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Marx-Engels Correspondence |
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The First Indian War of Independence (1857-1858) Marx To Engels, 14 June 1853 Marx To Adolf Cluss, 18 October 1853 Engels To Marx, 24 September 1857 Marx To Conrad Schramm, 8 December 1857 Marx To Engels, 16 January 1858 Marx to Engels in ManchesterLondon, 14 June 1853,28 Dean Street, Soho Dear Frederic, ...Your article on Switzerland was, of course, a direct swipe at the Tribune’s ‘leaders’ (anti-centralisation, etc.) and their man Carey continued this clandestine campaign in my first article on India, in which England’s destruction of native industries is described as revolutionary. This they will find very shocking. Incidentally the whole administration of India by the British was detestable and still remains so today. The stationary nature of this part of Asia, despite all the aimless activity on the political surface, can be completely explained by two mutually supporting circumstances: 1. The public works system of the central government and, 2. Alongside this, the entire Empire which, apart from a few large cities, is an agglomeration ofvillages, each with its own distinct organisation and each forming its own small world. A parliamentary report described these villages as follows: * ‘A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some 100 or 1000 acres of arable and waste lands: politically viewed, it resembles a corporation or township. Every village is, and appears always to have been, in fact, a separate community or republic. Officials: 1. the Potail, Goud, Mundil etc. as he is termed in different languages, is the head inhabitant, who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants, attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within the village... 2. The Curnum Shanboag, or Putwaree, is the register. 3. The Taliary or Sthulwar and. 4. the Totie, are severally the watchmen of the village and of the crops. 5. the Neerguntee distributes the water of the streams or reservoirs in just proportion to the several fields. 6. The Joshee, or astrologer, announces the operation of farming. 7. The smith and 8. the carpenter frame the rude instruments seed-times and harvests, and the lucky or unlucky days or hours for all the of husbandry, and the ruder dwellings of the farmer. 9. The potter fabricates the only utensils of the village. 10. The waterman keeps clean the few garments... 11. The barber, 12. the silversmith, who often combines the function of village poet and schoolmaster. Then the Brahmin for worship. Under this simple form of municipal government the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and although the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine and disease; the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families, have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms, while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves. Its internal economy remains unchanged.'* The post of Potail is mostly hereditary. In some of these communities the lands of the village cultivated in common, in most of them each occupant tills his own field. Within the same, slavery and the caste system. Waste lands for common pasture. Home-weaving and spinning by wives and daughters. These idyllic republics, of which only the village boundaries are jealously guarded against neighbouring villages, continue to exist in well-nigh perfect form in the North Western parts of India only recently occupied by the English. No more solid basis for Asiatic despotism and stagnation is, I think, conceivable. And however much the English may have Irelandised the country, the breaking up of the archetypal forms was the conditio sine qua non for Europeanisation. The Tax-gatherer alone could not have brought this about. Another essential factor was the destruction of the ancient industries, which robbed these villages of their self-supporting character. In Bali, an island off the east coast of Java, this Hindu organisation still intact, alongside Hindu religion, its traces, like those of Hindu influence, discernible all over Java. So far as the property question is concerned, this is a great bone of contention among English writers on India. In the broken mountainous terrain south of the Kistna, however, there appears to have been property in land. In Java, on the other hand, as noted in the History of Java by a former English governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, the sovereign [was] absolute landlord throughout the country ‘Where rent to any considerable amount was attainable’. At all events, the Mohammedans seem to have been the first in the whole of Asia to have established the principle of ‘no property in land’. Regarding the above-mentioned villages, I should note that they already feature in the Manu according to which the whole organisation rests on them. 10 are administered by a senior collector, then 100, then 1,000. Write soon. Your Marx to Adolf Cluss in WashingtonLondon, 18 October 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho Dear Cluss, You really did too much in going to the trouble of copying out the Chinese thing. At those expenses I would