The personal lives of revolutionaries aren’t usually of much interest — even Lenin’s personal life has largely escaped hyperanalysis — but with Marx it’s different. Generations of anarchist and bourgeois critics, perhaps despairing of any other route of attack, have painted Marx as a veritable monster. One such accusation paints Marx as a hypocrite who was contemptuous of the class he claimed to champion. The authors make it clear that such criticism has no basis in fact. Marx’s ties to the working class were real, meaningful, and went in both directions. For instance, when Marx was called before a court in Cologne in 1849, local workers gathered outside the courthouse and refused to disperse until Marx reappeared. By the same token, when police framed the Cologne branch of the Communist League, Marx worked tirelessly in defense of the accused workers. Despite Marx’s defense, seven of the eleven defendants were convicted and endured tremendous hardship in a fortress-prison. Marx afterward forever steered clear of secret organizations which endangered others. Another blow is struck against the mythical elitist Marx when the authors demonstrate time and time again Marx’s dedication to the education of the working class. Men like Willich and Bakunin after him wanted to turn the Communist League into an organization of plotters whose conspiracies would ignite the revolt of the working class, but Marx instead fought to preserve this organization and the others he belonged to as means for educating and organizing the working class. (Those who fetishize the vanguard party would do well to remember this — as would those who accuse Marx of fetishizing it). To this end he invested considerable time in lecturing, particularly on economics, of which he always was careful to speak clearly. Knowing that clear speaking wouldn’t always be enough, Marx quizzed his audience to make sure that they considered and understood the material. He did all of this even though he routinely spent the better part of his day in the reading room of the National Library! And when the publication of the French translation of Das Kapital had to be delivered to the public in installments due to the financial difficulties of the publisher, Marx remarked that this work will be more accessible to the working class in this form, and for me that consideration takes precedence of all others.

A second pair of charges hurled against Marx are even more remarkable for the fact that they completely contradict each other: on the one hand, it’s sometimes said that Marx allowed his family to languish in poverty while he diligently avoided work. On the other hand, it’s occasionally claimed that Marx and his family lived a proper Victorian life of opulence while the workers he cared so much for starved and shivered. Indeed, the authors of the volume under consideration have a good deal to say about the dire straits the Marx family found itself in when living in London. We are told that their poverty was so great that several of the children died (as was common in proletarian families of the day), meat was a rarity, and at one point Karl Marx was forced to stay indoors all winter because he had to sell his coat! Marx made a living at times by writing on foreign affairs for the capitalist press, but their interest in the matters Marx knew most about was not always long-lived. Consequently, for many years Marx’s financial security, such as it was, depended on Engels, who was forced to work a job he despised in order to ensure that his compatriot could at least count on having the merest sustenance. Nicolaievsky and his co-author make it obvious that Marx was a loving, dedicated father and husband who did his utmost to support his family. His failing, such as it was, was the inability to find work; those who fault him for this reveal their own inability to understand the misery of 19th-century England or the fact that some men, such as Marx, will not abandon their convictions for lucre (as Marx probably could’ve done by writing handsome lies).

Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen also meld the political and the personal in instances where the political implications of the personal are obvious. For instance, they demolish the undying misconception that Marx was the first communist, or even the first communist to strike out in the vein he did. Even as late as 1842 Marx vehemently denied accusations that he was a communist. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen point to Ludwig Gall as a forerunner of Marx; Gall was particularly exceptional in that he anticipated the language of the Communist Manifesto in 1835, 13 years before that seminal rallying-cry of the exploited was put to paper. In charting the personal and political development of Marx in the 30s and 40s, our authors clearly evince that Marx, far from inventing communism in his own prodigious mind, was merely the best of an entire generation of men and women who revolted against the degrading and impoverishing tendencies of capitalism.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest value of the present volume is that its authors prove that the ideas of Marx and his compatriots were not derived from some Utopian vision or eternal, unchanging sense of justice or rights, but rather from the process of attempting to answer a question they constantly posed: what will hasten the development of the working class as a revolutionary class that can smash capitalism and destroy class society once and for all?

This method is best exemplified by Marx’s stance on the various wars of his days, on which Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen provide much commentary. For Marx, the question was always which side’s victory would do the most to hasten the social revolution — and in his day this question was synonymous with asking which side would destroy more barriers to capitalist development or prevent the old barriers of feudalism from being reintroduced. This was not because Marx supported capitalism over feudalism per se, but because capitalism created the preconditions for socialist revolution. As Marx wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on 21 January 1849,

We are certainly the last people to desire the rule of the bourgeoisie … but we say to the workers and the petty bourgeoisie that it is better to suffer in the contemporary bourgeois society, whose industry creates the conditions for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone society…

Accordingly, the primary criterion by which Marx judged wars in his day was whether Russia was involved. As “the great stronghold, reserve position, and reserve army of European reaction,” as Engels wrote, Marx sided with Russia’s foes in every war. When Russian advances on Istanbul in the 1850s prompted the French and British to declare war, Marx was so enthusiastic in promoting the war effort that he eagerly contributed anti-Russian commentaries to conservative newspapers and even took an interest in the anti-Russian fanatic Urquhart. Indeed, during the ’60s Marx was best known to Englishmen — the only people who remembered him — merely as an anti-Russian. When France and Austria went to war in 1859, Marx supported Austria since it was a powerful counterweight to the power of Russia. And in 1877, during the brief war between Turkey and Russia, Marx once again called on the workers’ movement to support Russia’s foe.

In wars not involving Russia, Marx applied the same principle of supporting whichever country or bloc would promote the development of capitalism and, in turn, the strengthening of the working class, the gravediggers of capitalist society. During the American Civil War, Marx enthusiastically supported the cause of the modern, capitalistic Northern states over the semi-feudal South, which was antagonistic to industrial development. This view was so pervasive within the workers’ movement that many of Marx’s comrades found themselves fighting for the North. (Ironically, American conservatives point to the presence of “Marxists” within the ranks of the Union army as evidence of the federal government’s “socialism,” even though the reason they fought for the North was precisely because only under Northern leadership could the whole of American experience real capitalist development!) Even in British cities where workers were turned out of the factories for lack of cotton from America — prevented from reaching Britain by a powerful Union blockade of Southern ports — there was nearly unanimous support for the Union war effort. Finally, during Prussia’s war with France in 1870, Marx and Engels supported Prussia since its victory would (and did) unite Germany and open the way for unified capitalist development in Germany, thus enabling the workers’ movement there to move on make more important demands, and because Prussian victory would topple Napoleon III’s regime (and did). However, once the Prussians had met their objectives and continued to press onwards into France, Marx quickly swung to the side of France — not out of a moral abhorrence for wars of conquest, but to prevent a Franco-Russian alliance that would (and in fact did) arise from a humiliating French defeat and harsh German peace terms.

