-Caveat Lector- Treason in America -- From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman ANTON CHAITKIN (C)1984 New Benjamin Franklin House P. O. Box 20551 New York, New York 10023 ISBN 0-933488-32-7 --[13c]-- In 1838 Bowring, then an official in Palmerston's Foreign Office, began organizing more forceful measures to deal with the problem of the Zollverein. He dispatched Richard Cobden on an intelligence-gathering tour of Germany. On September 10, 1838, Bowring held a meeting in Manchester where he described the threat posed by the Zollverein. He claimed that the Germans did not really want to develop independent manufacturing, but were being induced to do so largely because of the British Corn Laws, which restricted imports into England of foreign agricultural products. Bowring then sent Archibald Prentice, editor of the Manchester Times, to explain to the Manchester manufacturers the need for a new organization that would seek a battle-policy of "free trade," based on the repeal of the Corn Laws, so that German industrial development might be halted. The following month the Anti-Corn Law League was formed by Bowring, the Manchester manufacturers, and Cobden, who had returned from Germany with an account of the strategic weaknesses of the Zollverein. John Bowring was officially deputized by Palmerston in 1839 to negotiate with Prussia to bring about the reduction of tariffs on English goods. The Prussian junker nobility then occupied, in British strategic planning, a similar position to that of the planter aristocracy in South Carolina: in exchange for British agricultural markets, they were expected to sabotage their own country's industrial development. With this oligarchical alliance under construction, Bowring submitted to Parliament the proposal for tariff changes which, after several years of struggle, were put into effect later in the 1840s. We may now look at the position of Frederick Engels within this "struggle" being developed in England under the control of Palmerston, Mill, and the radical imperialists. Engels graduated from the Elberfeld Gymnasium in 1837, the year his father entered his partnership with the Ermen brothers in Manchester. His first major piece of journalism Letters from Wuppertal, appeared early in 1839 in the Hamburg organ of Young Germany, Telegraph fur Deutschland. In this sarcastic attack on his home town, Engels blamed poverty, sickness, illiteracy, superstition, drunkenness, and general ugliness, not on the low level of industrial and scientific development, but on "factory work"-itself. He also calls for atheism as a means of freeing popular consciousness. Early in 1841 Engels wrote the libretto for an opera on the tragedy of Rienzi This is the story of the fourteenth-century Italian knight who liberates the people and tries to recreate a Roman Empire to conquer the world. Engels's libretto was not published in his lifetime. But Richard Wagner's opera on the same theme, based on Englishman Edward Bulwer-Lytton's cult novel, The Last of the Tribunes, had its first German performance in 1842 and established Wagner's fame. That he was no friend of the pro-American List's republican movement may be seen in Engels' Reports from Bremen, published in August 1841: "It is the German [emigrants] in the cities who have taught the Americans their deplorable contempt for our nation. The German merchant makes it a point of honor to discard his Germanness and become a complete Yankee ape.... When he returns to Germany he acts the Yankee more than ever."(35) Engels spent a year in the Prussian military service, simultaneously immersing himself in the Young Hegelian movement. In 1842 he met the radical democrat Karl Marx (1818-1883), who was then editing the Rheinische Zeitung and looking for some new doctrine out of the orbit of Hegel and Young Germany. Though Engels made little impression on Marx's thinking at first, he was to supply that new doctrine after he himself received his British "finishing." Frederick Engels, Sr. sent his son to England in 1842, to work his way up to the position of overall manager of the family's Manchester textile mill. The staged "revolutionary" process which greeted the young gentleman, and in which he now joined, was described later by Engels himself: Toward the end of 1838, some of the leading Manchester manufacturers founded an anti-Corn Law association, which soon spread in the neighborhood and in other factory districts, adopted the name of Anti-Corn Law League, started a subscription fund, founded a journal (the Anti-Bread-Tax Circular), sent paid speakers from place to place and set in motion all the means of agitation customary in England for achieving its aim.... When ... at the beginning of 1842, the business slump turned into a downright commercial crisis which threw the working class into the most atrocious poverty, the Anti-Corn Law League became definitely revolutionary. It took as its motto the saying of Jeremiah: They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger.' Its journal in clear language called on the people to revolt and threatened the landowners with the 'pick-axe and the torch' Its itinerant agitators ranged the whole country . . . meeting after meeting was held, petition after petition to Parliament was circulated...." When, in spite of all this, [Prime Minister Robert] Peel failed to abolish the Corn Laws, but only modified them, the Congress [of League Representatives] declared, 'The people has nothing more to expect from the government; it must rely only on itself; the wheels of the government machinery must be halted at once and on the spot; the time for talking is over, the time has come for action. It is to be hoped that the people will no longer be willing to starve for the benefit of an aristocracy living in luxury.'" . . . The great means in the hands of the manufacturers . . . to raise an insurrection against the Corn Laws, consisted in closing down their factories.... When an increase in wages was to be expected owing to the improvement in business, a manufacturer . . . suddenly reduced the wages of his workers, thereby compelling them to strike.... The workers, to whom the signal for an insurrection was thus given, brought all the factories in [Stalybridge] to a standstill, which was easy for them to do since the manufacturers (all members of the Anti-Corn Law League), contrary to their custom, offered no resistance at all. The workers held meetings presided over by the manufacturers themselves, who tried to draw the people's attention to the Corn Laws.... The insurrection spread to all the factory districts; nowhere did the urban authorities . . . who were all members of the Anti-Corn Law League, offer any resistance....