certainly not have had the impertinence to ask you for the article. Dana copied my stuff almost word for word, watering down this and that and, with rare tact, deleting anything of an audacious nature. Never mind. It is a business of his. Not of mine. In one of my Indian articles he also amended the bit where I speak of cholera as ‘The Indian’s Revenge upon the Western world’ to ‘India’s Ravages’ which is nonsense. En passant Freiligrath solicited that ‘revenge’ for a poem about cholera upon which he is still at work. Again, in another of my articles on India, dealing with the princes there, he transmogrified ‘The skeleton of etiquette’ into ‘The seclusion (pitiful!) of etiquette’. Never mind! Provided he pays. My wife has also compromised me by putting Rinaldo for Ruggiero and Alcide for Alcine in the first article on Palmerston. These are ‘les petites misères’ of an écrivain whose own handwriting is illegible. But it’s a bitter pill for a man who knows his Ariosto from A to Z in the original. Divino Ariosto! It’s a big jump from Ariosto to Klein, or rather a long fall, and a casus obliquus at that. Papa Klein wrote to me — not a word, of course, about his upsets and rows — asking for recommendations to you and Weydemeyer. In my reply (Pieper has not written him a single line quant à vous) I did not, of course, in any way suggest that Weydemeyer was unfriendly to me. How could anyone suppose me capable of such stupidity and baseness? Mr Klein would have had to conclude from my harmless remark about Cluss being ‘our party’s most talented and energetic representative in America’, that I was denying all talent and energy to Weydemeyer. However, such sophisticated word-juggling is beyond the reach of Klein’s intellect. Hence all his remark amounts to is a piece of nonsense invented in order to give vent to his annoyance. Notwithstanding all this, you are right, Sir, in having written to Mr Snug. Klein really does wield some influence over the Solingen workers, and they are the best in the Rhine province. I, pour ma part, have never, either drunk or sober, expressed the view that the workers are fit only for cannon-fodder, although the louts, among whom little Klein is evidently coming to rank himself, are, to my mind, barely fit even for that. It would be as well to treat little Klein with your accustomed discretion as a tool that may perhaps (?), in time of action, be of use to us.
I was greatly tickled by Heinzen’s heroic deed. Should you people give the fellow another dressing down, concentrate on his crass ignorance, and the pains the wretched man is at to appropriate his opponents’ catch-words when they're already stale and fit for nothing. Delectable, the chap’s aspirations to dignity, and then his scraps! Serves him right! Rent, In the Misère I cite an example of how in England, land which, at a certain stage of science, was regarded as barren, is, at a more advanced stage, considered fertile. I can adduce as a general fact that, throughout the middle ages, esp. in Germany, heavy clay soil was cultivated by preference as being naturally more fertile. In the past 4-5 decades, however, owing to the introduction of potatoes, sheep-farming and the resulting manuring, etc., light sandy soil has taken pride of place, esp. since it involves no expenses of drainage, etc., and on the other hand its deficiencies can easily be made good by means of chemical fertilisers. From this, then, it may be seen how relative ‘fertility’ is, even ‘natural’ fertility, and at the same time how ill-informed Mr Carey is, even from the point of view of history, when he expresses the opinion that the most barren land is always the first to be brought under cultivation. What leads him to that conclusion? The fact that tropical swamps are damned fertile but reclaimable only by civilisation. A tropical swamp, however, is productive not so much of herbs as of weeds. Civilisation clearly originates in those regions where wheat grows wild, as was the case in part of Asia Minor, etc. Such land is rightly described as naturally fertile by historians — and not land yielding poisonous vegetation and requiring more strenuous cultivation if it is to become fertile for human beings. Fertility is not, after all, absolute but merely a relation of the land to human requirements. Ricardo’s law only holds good within bourgeois society. Hence it is where the relationship of the bourgeois to the land is purely that of a bourgeois, and every peasant, — or feudal — or patriarchal, relationship is cast aside that the law applies in its purest form, hence above all in the mining of precious metals, and in colonies where commercial crops, e.g. sugar, coffee, etc., are grown. More about this another time. In both instances the exploitation of the land is regarded and pursued by the bourgeois de prime a'bord as a purely commercial concern. Though I'm not afraid of those curs of Russians in so far as Europe is concerned — they are going to put us Germans in queer street. Between the Kaimuks and the crapauds [i.e., French philistines] we are in a cleft stick. Herewith copy of The People’s Paper. Vale faveque, Your Engels to Marx in LondonRyde, 24 September 1857 |
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