Contrast this method, which saw Marx supporting powerful states against weaker ones and national oppressors against national unification movements (e.g., Austria, the oppressor of Italy, in its war against France), to the method employed by, say, the Trotskyists, who speak endlessly of the “rights” of “smaller countries,” or worse yet, of the need to respect the sovereignty of (capitalist) nations, or any of a dozen mystifications which amount to taking the side of one group of capitalists against another group of capitalists, without ever considering the interests of the working class (which, today, has no interest in supporting any war since, as capitalism already rules the entire globe, no war can serve a progressive role).

The last third or so of the book focus on Marx’s dispute with the anarchists. These chapters reiterate and amplify all of the wonderful work the authors did to demonstrate the integrity of Marx and the process by which he came to possess his political opinions. Equally important, they show that “official Anarchism” is an ideology that has no place within the workers’ movement, and that the who anarchists have been great fighters for our class — of which there were and are many — have only become such by breaking with the noxious ideas of Bakunin.

To better understand Marx’s dispute with the anarchists, we must first get a bit of history of anarchism — particularly the personal history of its greatest 19th century proponent, Bakunin — as well as the history of the Workingman’s International, which was to be the battleground between the “Marxists” and the anarchists.

Bakunin was not the first modern to be called an anarchist — that distinction belongs to Proudhon — but he was arguably the first whose anarchism was really at odds with the established capitalist society. (Whether Bakunin’s vision was incompatible with capitalism in general is debatable.) Born to nobility, Bakunin quickly renounced his heritage. Already by the 1840s he was well-known to Europeans as a voice of opposition to Tzarist absolutism. He was first sentenced to death by Saxony for his part in the 1849 risings in Dresden. He was sentenced to death for a second time by Austria, whereupon he was handed over to the Russians where he served five years in solitary confinement.

Marx and Bakunin were already familiar with each other by 1844. The two evidently respected each other’s abilities and tread a common path, but there conceptions of revolution were inimical. Bakunin saw revolution as a great sweeping away while Marx, of course, saw it as growing from the foundations of the present society. Accordingly, Bakunin criticized Marx for teaching “paralyzing theory” to the working class in 1848.

The next misstep was Marx’s. In 1848, Marx printed a letter from Polish radicals charging that Bakunin was a Russian agent. Marx was acting in good faith, but was duped. He publicly retracted the letter later, and subsequently defended Bakunin when a similar smear was made a few years later, but the damage was already done. Still, Marx and Bakunin both were men who would not let personal disputes stand in the way of working for a common cause. Unfortunately, the two — and their factions — did not have a common cause, or at least a common vision of how that cause was best served.

The International Workingmen’s Association — afterward known as the First International — was a mass organization founded in the middle of the 1860s which brought together a wide spectrum of groups within the workers’ movement. English members saw the organization as tool to aid strikes by discouraging foreign scabbing. On the other hand, the French saw it as a way of furthering reforms beneficial to artisans and went so far as to repudiate strikes! Because its goal was to organize all workers, this incoherence was to be expected. By 1869, the First International had 800,000 members on every inhabited continent.

Marx joined in 1864 though he realized its composition and leadership were not ideal. Even so, he felt that its ties to the working class were real enough that he was obligated to join. He was soon elected to the first committee, for which he wrote the inaugural address, which reads thusly: “The capture of political power has become the great duty of the working class.” Marx quickly became leading member and quite busy. He worked to keep disparate factions united, even though he privately had many criticisms of them. At the same time, he wouldn’t budge on the class character of the international — he was happy to see Mazzini and other Italians forced out after their attempts to dilute the class character of the international by promoting nationalistic schemes.

Like Marx, Bakunin was an early member of the First International. However, unlike Marx, Bakunin rejected the idea that the proletariat was capable of organizing and acting as a class. Instead, like the Leninists that modern anarchists denigrate while venerating Bakunin, Bakunin was firmly attached to the notion that the revolution would be effected by heroic actions, undertaken by shadowy conspiracies, that would ignite the revolution. Accordingly, Bakunin told Marx he would agitate for international in Italy, but upon arrival promptly founded a society society. Meuron, who joined Bakunin’s next secret society in Switzerland, saw these conspiracies as a means for protecting the International from ambitious, scheming men who craved power and success more than revolution. As the authors point out, Meuron like Bakunin could not conceive of a large, public organization organized in a way that wasn’t a “cockpit” for ambitious men. Like the anarchist caricature of Lenin, Bakunin and his compatriots had an incredibly low regard for the ability of the working class to organize itself. In this they were truly the first vanguardists.

The best example of the elitist, anti-proletarian attitudes of the anarchists is provided by Bakunin’s association with a young Russian emigre named Nechaiev. An extract from Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen’s book detailing this affair will ably tell this story and give readers a delightful taste of how the authors write.

The Nechaiev affair plays such an important role in the history of the International, or rather in the history of its decline, that it deserves to be recounted at some length.

Nechaiev was the son of a servant in a small Russian provincial town. He put to such good use the few free hours that his work as a messenger in the office of a factory left him that he succeeded in passing his examinations as an elementary school teacher. He starved and scraped until he had saved enough money to go to St. Petersburg, where he had himself entered as an external student at the university. In his first winter term, in 1868, he entered the student movement, in which his energy and the radical nature of his views soon earned him prominence. But that was not enough for him. He wanted to be foremost, and in order to enhance his reputation as a revolutionary he started inventing stories of his adventurous past. First he said he had been a prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Then he added an account of his daring escape. The majority of his listeners accepted all this unquestioningly, and were filled with indignation at the stories he told of his treatment by the prison warders, and a students’ meeting was actually called and a delegation actually approached the university authorities. Nevertheless there were some who doubted. Some of the details of Nechaiev’s prison experiences sounded improbable to the more experienced among his colleagues, and the officials declared that Nechaiev had never been under arrest.

