Even those who disagree with Marx’s grand theories will admire the depth and sophistication of his political journalistic writings – especially those dealing with Russia and the non-European world. Some may even find in them a helpful introduction to the challenges of the 21st century.
— Shlomo Avineri, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Spencer Leonard’s two-volume collections of Karl Marx’s journalism, Marx and Engels on Bonapartism: Selected Journalism, 1851-59 and Marx and Engels on Imperialism: Selected Journalism, 1856-62 are essential works, both a major editorial and scholarly achievement for anyone interested in the history of socialism. He has given us here no mere edited volume; to a degree, Marx’s “ephemeral works,” can be found, but Leonard does more than gather them. As Karly Kautsky puts it in an essay republished her in an appendix to volume I, these works of journalism with messy questions of authorship and editorial meddling, have been treated as mere historical or “academic curiosity”—as Leonard himself puts it, they are not unknown but “poorly served and ill-digested.” He brilliantly places them in context and explains their monumental significance and outlines why they have been ignored by historians and activists alike, focusing in particular in his introduction to volume two their reception—or rather their non-reception—during the late 20th century, which witnessed first the flowering of anticolonial movements both in the western left and their struggle to align Marx’s theoretical works to their opposition to western imperialism.
Marx’s journalism addressed what was at stake, in real time, in the relationship between the maturation of the liberal capitalist order in the West as it pursued a global economic empire, and the development of class antagonism at home as the growth of capital upset liberalism’s core belief in the peaceful coexistence between individual liberty and freedom, both economic and political, and human equality—a society without fixed ranks and hierarchies.
In Marx’s “ephemeral writings,” he faces squarely the historical kinship of liberalism and socialism. Both emerged from grandly systematic Enlightenment social science that proclaimed the discoverability of universal economic, political, and social laws that point toward a theoretically inevitable future absent human agency. As a journalist, Marx shared with his contemporary fellow journalist Walt Whitman who looked out upon the human landscape, “both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.” To classical liberals, the market was a organized human nature as a peaceful alternative to violence and coercion, and unleash without distinction individual ingenuity, drive, and aspiration. To Marx, liberalism concealed through ideology the way in which markets, property, and the rule of law privileged capital and the class that controlled it, the bourgeoisie. In his later theoretical works, Marx outlined the way in which liberal economics moved inevitably toward crisis, a social and economic condition that would absent human agency result in working-class consciousness and ultimately revolution that would create a new society free of material inequality, communism, and conclude with the end of history. His journalism was his first draft, and as he plied his trade as a professional writer with episodic observations upon the important events of his moment, he confronts in real time the contingent possibilities of working-class revolution, the stages toward it, and the openings presented by war, crisis, national and ethnic consciousness, and the roles played by revolutionary vanguards who perpetually weigh their role as midwives to historical change. Marx’s journalism is particularly compelling because within it, his focus is global, and concentrates in particular upon the globalization of capitalist hegemony as advanced by Britain and the United States. As a one-time student of American socialism, I wish that Leonard’s excellent work had been available to me when I was laboring to understand the relationship between Marx and the transformation of liberalism from 1848 to the U.S. Civil War.
— Adam Tuchinsky, author of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor
Journalism is the only profession that Marx embraced for years, and its “products”, in the form of hundreds of articles for the socialist and liberal press, match or surpass the size of the works which today support his fame. However, in carefully selecting, ordering and introducing a vast sample of Marx's journalism, Spencer Leonard does not just enrich our knowledge of the career of the author of Das Kapital: he reveals a writing of the conjuncture without which articulation of capitalism’s “historical tendencies” and revolutionary “strategy” with its often tragic vicissitudes remains an enigma or a postulate. This will become an indispensable resource for activists, students and scholars.
— Etienne Balibar, author of The Philosophy of Marx
Marx and Engels have long been sequestered as philosophers and theorists, contemplating the world rather than changing it. This major collection of their writings – wrongly categorized as mere journalism – presents their world-changing activism as it unfolded in the European and American press. Their sharp-eyed view of history-making as class struggle covers political confrontations from Ireland to India, from strikes to coups d’état. The editor’s introduction guides readers through the ‘practical materialism’ of the revolutionary duo during a decade of worldwide turmoil when reactionary authority struggled to contain mass politics. Readers will find the historical roots of today’s anti-democratic thuggery brought vividly to life. Forewarned is forearmed.
