsigned as editorials. Abraham Lincoln is known to have perused the Tribune in the years before his presidential candidacy, while he was developing his political position. If he looked to the Tribune in 1861 for news of British intentions with regard to the war (preventing Britain from entering the war on the side of the South was his most pressing foreign policy problem), then Lincoln read Marx as President. Given the importance of the Tribune, and the long list of its distinguished contributors, and Horace Greeley’s ties with Northern literary society, it is reasonable to assume that Emerson and Whitman read him, too. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a short life of Lincoln that appears to echo at least one of Marx’s essays. Marx had written about Mrs. Stowe, so it seems all the more probable that she was aware of him. There was so much shared language among Marx and his American contemporaries that influence is not readily established. Greeley delivered attacks on wage slavery, and Marx described the condition of the British workers as slavery and called for their emancipation. An early essay of Friedrich Engels demonstrated the practicability of communist societies with accounts of American Shaker settlements, communal farms in the Midwest, and with mention of a community in Northampton, Massachusetts. Every example was drawn from the United States.
More generally, as Marx and the abolitionists both insist, the circumstances of workers of the time made slavery, actual as well as virtual, a live prospect for them. At least one Southern writer, George Fitzhugh, proposed ending the injustice of black slavery by enslaving whites as well. The revered Thomas Carlyle had called for the enslavement of workers in Britain, and lesser lights kept the idea alive, down to the time of the Fabians.
Abraham Lincoln’s origins were of a kind to have made the enfranchisement of his own family fairly recent. Considering the legal constraints that had always burdened the poor, and the fragility of such rights as they had gained, there is a special resonance in his saying, “He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.” The boundaries human bondage threatened to overleap were racial as well as geographic. Conversely, its suppression had vastly more than national and humanitarian implications. And that is why, calling the Civil War a “working man’s revolution,” Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote:
The revolution through which the American nation has been passing was not a mere local convulsion. It was a war for a principle which concerns all mankind. It was the war for the rights of the working class of society as against the usurpation of privileged aristocracies. You can make nothing else of it … The poor labourers of Birmingham and Manchester, the poor silk weavers of Lyons, to whom our conflict has been present starvation and lingering death, have stood bravely for us. No sophistries could blind or deceive them; they knew that our cause was their cause, and they suffered their part heroically, as if fighting by our side, because they knew that our victory was to be their victory. On the other side, all aristocrats and holders of exclusive privileges have felt the instinct of opposition, and the sympathy with a struggling aristocracy, for they, too, felt that our victory would be their doom …
In the 1867 preface to Capital Karl Marx wrote:
As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-class, so in the 19th century, the American civil war sounded it for the European working-class.
I am haunted by the sense that a changeling has been put in the cradle of American culture. Adam Smith, the supposed capitalist, whose influence among us is notorious, developed an economic system in which prison, the poorhouse, and starvation have no role, and in which the flourishing of the people (a term he prefers to “the poor”) is the desired end. Compare the Fabians, those most sedulous strainers of mercy. Why are Smith’s proposals for public projects to enhance the economy, taxes that weigh less heavily on the poor than the rich, and education to alleviate the effects of industrial work, called capitalist, while subsidies of the cost of labor, and visits of inspection to the homes of the poor to assure that their destitution was perfect before they were relieved — that women had sold their wedding rings, for example — are called socialist? Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events, when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as the advance of socialism?
We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope. For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life. But the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself. Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises of the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing. The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth, is fully present in Sellafield. British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur.
The mainstream political tradition in America is represented insistently now as unrelievedly “capitalist,” whatever Marx might have said about it, and as compromised, grubbing, and mean-spirited because of the supposed relative prevalence of “private property”—whatever Marx may have said about that. On both the right and the left, capitalism, not democracy, is represented as the basis of our institutions. If Sellafield is sometime sold to private owners, as the government has long intended that it should be, then overnight it will become a classic capitalist enterprise by Marx’s definition.
There is a third option, however, described by both Smith and Marx, and, as luck would have it, indigenous to America, of a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible, material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale. These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one’s children. These things correspond in a general way with what Americans consider to be “Western values,” yet they never have described, and do not now describe, the condition of life of ordinary British people. To the inevitable reaction, that people do not miss what they have never had, that the austerity of their lives has spared them the corruptions of materialism, that legal protections are needed only where society is a war of each against all, that there is the dole to assure them security from cradle to grave, however tedious the passage, or however swift, the reply must be that the history and present condition of ordinary British people make it clear enough how they have been used and in what spirit, by capitalists and by socialists, in tacit or declared collaboration. The best American political impulses occur outside this sham opposition. They need to be rediscovered as valuable impulses. Certainly we need to rediscover the complexity of our own political history, which deserves vastly better than to be seized upon by capitalists or dismissed by socialists.