Before this fact had been established, however, Nechaiev illegally went abroad to make contact with the Russian émigré leaders. He reached Geneva in March, 1869, and made the acquaintance of Herzen and Ogarev, the patriarchs of the ‘emigration,’ as well as of the representatives of the younger generation of refugees. He made an extraordinary impression upon them all. Herzen, who had grown old, tired and sceptical, said that Nechaiev went to one’s head like absinthe. But the young student was not satisfied with praise and honour. He added details of his own. He said that Russia was on the eve of a tremendous revolutionary outbreak, which was being prepared by a widespread secret society. Of this society he was a delegate. And he repeated the story of his imprisonment and flight. In Geneva also there were a few people who refused to be taken in so easily. A number of émigrés had been prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress themselves and knew how impossible it was to escape, and letters came from St. Petersburg from people who ought to have known, saying that the secret society did not exist, or at any rate gave not the slightest sign of its existence. But those who regarded Nechaiev with suspicion belonged to groups who were hostile to Bakunin. It was these who not long afterwards formed a ‘Russian section’ of the International and made Marx their representative on the General Council. This, however, cannot have been the deciding factor in causing Bakunin to ignore their warnings. He knew the Peter and Paul Fortress himself and knew–could not possibly have helped knowing–that Nechaiev was a liar. But what did it matter? Lies could be useful in revolutionising the slothful, and after all this Nechaiev was a marvellous fellow. Bakunin wrote a regular panegyric about him in a letter to Guillaume, describing him as ‘one of those young fanatics who hesitate at nothing and fear nothing and recognise as a principle that many are bound to perish at the hands of the Government but that one must not rest an instant until the people has risen. They are admirable, these young fanatics–believers without God and heroes without phrases!’ Bakunin and Nechaiev became fast friends.

Bakunin did not apparently formally admit Nechaiev to his secret society. The idea of his association with Nechaiev being surveyed by its otherwise fully initiated members was an uncomfortable one to him. The Bakunin—Nechaiev society was a quite intimate super-secret society, such as the old conspirator loved. Its object was the revolutionising of Russia.

In the spring and summer of 1869 Bakunin wrote as many as ten pamphlets and proclamations, and Nechaiev had them printed. Among them was the subsequently famous Revolutionary Catechism, which was intended to be a reply to the question of what were the best ways and means of hastening the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. The answer was to be found by the consistent application of two principles. The first was ‘the end justifies the means’ and the second was ‘the worse, the better.’ Everything–and by that Bakunin meant every thing without any exception whatever–that promoted the revolution was permissible and everything that hindered it was a crime. The revolutionary must concentrate on one aim, i.e. destruction. ‘There is only one science for the revolutionary, the science of destruction. Day and night he must have but one thing before his eyes–destruction.’ That was Bakunin’s own summary of the duties of a revolutionary. Within the revolutionary organisation the strictest centralisation and the most rigorous discipline must prevail, and the members must be completely subordinate to their leaders. The object of this organisation was ‘to use all the means in its power to intensify and spread suffering and evil, which must end by driving the people to revolt.’ The Catechism even defended terrorism, which, however, it did not recommend against the worst tyrants, because the longer such tyrants were allowed to rage the better it would be for the revolutionising of the people.

Towards the end of the summer of 1869 Nechaiev travelled illegally to Russia, taking with him a mandate from the ‘Central Committee of the European Revolutionary Alliance,’written and signed by Bakunin, recommending him as a reliable delegate of that organisation. Bakunin had actually had a special stamp prepared, with the words: ‘Office of the foreign agents of the Russian revolutionary society Narodnaia Rasprava.’

Nechaiev remained in Russia for more than three months. He succeeded in forming an organisation based on, or alleged to be based on, the Revolutionary Catechism. Revolutionary-minded young men were not so very difficult to find, and his letter of recommendation, signed by Bakunin, whose name was universally honoured, earned him the greatest respect. He chose Moscow as his centre and it was not long before he had gathered a group about him. Had he assigned it practical aims and objects, its fate would have been the usual fate of such organisations in Russia. It would eventually have been discovered and dissolved by the police, but two or three new groups would have arisen to take its place. To Nechaiev,however, that would have appeared an idle pastime. He wished his followers to believe that there was a secret revolutionary committee which they must unconditionally obey, and,true to the injunctions of the Catechism, he used every means that tended to serve his aim. Once, for instance, he persuaded an officer he knew to pose as a supervisory party official sent from the secret headquarters on special duty. That ruse might pass at a pinch. But Nechaiev did not shrink from even cruder mystifications, so crude that he ended by perplexing some of his own followers. Finally a student named Ivanov announced to other members of the group that he no longer believed in the existence of any committee, that Nechaiev was lying to them and that he wished to have nothing more to do with him. Nechaiev decided that the ‘criminal’ must die. He succeeded in persuading the rest of his followers that Ivanov was a traitor and that only his death could save them. On November 29, 1869, they lured Ivanov to a dark corner of a park and murdered him. Ivanov defended himself desperately and bit Nechaiev’s hand to the bone as he was strangling him with a shawl. Nechaiev bore the scar for the rest of his life! The murderers were soon discovered and arrested, and only Nechaiev succeeded in escaping abroad.

Detailed reports of Ivanov’s murder appeared in the papers, and the crime was remembered for many years. It armed the Russian revolutionaries against Nechaiev-like methods.

Bakunin knew the whole story in detail, but it only enhanced Nechaiev’s reputation in his eyes. On learning that Nechaiev had arrived in Geneva–he was living at Locarno at the time–he leapt so high with joy that he nearly broke his old skull against the ceiling, as he wrote to Ogarev. He invited Nechaiev to Locarno, looked after him and was his friend as before. ‘This is the kind of organisation of which I have dreamed and of which I go on dreaming,’ he wrote to his friend Richard. ‘It is the kind of organisation I wanted to see among you.’ At this time Bakunin had already started his struggle against the General Council of the International on the ground of its ‘dictatorial arrogance.’

To the same period there belongs the incident which, apart from the other reasons, led directly to Bakunin’s expulsion from the International. His financial position had always been precarious, but in the autumn of 1869 he was in particularly desperate straits. Through some Russian students who were followers of his he was put into touch with a publisher who offered him 1,200 roubles–far more than the author himself ever got for it–for translating Marx’s Capital. Bakunin accepted the offer gladly and received an advance of 300 roubles. He did not show himself to be in any hurry to complete the task, however, and three months later he had only done sufficient to fill thirty-two printed pages. He readily let himself be convinced by Nechaiev that he had more important matters to fill his time and that he belonged to the revolution and must live for the revolution only. So he laid the work aside and gave Nechaiev full authority to come to an arrangement with the publisher. Nechaiev set about this task in an inimitable manner. It was impossible for Bakunin to communicate directly with the publisher himself on account of the police, and a student named Liubavin had undertaken to do so on his behalf. The contract had been formally made out in Liubavin’s name and in the publisher’s books Liubavin was nominally liable for the 300 roubles’ advance. One day Liubavin received a letter bearing the stamp of Nechaiev’s organisation. Its most remarkable passages are quoted below:

‘DEAR SIR, –On behalf of the bureau I have the honour to write to you as follows. We have received from the committee in Russia a letter which refers among other things to you. It states: “It has come to the knowledge of the committee that a few young gentlemen, dilettanti Liberals, living abroad, are beginning to exploit the knowledge and energy of certain people known to us, taking advantage of their hard-pressed financial straits. Valuable personalities, forced by these dilettante exploiters to work for a day-labourer’s hire, are thereby deprived of the possibility of working for the liberation of mankind. Thus a certain Liubavin has given the celebrated Bakunin the task of translating a book by Marx, and, exploiting his financial distress just like a real exploiting bourgeois, has given him an advance and now insists on the work being completed. Bakunin, delivered in this manner to the mercy of young Liubavin, who is so concerned about the enlightenment of Russia, but only by the work of others, is prevented from being able to work for the supremely important cause of the Russian people, for which he is indispensable. How the behaviour of Liubavin and others like him conflicts with the cause of the freedom of the people and how contemptible, bourgeois and immoral their behaviour is compared with that of those they employ and how little it differs from the practices of the police must be clear to every decent person.

‘”The committee entrusts the foreign bureau to inform Liubavin:

‘”(1) That if he and parasites like him are of the opinion that the translation of Capital is so important to the Russian people at the present time they should pay for it out of their own pocket instead of studying chemistry and preparing themselves for fat professorships in the pay of the state…

‘”(2) It must immediately inform Bakunin that in accordance with the decision of the Russian revolutionary committee he is exempt from any moral duty to continue with the work of translation…”

‘Convinced that you understand, we request you, dear sir, not to place us in the unpleasant position of being compelled to resort to less civilised measures…

‘AMSKIY,
‘Secretary to the Bureau.’

Bakunin subsequently stoutly denied that he knew anything of the contents of this letter, and there is every reason to believe him. But when Liubavin sent him a letter indignantly protesting against these threats, Bakunin, instead of talking to Nechaiev about it, for he must have guessed who was behind it all, took occasion to be offended at Liubavin’s intelligibly not very courteous tone. He wrote to Liubavin that he proposed to sever relations with him, that he would not continue the translation and would repay the advance. He never did repay the advance and must have known that he would never be able to do so.

In Nechaiev’s opinion this species of blackmail was not only permissible to a revolutionary but was actually demanded of him. At every opportunity he threatened denunciation or the use of force, and stole his opponents’ letters in order to be able to compromise them with the police. He shrank at nothing. He caused revolutionary appeals to be sent to one of his greatest enemies, a student named Negrescul, who was being kept under police observation, and, as Nechaiev expected, the material fell into police hands and Negrescul was arrested. He succumbed to tuberculosis in prison and died a few months after his release.

Bakunin knew what Nechaiev was capable of, as many others did by this time, but he remained loyal to him as before. Not till Nechaiev actually started threatening people whom Bakunin held dear–Herzen’s daughter for instance–did Bakunin raise his voice against him. The final impulse that caused Bakunin to break with him seems to have been provided by Nechaiev’s plan to form a gang for the specific purpose of robbing wealthy tourists in Switzerland. He even tried to force Ogarev’s stepson to join him, whereupon Bakunin protested. At that Nechaiev appropriated a strongbox of Bakunin’s containing correspondence, secret papers, and the statutes of his revolutionary organisations–including the original manuscript of the Catechism–and threatened Bakunin with publication should he take any steps against him.

That was the end of Bakunin’s friendship with Nechaiev. Bakunin was horrified at the practical conclusions that Nechaiev drew from principles that he himself had helped him to formulate. The story that Nechaiev told some of his acquaintances, namely, that when he first came abroad he was an ‘unspoiled, good and honourable youth’ and that it was Bakunin who corrupted him, was, of course, not true. Nechaiev had started his mystifications in Russia before his first journey abroad. But Bakunin not only made no attempt to counter-act Nechaiev’s inclinations, he actually encouraged them by giving them a kind of theoretical foundation. Their quarrel is not sufficient to obliterate the fact that Nechaiev was very strongly influenced by Bakunin and that it was Bakunin himself who evolved the theory by which all things were permitted.

Not much more needs be said about Nechaiev’s further career. He lived two more years abroad, First in London, then in Paris and finally in Switzerland. He published more revolutionary literature and threatened and blackmailed as before. Bakunin refused to have anything more to do with him and was so embittered against him that he would have liked to denounce him as a ‘homicidal maniac, a dangerous and criminal lunatic, whom it was necessary to avoid.’ Nechaiev was finally betrayed by a Polish émigré in the service of the police. He was arrested in Zurich in the middle of August, 1872, and repatriated to Russia as a common criminal. On January 8, 1873, he was condemned to twenty years’ hard labour in the mines of Siberia. He was not sent to Siberia, however, but confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Such was his power over people that he actually succeeded in winning over the soldiers who kept guard over him, and they helped to put him in touch with revolutionaries outside. He devised a plan for seizing the fortress during a visit of the Tsar’s, but he was betrayed by one of his fellow-prisoners and transferred to severe solitary confinement. He died of scurvy on November 21, 1882.

Faced with the obvious association of the bandit Nechaiev and Bakunin, a leading figure in the International, as well as the Anarchists’ unwillingness to put the interests of the working class, though it often meant supporting the development of capitalism, before insurrectionist conspiracies, Marx’s decision that it was necessary to purge the international of Bakunin. The authors carefully defend this.

In many ways, this was a fight Bakunin himself had begun a few years before. In 1869 Bakunin and his followers tried to have the First International’s council transferred from London (where Marx lived) to Geneva (where the anarchists usually resided). But by 1871 or ’72 a tremendous waning of the International’s strength prepared the way for bitterest infighting. Jacobin emigres from France revived Bakunin’s old claims that Marx was authoritarian, a pan-German, or, even more unscrupulously, they revived the bourgeois press’s claims that he swindled workers or was a secret servant of Bismarck. The English section, increasingly conservative, felt entitled to their own regional council, whereas previously the General Council, on which Marx served, and which was based in London, had served this role. Finally, Bakunin and some of his followers were incensed at the growing importance of Germany within the European workers’ movement. Seizing upon all of these tensions, Bakunin — who had already declared his intention of conquering the International by taking down Marx’s weaker factional supporters — decided to use local autonomy as his rallying cry. Marx and the General Council, on the other hand, sought more centralization, in order to combat Bakunin’s incessant plotting and the increasingly fractious nature of the International.