(36) When the project went awry because the workers demanded a restoration of their wages, Engels explained, the League created a special army to put down its dupes, who were quickly suppressed. Engels portrays this vast experiment in social manipulation as a fight for the interests of the middle class, as against the workers and the landed nobility. Nowhere is the guiding hand of Bowring or the Foreign Office ever mentioned; imperialist oligarchs who own factories are described in the liberation dogma as "the middle class," the new enemy of which his German readers are warned to beware those who own factories, or would build them. Frederick Engels' first work on economics was written in England in 1843-the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy and published in Germany. Here Engels attacks Christianity, and like oppressors. But he takes care to direct his readers on the free-trade-versus-protectionist battle raging in Germany: "Modern liberal economics cannot comprehend [allow] the restoration of the mercantile system by List.... On all points where it is a question of deciding which is the shortest road to wealth�i.e.. in all strictly economic controversies the protagonists of free trade have right on their side."(37) But Engels was not "invented" until, in 1844, the Deutsche-Franzosische Jarbucher printed his homage to Thomas Carlyle, a review of Carlyle's book Past and Present. From the radical Jarbucher, co-edited by Karl Marx and Palmerston agent Arnold Ruge, Engels' fame was immediately spread throughout Germany by the British-aligned press. As he said in a letter to Marx, "It is ridiculous that my article about Carlyle should have won me a terrific fame with the 'mass,' while naturally only very few have read the article about economy."(38) Engels' Carlyle review, never published in English until 1975, displays the common origin of the communist and fascist movements: "Of all the . . . books . . . which have appeared in England in the past year . . . [Past and Present] is the only one which is worth reading.... Carlyle's book is the only one which strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view." The review, like the Carlyle book, is an attack on the fraud of free institutions (in case the Germans might wish them for themselves): "The debates in the Houses of Parliament, the free press, the tumultuous popular meetings, the elections, the jury system . . . [have] not made independent men of the English . . . The educated English are the most despicable slaves under the sun.... "Only the workers, the pariahs of England, the poor, are really respectable, for all their roughness and for all their moral degradation. It is from them that England's salvation will come, they still comprise flexible material; they have no education, but no prejudices either, they still have the strength for a great national deed...." Engels praises Carlyle's "efforts to make German literature accesible to the English"�curious comment on the author of Hero-Worship, the sponsor of Romantic obscurantism as against Schiller and the republicans, the man who called German poet Heinrich Heine "a dirty blaspheming Jew." Engels quotes Carlyle on the ultimate solution to man's oppression Work! Work will make men free: " 'Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind; Heaven is kind�as a noble Mother; as that Spartan Mother, saying while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!" Complain not; the very Spartans did not complain.'" Engels gently chides Carlyle's pantheism for not entirely abolishing religion. But he is "a theoretician of the German type. . . " whose "book is ten thousand times more worth translating into German than all the legions of English novels which every day and every hour are imported into Germany...."(39) It was now to be Frederick Engels' job to "translate" Carlyle's viewpoint, dressing up feudalism in Hegelian clothes for the edification of German revolutionaries. Thus armed, equipped with a reputation, he now returned to the Continent for a time, meeting Marx in Paris and fastening upon his as a useful instrument for the propagation of a new doctrine. Marx, the young revolutionary in exile from Germany, was overwhelmed by the economic erudition of Engels's Critique. When Engels then published The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Marx was wholly won over to what should rightfully be called "Engelsism." As the Critique was the foundation of the Engels-Marx economic theories, the 'Condition of the Working Class" was the first important expression of their "social" theory. The book warns German readers about the horrors in store for them if industry is allowed to develop, and incidentally praises the pro-feudal noble lords of England who are "sincerely" fighting the horrors of industrialism�especially that "Germano-Englishman Thomas Carlyle," the truest champion of the working class.