— Terrell Carver, University of Bristol
This collection of Marx’s journalism of the 1850s is an invaluable resource for understanding the political Marx. After the failure of the 1848 Revolution, Marx did not share the illusions of his fellow exiles that 1848 could be revived. In the face of the democratic movement of the working class a new kind of state had emerged; rather than the “executive committee of the ruling class,” the new Bonapartist state balanced between the workers’ movement and the bourgeoisie. Marx had been blacklisted in Europe but the New York Tribune gave him an audience of a quarter of a million for reports in which he narrated the events in Europe as they unfolded, showing that “Steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbés, Raspail, and Blanqui.” Leonard provides an invaluable and scholarly context for the formerly neglected articles and includes key commentary from Marx’s few allies at the time.
— Andy Blunden, author of An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic
These new volumes are a welcome – not to say overdue – resource for understanding Marx as a political thinker. The scope and depth of Marx’s post-1848 journalism are underappreciated by casual readers and scholars alike, but these volumes should change that. Here we find Marx analyzing the global politics of the capitalist world, in collaboration with Engels and others, and under the pressure of events. Leonard’s selection of articles and the thematic orientation of the volumes are both excellent, serving together to guide the reader through Marx’s developing analysis of the imperialist or bonapartist state, and connecting what otherwise might be seen as disparate discussions of Ireland, the American Civil War, the Crimean War, and European foreign policy.
— William Clare Roberts, author of Marx’s Inferno
Marx and Engels on Bonapartism: Selected Journalism, 1851-59 is the first volume of a series of three dedicated to Marx’s and Engels’ journalistic writings of the 1850s and 1860s. In spite of their material relevance (they represent between one quarter and one third of what Marx and Engels published in their own lifetimes), the articles have received little attention from scholars. This collection offers the broadest thematic selection of texts so far available in English, accompanied by in-depth introductions and a punctual footnote apparatus. At the center of the volumes are Bonapartism and imperialism, conceived by Marx and Engels as key categories with which to interpret the political, social and economic conjuncture of the mid-nineteenth century, on the European but especially on the global scale.
— Francesca Antonini, author of Caesarism and Bonapartism in Gramsci: Hegemony and the Crisis of Modernity
Nearly a hundred years before the imperialism of free trade thesis was presented, Marx and Engels already envisioned in their writings the relationship between metropolitan capitalism and the drive for political domination over other more backward countries. At the same time, even with full-blown democracy (universal suffrage) still a long way away, the political form of the bourgeois state was assuming a Bonapartist cast. In their remarkable journalistic forays of the 1850s and early 1860s, Marx and Engels considered events throughout the world in light of these underlying dynamics. It is wonderful how Marx and Engels, while going into details, could still maintain their grasp over broader contexts. We owe much to Spencer Leonard for collecting and editing the best of this material and publishing it in two handy and integrally conceived volumes. Reading what Marx and Engels wrote on the world over 150 years ago uncannily attunes us to what we are witnessing today.
— Irfan Habib, author of Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception
Few grasped more profoundly the importance of America to the age of revolution than Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels, and few have understood their insights so fully as Spencer Leonard. These deeply researched and lucid volumes break Marx and Engels out of their traditional European confines with magnificent results. His analysis of Marx’s thoughts on the American Civil War is brimming with ideas about how that conflict fit into the larger contest between revolution and reaction in the nineteenth century.
— Don H. Doyle, McCausland Professor of History, University of South Carolina
At a time when it seems too many in society are prepared to throw away the past, these volumes shed much-needed light on the "forgotten Marx" of Marxism. As Spencer Leonard adeptly describes, what Marxism was must be recognized and its defeats worked through if the Marxists of today are to push forward into the future. With compelling, beautifully written explanatory and contextualizing introductions across and within the volumes, this work will prove indispensable to students and scholars who seek to understand the past in order to transform the present and achieve a different future.
— Ashley Frawley, Swansea University Department of Sociology