After much wrangling, a congress of the 1st International decided to expand the purview of the General Council, to move the General Council to New York (where Marx would not be able to follow it, which meant this measure was heartily supported by the Anarchists — and which demonstrates, for the umpteenth time, that Marx was no power-seeking authoritarian), and, in the end, to expel Bakunin. Marx’s faction received support from the Germans, Swiss, and Americans (who were mostly German emigres), while Bakunin’s faction received its support from the Spanish, French, and the conservative English, whose demands for local autonomy meshed up with the hypocritical but tactical stance of Bakunin (who, as we saw before, was not hostile to the most intense centralization, even going so far as to invent centralized bodies that did not exist).

Once again demonstrating a keen understanding of the personal and political, Maenchen-Helfen and Nicolaievsky suggest that Bakunin’s contempt for the ability of the working class to self-organized stemmed from his focus on the periphery of capitalist Europe: “the differences between Marx and Bakunin boiled down to the differences between the historical tasks necessarily confronting the proletariat in countries in which capitalism was fully developed and the illusions to which the semi- and demi-semi-proletarians living in countries in which capitalist development was only just beginning were equally necessarily subject.”

In the end, then, our brave authors forever smash the notion that Marx unfairly prosecuted Bakunin or that some personal agenda was at work in their dispute. They also clearly demonstrate that Marx was deeply committed to fighting alongside the working class, rather than working outside of it as a conspirator who regarded the class as an inert powder-keg waiting for its spark. Perhaps the best summary of Marx’s role in the workers’ movement is offered by a passage of Engels’s which the authors cite:

By his theoretical and practical work Marx has acquired such a position that the best people in the workers’ movements in the various countries have full confidence in him. They turn to him for advice at decisive moments, and generally find that his advice is best. … but any attempt to influence people against their will would only do harm and destroy the old trust that survives from the time of the International. In any case, we have too much experience in revolutionary matters to attempt anything of the sort. It is not Marx who imposes his opinions, much less his will, upon the people, but it is they who come to him.

Under the weight of anarchist criticisms, one might dismiss this as vapid hagiography from a committed friend. Thanks to the work of Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, we instead see that this portrayal is true. In reminding us of Marx’s respect for the capacity of the working class, as well as his dedication to basing his the interests of the working class rather than abstract principles or morality and justice, their work is not only an antidote to Official Anarchism’s distortion of history, but also to the lies of Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and all the other phony followers of Marx.

Karl Marx: Man and Fighter by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen is available for free download at archive.org.

As the worldwide economic crisis exploded onto the front pages in late 2008, Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster responded by reissuing five essays that had originally appeared in the pages of Monthly Review in the few years prior to 2008. The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences collects these essays and adds an introduction and a concluding chapter written specifically for this volume.

Given that most chapters originally appeared as self-contained essays written months apart from each other, it’s no surprise that each one covers the same ground. Every essay begins with the authors trotting out their intellectual predecessors, namely Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Fred Magdoff’s father Harry Magdoff. (This isn’t just filial piety – Sweezy and Magdoff have been sounding the alarm about capitalism’s turn to finance and debt since the 70s. Still, citing your sources and noting their prescience comes to look like hagiography when you do it every twenty pages.) Magdoff and Foster then invariably turn to explaining the causes of the crisis. Here especially the format of the book fails readers, since the authors chart the genealogy of the crisis six times in brief rather than once in depth. To prove their arguments, each article then throws a few graphs at you. Most essays then conclude with a reminder of the intractability of the crisis facing capitalism. Thus, while each chapter is individually satisfying – if short – the book as a whole is redundant, with each chapter reading like a variation of the one preceding it. This might compromise the quality of the book as a product or piece of literature, but this tedious exposition doesn’t diminish the worth of the authors’ thesis.

For Magdoff and Foster, the ultimate cause of the crisis can be summarized as follows: in the modern era of capitalism, the economy is dominated by monopolies. Under monopoly capitalism, price warfare has disappeared and monopolies more or less tacitly agree to fixed prices, with the actual competition taking place in advertising and the “sales effort.” Consequently, greater profits are realized. In fact, the profits are too great to reinvest back into production because supply already exceeds demand and the infrastructure of the modern economy has already been developed. When such a situation arises, the economy is said to be “stagnant.” The world avoided an earlier onset of stagnation thanks to the advent of the automobile and the new markets it entailed, the necessity of rebuilding a world literally destroyed by the Second World War (what better way to increase demand?). Moreover, the initial profitability of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sectors was a counterweight to any tendencies towards stagnation. But this profitability of the FIRE sector is a double-edged sword. The paper claims of the FIRE sector are meant to reflect real investment in factories and the like, but as the real economy hit a brick wall in the 70s there were even fewer investment opportunities in the real economy. This led bourgeoisie to turn the FIRE sector more greedily than ever – but it also meant that the FIRE sector would have to be divorced from the stagnant real economy if it was to remain profitable. Now any lack of confidence in the soundness of the foundations of the FIRE sector could lead to economic disaster. Each time the FIRE sector’s bubble threatened to burst, the bourgeoisie averted disaster by borrowing more and increasing profitability by holding down the wages of workers, who were in turn themselves forced to turn to debt as the only means of maintaining their standard of living (which, of course, was quite profitable for the FIRE sector). But by 2007 and 2008, led by the collapse of the mortgage bubble, the whole rotten edifice finally collapsed.

To back up this history, Magdoff and Foster offer some convincing proofs of capitalism’s increasing reliance on the FIRE sector. For instance, they point out that the share of financial profit as part of the the total domestic profit rose from about 16% in 1965 to almost 40% in 2007. Similarly, the ratio of total debt to GDP went from about 1.5 to 1 in 1970 to 47.7 to 13.8 in 2007. In the financial sector alone, this ratio went from 0.1 to 1 to 16.0 to 13.8, which was the largest increase of any sector. Household debt increased from 40% of the GDP in 1960 to 100% of the GDP in 2007, in large part due to the fact that wages in real dollars haven’t risen since 1972 while consumer spending has increased greatly. (This disparity between debt and income led to the mortgage crisis.) Finally, the precariousness of this situation is demonstrated by the fact that corporations held 600 billion dollars in savings, but total investment between 1986 and 2006 only once reached the average of the years 1960-1979. Clearly, the tremendous profits of these corporations don’t correspond to anything in the ‘real’ economy.

Now, given the fact that the laws of capitalist production have forced the bourgeoisie to turn to debt, Magdoff and Foster reject the idea that banking reforms and the like can accomplish anything. Against the whining liberals who belief that all that’s necessary is to force the capitalists back to investing in the “real” economy, Magdoff and Foster argue that the only reason capital turned to finance in the first place is because investment in the ‘real economy’ was untenable. No legislation can change this.