(40) Marx was now pressed into the active service of the British nabobs. At Engels's urging and under his tutelege, Marx produced a crude attack on Friedrich List's book The National System of Political Economy. He calls List a plagiarist, a corrupt defender of special interests (German manufacturers), a liar. The article was so ugly that it went long unpublished and only appeared in English in 1975. For example, List is quoted, "The force capable of creating wealth is infinitely more important than wealth itself." By this List was speaking of the need to pay good wages, provide education, and so forth. But Marx rejoins, "It is a fine recognition of man that degrades him to a 'force' capable of creating wealth! The bourgeois sees in the proletarian not a human being, but a force . . . " and so forth. Most pathetic, in the light of Engels' own recounting of the conspiracies of the Anti-Corn Law League, is Marx's attack on List's "conspiracy theory": "Since his own work conceals a secret aim, he suspects secret aims everywhere. Being a true German philistine, Herr List, instead of studying real history, looks for the secret, bad aims of individuals, and, owing to his cunning, he is very well able to discover them . . . making [his enemy] an object of suspicion.... Herr List casts aspersions on the English and French economists and retails gossip about them."(41) The middle 1840s saw an intense struggle over the future of Germany, and over the personal leadership of Friedrich List. The slanders, the secret police operations, the "revolutionary"' opposition to List's position, finally drew List to England, where he was psychologically broken; according to legend, he committed suicide in 1846. Engels was on the battle lines in Germany, a central figure in bringing about this result. We have the record of two speeches he made in Elberfeld in February 1845. On February 15, Engels warned his audience�consisting of manufacturers and public officials and no workers�of the consequences if Germany were to follow List to challenge England's industrial supremacy: Herr List has brought the wishes of our capitalists into a system.... [He] proposes gradually increasing protective tariffs which are finally to become high enough to guarantee the home market for the manufacturers.... Let us assume for a moment that this plan is adopted. . . . Industry will expand, idle capital will rush into industrial undertakings, the demand for workers will increase and so will wages with it, the poor-houses will empty, and to all appearances everything will be in a most flourishing state.... But ... then . . . tariffs are reduced [so that] English industry can [again] compete with our own in the German market. Herr List himself wishes this. But what will be the result of all this? . . . The English will throw the whole of their surplus stocks on the German market . . . and so transform the German Customs Union into their 'second hand shop' once more. Then English industry will rise again, because it has the whole world for its market, because the whole world cannot do without it, while German industry is not indispensable even for its own market.... Let us now assume that [the protective tariffs] are not reduced.... As soon as German industry is in a position to supply the German market completely it will stand still [having reached its limit]. [But suppose] we Germans will be able owing to protective tariffs to bring our industry to a point at which it can compete with the English without protection.... A life-and-death struggle will arise . . . they will muster all their strength.... And with all the means at their disposal, with all the advantages of a hundred-year-old industry, * will succeed in defeating us.... We shall remain stationary, the English will stride forward, and our industry, in view of its unavoidable decay, will not be in a position to feed the proletariat it will have artificially created�the social revolution begins.(42) The rest of the speech is a forecast of the bloody, merciless horrors which this "artificially created proletariat" (led, of course by the famous communist speaker) will unleash on these bourgeoisie if they dare to challenge the British. In 1848, Karl Marx rewrote as the "Communist Manifesto" an earlier Engels piece entitled "Confessions of a Communist." This was to be the pattern; the Cotton Prince would write a draft, or simply make a suggestion for the appropriate theme of a work, and pass it along to Marx to put it in "good revolutionary form." This subservience was enforced by Marx's slavelike existence following his move to England, where all his "mature" work was done. The Engels-Marx correspondence shows that while Marx's family was starving (two children died of malnutrition) Engels gave Marx between �10 and �70 per year to support him; yet Engels's profits from the family firm ranged from �1,000 to �4,000 per year. Engels"'contnbutions" served usually as Marx's only source of income. Marx never held a regular job; he at one time received a pound or two per piece for a series of articles, which Engels actually wrote, for the New York Tribune; he wrote another series of articles, for pennies, for the Bentham-trained Foreign Office official David Urquhart. As the American secessionists geared up their preparations for action throughout 1859 and 1860, Cotton Exchange director Frederick Engels took responsibility for organizing and fitting out a regiment of the British army, and directed its deployment into position against what he warned was a threatened invasion of England by France. During the American Civil War Engels made repeated suggestions to Marx that the American Union was lost, and was not after all worth saving Marx respectfully declined to share his sponsor's "pessimism," refusing to adopt a stance so far removed from the logic of Revolution as to acquiesce in the perpetuation of slavery. The revolutions which swept Europe in 1848 confused and blasted many of the hopes of republicans in Germany and elsewhere; full-scale German unification and industrialization was not to come before Bismarck's reign later in the century, and then not in the form of List's grand design linking the nations of Europe. In the 1860s and 1870s, the very same British oligarchs who turned loose the radical movements against America's emulators in Europe, turned their attention to the problem of "reforming" an uncontrolled United States of America. pps. 263-304 --notes-- 1. This was true except in the South. There Lincoln's enemies, the old Free Trade, "radical Republicans," controlled Reconstruction policy to keep the former Rebel states unindustrialized�and thus, in a profound sense, still not back in the Union. 