Marx and India

Abstract

The life-work of a genius like Marx is always unfinished, and for the most part unplanned, but no philosopher ever gave his system to the world in so unsystematic a fashion as he did. Much of his writing was governed by accidents of the historical tides swirling round him. Even his work on economics was left incomplete; on history and politics the bulk of his ideas are scattered about in his three or four pamphlets on contemporary events, in numberless letters, and most of all in the great mass of articles he wrote, primarily to earn his daily bread, for the New York Tribune. Marx complained of "this wretched paper",' though no journal has ever deserved better of posterity, and of the "very great interruption" to his studies caused by his journalistic work; but if he had not been compelled to undertake it both he and we would have been much the poorer. Each main section arose from happenings somewhere abroad, which stimulated him to explore their historical background. It was for him a means of catching at ideas, indulging his insatiable curiosity, and working off nervous pressures in a flow of satire, wit, eloquence : Marx was one of the great Romantic writers, and a stylist to his finger-tips. For us, it is an immense chaotic contribution to a way of looking at the human universe which had begun taking shape before Marx, and is still taking shape. Only a man so phenomenally endowed could have afforded such magnificent prodigality. But everything here is necessarily hasty, improvised, onesided; at times the words even have an oddly un-Marxist ring. We know from his other writings how Marx looked at very broad ranges of history, and from his journalism we learn in microscopic detail his reactions to passing events. What we lack is a considered, allround summing up of things of the middle order of magnitude: the English Civil Wars as a whole, the French Revolution, the Crimean War.