In looking at speculation and the reliance on debt as the effects of a deeper crisis in capitalist production, rather than the causes of the crisis itself, the authors join the ranks of the Marxists (and others) who point to inescapable contradictions in the base of the capitalist economy (e.g., tendency for the rate of profit to fall, overproduction, or the loss of extra-capitalist markets, etc.) as the root causes of the periodic crises that throw hundreds of millions of workers into ever-increasing misery.

The Crisis of Monthly Review’s Conception of Capitalism

In passing, it’s worthwhile to point out what I see as the most unsatisfactory aspects of Magdoff and Foster’s explanation: the stagnation thesis. This is a concept that the authors acknowledge came from Keynes and his student Hasen, so to cast doubt on it doesn’t mean to cast doubt on the work of Marx in the 1800s or those who built on the foundations of his piercing investigations of political economy.

Stagnation, as Magdoff and Foster explain it, appears to be a special kind of overproduction. At any rate, stagnation doesn’t bankrupt the capitalists as overproduction did in the past; on the contrary, it merely deprive him of the opportunity to reinvest his capital (which, because of the supposed monopolistic nature of capitalism, is quite large indeed). That this is a problem according to the stagnation thesis demonstrates (at least to my mind) the problematic nature of the stagnation thesis. According to Marx and those who have followed him in investigating capitalism objectively, competition compels capitalists to return their profits to the sphere of production as they continuously upgrade their production capabilities and so on, in order to sell lower than their competitors. But according to the stagnation thesis, competition of this kind is a thing of the past. Why, then, does it matter if capitalists cannot invest their money back into production? Why wouldn’t they be content to consume these profits unproductively (as we well know they can)? What, other than greed, compels them to increase their capital?

Now, it may be that my understanding of capitalism is wrong and this isn’t an issue; and it may be the case that Baran and Sweezy and their successors explain this in their other works. But it also appears to be the case that Sweezy and Baran had an ulterior motive for the stagnation thesis: to argue that “capitalism” was no longer able to develop the productive forces of society, while third world “socialism” was, as evidenced by the great industrial advancements in Russia, China, and so on. Whatever the statistical merits of this argument, it missed the point that economic development is the prerequisite of socialism, not its goal. The very fact that these regimes were just then imposing, on a greatly accelerated scale, the same drive towards wage labor that the west experienced in the 1700s and 1800s was testament to their capitalist character. The forced relocation of Romanian peasants to industrial cities, the Chinese attempt to modernize overnight with the “Great Leap Forward,” and the Soviet cult of Stakhanovism are all examples of this developmentalist, capitalist character. This association of Socialism with economic development was the essence of the Stalinist counter-revolution, and explains why “Marxism-Leninism” (i.e, Stalinism) was a force to be reckoned with, if not a prevailing power, in virtually every underdeveloped country in the world. For a more serious exposition of this argument, specifically as it relates to the work of Baran and Sweezy, see The Exploits of University Marxism. For a more general consideration of the misidentification of Marxism with developmentalist state capitalism from the perspective of several bourgeois authors (even some of them recognized that Stalinism had nothing to do with Marxism!), see The Marxian Revolutionary Idea by Tucker, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? by von Laue, and Daniels’s introduction to A Documentary History of Communism.

At any rate, it seems that the stagnation theory at best is inessential to the core of Magdoff and Foster’s work, which demonstrates the increasing importance of debt in the capitalist economy – something one can explain by factors other than overproduction (such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall or overproduction).

The Crisis of Monthly Review’s Politics

Given that Foster and Magdoff see the crisis as a symptom of capitalism’s contradictions rather than the poisonous fruit of the irresponsible behavior of a few bankers, it seems logical that Foster and Magdoff would reject any suggestions that reforms can overcome this crisis.

Not so.

While the authors do occasionally point to a vaguely-defined socialism here and there as the only solution, elsewhere they claim that reforms – if big enough – actually can overcome capitalism’s internal contradictions. In effect, the authors fall prey to the delusion that “reform is revolution, and vice versa.”

In fact, Magdoff and Foster explicitly state that the working class can end the crisis while working “within in the system”:

The only thing that conceivably done within the system to stabilize the economy, Sweezy stated at Harvard in 1994, would be greatly to expand civilian state spending in ways that genuinely benefited the population; and to carry out a truly radical redistribution of income and wealth of the kind “that Joseph Kennedy, the founder of the Kennedy dynasty” referred to “in the middle of the Great Depression, when things looked bleakest” – indicating “that he would gladly give up half of his fortune if he could be sure the other half would be safe.” Neither of these radical proposals of course is on the agenda at present, and the nature of capitalism is such that if a crisis ever led to their adoption, every attempt would be made by the vested interest to repeal such measures the moment the crisis had passed.

In praising this explicitly conservative call to reform, Magdoff and Foster not only abandon Marx and Engels’s time-tested warning that “a part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society” but also the appearance of being able to comprehend the simplest of sentences. Here we have a nadir in the execrable history of leftism; past generations of leftists naively took bad men at their word; Magdoff, Sweezy, and Foster can’t even do that much!

Now, if the Monthly Review cadre interprets capitalists’ explicit calls to defend the status quo as “radical,” then it’s no surprise that their suggested course of action amounts to pallid reformism. Indeed, our authors insist that we need a “mass social and economic upsurge, such as in the latter half of the 1930s, including the revival of unions and mass social movements of all kinds — using the power for change granted to the people in the Constitution; even going so far as to the threaten the current duopoly of the two-party system.”

Thus, amid such bold prescriptions as “threatening the current duopoly of the two-party system” – what Bolsheviks! – Magdoff and Foster call for a return to the Union building of the 1930s, which was largely a legally mandated, government-imposed response to working class struggle exploding onto the streets in 1933 and 1934. And at the head of this challenge that Magdoff and Foster envision are the union and “social movement” activists who are charged with making “the larger public … see through this deception” of austerity and attacks on wages. Of course, Magdoff and Foster should have known – as we’ve since seen – that the unions can’t be counted on to do anything more than muster up a bit of harsh invective as they blame the crisis on the “greed” and the failings of Wall Street and Congress rather than the immutable laws of capitalist production. Neither can they be counted on to fight back against attacks on wages. Far from it!

Elsewhere, Magdoff and Foster call for “massive class struggle” to increase government spending and unstintingly praise the social spending of the New Deal. However, they themselves point out that civilian government has increased from its New Deal levels: civilian government purchases totaled 13.3% of the GDP in 1939, but from 1960 to 2008 the average was around 13.7%. All of this without even the slightest palliative effects! An even more important objection must be made: even if government spending were to double or triple, capitalism, as a system of production in which value is created by the exploitation of wage labor in the production of commodities, would remain unaffected; and as capitalism would remain regnant, all of the tendencies towards crisis and collapse that are inherent in any economy based on wage labor and commodity production would persist unchanged.