2. Reports of the Committe of Secrecy Appointed by the House of Commons on the State of the East India Company, 1773. 3. Gardner, Brian, The East India Company, McCall Publishing Co., New York, 1972. Clive died as an opium addict and probable suicide (Gardner, p. 102). 4. Bolts, William, Consideration on Indian Affairs, London, 1772. 5. Mukherjee, Ramkrishna, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company, Monthly Review Press, London and New York, 1974, p. 359. 6. Dutt, Romesh Chunder, TheEcononncHistoaofIndiaunderEarly Btitish Rule, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1902, pp. 51-52. 7. Dutt, Economic History of India, p. 53. 8. Gardner, East India Company, p. 111 9. Gardner, East India Company. 10. Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, pp. 405-406. 11. Gardner, East India Company, pp. 206 and 306. 12. Minutes of August 15, 1821, and of (month and day unknown), 1821, quoted in Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 375. 13. Bombay Administrative Report, 1872, quoted in ibid., p. 376. 14. Dutt, Economic History, Vol 1, p. 62, 149. 15. Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 376. 16. ibid., 316. 17. Warren Hastings, letter to the Directors of the Company,Feb. 21, 1784, quoted in Muir, Ramsay, The Making of British India:1756-1858, Manchester University Press, 1917. 18. Farquhar, J. N., Modern Relgious Movements in India MacMillan, Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., New Dehli, 1977, p. 9. 19. Gardner, East India Company, pp. 200-201. 20. Mukherjee, Rise and Fall, p. 333. 21. Gardner, East India Company, p. 289. 22. Quoted in Miller, Lawrence, Dimensions of Mugwup Thought, dissertation, 1968, University of Illinois; pp. 56-57. 23 Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980, pp. 19-22. 24. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Essay on Self Reliance, The Roycrofters, East Aurora, New York, 1908, p. 59. 25. Parliamentary Debates, Hansard, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 1098-1099, proceeding of the House of Commons on April 9, 1816- also in Edinburgh Review no. LII, June, 1816; quoted by Stanwood, Edward, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, originally published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1903, reprinted by Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1974, pp. 167-168. 26. Mill's relation to the Company is presented quite baldly in Willson, Beckles Ledger and Sword, or, The Honourable Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (1599-1874), Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1903, Vol n, p. 425: "It was at this time that the great conflict between Parliament and the Company came on, the Company struggling not merely for its principles, but for its very existence.... Chief of [the Company's supporters] was James NISI. For the time being M11 was almost in himself the Company. Between 1831 and 1834 he was repeatedly examined by Parliamentary committees through numerous weary sittings." 27. Reprinted in Gibbs, J. W. M., editor, The Early Essays by John Stuart Mill, George Bell and Sons, London, 1897, pp. 271-278. 28. Carlyle, Thomas The French Revolution, A History, Oxford University Press, London, 1928, Vol. I, pp. 183-185. 29. Carlyle, Thomas, [On] Heroes and Hero Worship, W. B. Conkey Company, Chicago, 1900, pp. 17-18. 30. Carlyle Thomas, Occasional Discourses on the Nigger Question, in Critcal and Miscellaneous Essays, Chapman and Hall, London, 1872, Vol VII, pp. 81, 89; [first published in Fraser's Magazine, December, 1849]. 31. List, Friedrich, The National System of Political Economy, Augustus M. Kelley, New York, 1966, p. 421. 32. ibid., p. 140. 33. Carol Cleary, unpublished manuscript, "The Battle to Contain List and his Policies," April 1979. 34. Frederick Engels, "Young Germany m Switzerland," 1845, Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. IV, International Publishers, New York. 35. Engels, Friedrich, "Reports from Bremen," written for the Moegenblatt fur gebildete Leser No. 199, August 20, 1841, in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works, jointly published by Lawrence and Wishart, London, lnternational Publishers Co., New York, and Progress Publishers, Moscow, in collaboration with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, 1975, Vol. II, pp. 116-117. 36. Frederick Engels, The History of the Corn Laws, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. IV. 37. Engels, Friedrich, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 421. 38. Engels to Marx, October 1844, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965. 39. Engels, Friedrich, renew of Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 467; the Carlyle review is pp. 444-468 40. Engels, Fredrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, translated and edited by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1958, pp. 104-105, 107, 312, and Engels' footnote on p. 331. 41. Marx, Karl, draft of critique of List's NationaI System, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol IV 4, pp. 267-268. 42. b ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 258 260. --cont-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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