Conclusion

Near the end of the book the authors remind readers that political economy once consisted of “splendid tournaments” in which economists represented different classes struggling for supremacy. Today the bourgeoisie reigns supreme, but economics is still used as a weapon in the fights between different sections of the bourgeoisie and between the bourgeoisie and the working class. If the work of Magdoff and Foster can be likened to participants in such a “splendid tournament,” they should be seen as fighters in a frenzied melee: for every blow the authors strike against the bourgeoisie with their lance of economic analysis, another blow is struck against the working class with their mace of political recommendations. The authors insistence that crises are inherent in the capitalist mode of production is overshadowed by their insistence that class struggle take the form of reinvigorating the bourgeois unions and confining political action to the realm of bourgeois elections. In the end, their economics might open the eyes of the working class, but their politics will never lead the working class to break its chains.

Does this mean we’re off the hook?

Far from it. In his excellent 2004 book The Monster at our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, Mike Davis examines the industrialization of agriculture and many other structural features of capitalism make a catastrophic pandemic almost inevitable in the near future. Such a pandemic could kill as many as a billion people.

To begin with, it has to be pointed out that given enough time and opportunity, nature herself concocts the superviruses that can decimate species. Around 10,000 years ago, however, humans intervened in the process. Our ancestors domesticated animals, crowding together animals and people in a totally new way. Such close contact facilitated the mutation of diseases within animals herds and the eventual mutation and transmission of these diseases to humans. (Thus, European diseases bred in a land of domesticated animals killed tens of millions of Native Americans, whose immune systems developed in a world largely devoid of domestication). Fortunately, for 100 centuries the scale of farming expanded only gradually.

But today, as Davis points capably shows, this relationship between man and farm animal exists on a wholly different scale. Driven by competition and an increased demand for meat in the third world, where proletarianization has forced hundreds off millions off the land and into cities, capitalist firms have implemented the most remarkable centralization of meat production. Gone are the days of the small farm with a few hundred animals. For instance, in Western Arkansas and northern Georgia, more than 1 billion chickens are slaughtered annually, and one swine megafarm in Milford Valley, Utah, reputedly produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles (page 84). Packing together so many animals means diseases have exponentially more chances to mutate, and more chances to gain an ineradicable foothold. So it was that Swine flu evidently originated in a Mexican hog farm operated by Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor.

It’s not only the concentration of farm animals that heralds danger. These animals are transported further and more often than ever before, a practice which expands the radius of potential infection. Increased use of antibiotics and vaccines may also increase selection for hardier strains of viruses and bacteria (page 91). Thus, researchers told Science that swine influenza’s sudden burst of mutational energy has probably been stimulated by parallel changes in herd size, interstate transport of hogs, and vaccination practice (90).

Changes in human population density and transportation habits mirror those of the livestock and poultry used in these giant capitalist enterprises. If the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 100 million people had its origins, at least in part, in the trenches of the Western Front, imagine what diseases might be fostered by the slums of the third world. Slums house (to use the term loosely) a billion of the world’s people, Davis points out. Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, has 571,000 inhabitants per square kilometer; Delhi has a slum with the density of 300,000 per square kilometer; Kibera, a slum of Nairobi, has a density of 200,000 people per square kilometer; and Cite-Soleil, a slum of the now earthquake-flattened Port-Au-Prince, had a density of 180,000 people per square kilometer (page 154). In Hong Kong, SARS possibly spread because of an apartment building’s faulty sewage system; imagine, then, the possibilities for the spread of disease in slums where the sewage systems are not faulty, but non-existent (pages 72-73). (In Dharavi there is one toilet for every 1,400 people.) Ironically, affluence as much as poverty contributes to the transmission of diseases. Corporate scumbags and yuppie travelers flying ’round the world are capable of spreading disease from one continent to another in a matter of hours.

It might be argued that advances in medical science can match step for step the evolution of deadly, pandemic-causing diseases, but on this point Davis has more bad news. First, the pharmaceutical industry has put profits in front of people — the only possibility in capitalism — and virtually abandoned producing vaccines. Davis presents two reasons for this. First, companies have been found liable for the inevitable side effects of their vaccines, so in the 1970s there was a “rush” to get away from vaccines (page 41). Moreover, vaccines and antibiotics just aren’t profitable: “products that actually cure or prevent diseases, like vaccines and antibiotics, are less profitable, so infectious disease has largely become an orphan market. As industry analysts point out, worldwide sales for all vaccines produce less revenue than Pfizer’s income from a single anticholesterol medication.” Thus, while in 1976 there were thirty-seven companies in the U.S. producing flu vaccines, by 2004 there were only two (one of which maintained a criminally unsanitary vaccine production facility) (pages 140, 143). Davis also notes that pharmaceutical companies spend nearly three times as much on marketing as they do on research.

If capitalist medicine offers little help, can we at least rely on the state and its health officials? Again, Davis paints a bleak picture. In the first instance, the countries in which SARS and deadly influenza strains have appeared are quick to deny that there is any problem. This has been especially true of Thailand and China, but even Canada is guilty as well (page 94). Such a response is the only option open to the state, which is really nothing but the defender of national capital; its only course of action is to protect the sales of the local capitalists producing diseased chickens, as well as the capitalists reliant on tourism, even if this means allowing a small outbreak to turn into a full-fledged pandemic (all the better to hide the disease’s origins, after all!). Some governments find ways to use these outbreaks to the advantage of the big capitalists who finance them. In Thailand, for instance, the government forced a chicken culling that devastated small farmers but exempted the largest producers, leaving them free to take over more of the market. Other countries are blase about the dangers of influenza. In the U.S., more money was devoted to abstinence education than to the development of an avian influenza vaccine (page 128). The U.S. government also made it clear that in the event of an avian flu pandemic, it would first distribute Tamiflu to its “imperial legions” occupying Iraq and Afghanistan (page 146). Even more troubling is that the U.S. only ordered two million doses of Tamiflu, rather than the 100 million recommended by experts (pages 144-145). Other states are no better. India, for instance, spends eight times as much of its budget on defense as it does health (page 157). In Africa, fully one million more health workers are needed to ensure even basic care (page 157). And so on, and so on.

These are the main points of Davis’s book. He very capably lays out the case against the current scale of industrial agriculture and states’ inability to confront incipient pandemics, a course of action which would harm the profits of ‘their’ capitalists and draw resources from military endeavors and the other criminal enterprises of the state. Whether the next would-be pandemic fizzles out and fades from memory, as SARS did and now Swine Flu seems destined to do, Davis’s book will remain relevant, for a catastrophic pandemic is virtually assured by the capitalist mode of production. (Though an updated edition touching on the 2009 swine flu outbreak might be useful.)

David Freeman Hawke’s Everyday Life in Early America provides a counterpoint to such a view. This is not a work of special scholarly merit. It was written for popular audiences and is merely a synthesis of the research of many other scholars. However, in addition to being a book I recently finished (the primary reason I’m discussing it), it does an excellent job of providing a look at an American society that was quite different from ours today, which drives home the point that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Hawke begins by describing the world of the Englishmen that came to America. He points out that in many places in 17th century Britain, many farmers still tended land in common. Moreover,

youngsters were taught the medieval notion that what they did reflected first on the family, then rippled out to affect the entire community. Whether they became craftsmen, merchants, or farmers, they knew from youth that no man was an island, that their lives and actions were inextricably involved with the welfare of the community. Town fathers regulated the products that citizens brought to market — judging the quality, the weight, the justness of the price — and no one questioned their right to do so. (This is not to say that cheating did not prevail; ideals seldom flourish in everyday life.) When someone died in a seventeenth-century English village, no one needed an explication of John Donne’s lines, “Do not send to ask for whom the bells toll. It tolls for thee.” (p. 8)

In some parts of America (specifically East Hampton, Long Island) community life persisted in much the same way:

All things considered, the life of the town was corporate to a remarkable degree. The citizens were indeed a body, each one integrated into part of the larger whole. Experience came to them in, and by, and through the group; literally and figuratively, they lived in each other’s presence. Their houses lay huddled together along a single street. Their field-lots were scattered in every direction — two acres here, four acres there, but always among a bevy of neighbors. They accepted common tasks and they shared both good and bad fortune. They worked together, they worshiped together, governed together. (p. 20-21, quoting John Demos)

The “profit motive” that the defenders of capitalism present as innate and eternal was little-known in the North:

there was little innovative, risk-taking behavior; there was no determined pursuit of profit. Indeed, the account books of these farm families indicate that they invariably chose the security of diversified production rather than hire labor to produce more wheat or to specialize in milk production. Economic gain was important to these men and women, yet it was not their dominant value. It was subordinate to (or encompassed by) two other goals: the yearly subsistence and the long-run financial security of the family unit. (p. 42-43, quoting James A. Henretta)

While in other regions, particularly Virginia, community was illusory and a cutthroat spirit prevailed:

The worst sides of English life flourished in a brutal, self-centered society that lacked communal bonds of any kind. Manners and morals collapsed. During the “starving time,” some “fed on the corpses of dead men, and one who had gotten insatiable, out of custom to that food, could not be restrained until such time as he was executed for it.” Excessive drinking prevailed. Community cooperation and restraints found in the village vanished. Every man looked out for himself. In the winter of 1631-1632, one entrepreneur collected two thousand bushels of corn in Virginia and sold them to New Englanders while his brethren at home wanted for food. The ideal of the commonwealth, “in which the interest of ever part would be harmoniously subordinated to the larger interest of the whole society,” never appeared. (p. 21)

The community ideal wasn’t entirely abandoned, however. Virginia tried four times to hold down ‘the excessive and immoderate prices exacted by diverse, avaricious … practitioners in psychic and surgery,’ but with little success. (p. 84) Moreover,

most communities tried to impose restraints on the miller. His monopoly usually had a time limit on it which might not be renewed if his performance failed to satisfy the neighborhood. A contract usually restricted charges to customers. The gristmill, in short, was treated as a public utility. The aim was to “adjust private enterprise to community ends.” (p. 147)

Attitudes toward religion also varied by region. To say that early white America was a Christian land may be a stretch:

A pious visitor toward the end of the century found “the lives of the planters in Maryland and Virginia are very godless and profane.” The trend that had set in there soon became fixed in most colonies. “Sunday is very badly kept,” said a visitor to Pennsylvania, “especially in the rural districts, where most country folk pay little attention to it.” (p. 90)

New England was more devout, but their Christianity was quite different from the conservative evangelicalism of today. Their take on marriage might be called progressive in modern parlance: New England departed radially from English custom. The Congregationalists held that nothing in the Bible designated marriage as a religious rite–even pagans got married–and they made it a civil affair officiated by a magistrate. (p. 93)

All in all, Hawke’s little volume does an admirable job of explaining the complexity and variety of lifeways in early British North America. Everyone should be able to find a topic of interest, whether it is his discussion of early American furniture or his comments on linguistic differences, but to me its greatest worth is in its demonstration that society and “human nature” are very much malleable. If America today is indeed marked by hyper-individualism and the complete atomization of individual, Hawke shows that this was not always the case. Those of us hoping for a better future can take heart in that.

Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the antecedents, and the culmination. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant. Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all right, all correct – he hadn’t such advantages – but let us have hard-headed, solid-fisted people – the education that made him won’t do for everybody, he knows well.

At the end, of course, it’s revealed that Bounderby’s not a self-made man at all. This is a hypocrisy Dickens returns to time and time again in the work:

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don’t you go and do it?

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ Dickens had no trouble recognizing this:

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.

and

It must be admitted that he allowed her [his indigent mother] half a pound of tea a year, which was weak in him: first, because all gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient, and secondly, because his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it for as much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of man – not a part of man’s duty, but the whole.

But for all of Dicken’s clearsighted criticism of 19th century capitalism, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is another 1854 novel that is more relevant to us in these years of capitalist crisis (it’s also an excellent BBC miniseries — which you can watch online with Netflix if you’re a subscriber). There’s none of the caricaturing as in Hard Times, but this works to the advantage of Gaskell’s story; the character of John Thornton is an affirmation of one of the central tenets of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, which is that the imminent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him (Marx, Capital.) Thornton is a stern but decent factory owner whose business is on the verge of going under. On the one hand, he’s moved to mercilessly exploit his workers and quash their attempts to unionize, and on the other his capitalist cronies are constantly encouraging him — against his better judgement — to survive the crisis by speculation. Sound familiar? It’s the story of the last 40 years. But lest we think that Gaskell and Dickens wrote timeless works, it’s important to remember that both were brilliant precisely because they saw what was new and horrible in capitalism, a social formation that was new to the world in the 19th century. If subsequent writers haven’t dealt with capitalism so clearly, it is because they lived in a world that has known nothing else. Dickens, Gaskell and a host of 19th century writers remind us that capitalism is not ageless. If the working class can rise to its historic task, it won’t be immortal either.