Ironic: Republican Horace Greeley may be said to have subsidized Karl Marx's

[JDPriestly]

writing of Das Kapital.

OK so I love history and know more about it than maybe the average American, I'm not a historian, and I have a lot to learn. If this rather funny historical fact is well known, please accept my apologies for posting it.

Someone posted a speech by John F. Kennedy in which Kennedy joked that had Horace Greeley given Marx a raise when Marx was struggling to support a family on the meager wages of the Tribune, Greeley's newspaper, we might not have had to deal with Communism. (Anyway, Kennedy joked about Greeley and Marx and I have taken great liberty in telling about his joke.)

"On Saturday morning, October 25, 1851, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, entrenched after a decade of existence as America’s leading Whig daily, appeared with twelve pages rather than its usual eight. The occasion was too noteworthy to be passed over without comment by the paper itself. So a special editorial was written—probably by Greeley’s young managing editor, the brisk, golden-whiskered Charles A. Dana—to point it out.

. . . .

“The first act of the revolutionary drama on the Continent of Europe has closed,” it began upon a somber organ tone: “The ‘powers that were’ before the hurricane of 1848, are again the ‘powers that be.’” But, contributor Marx went on, swelling to his theme, the second act of the movement was soon to come, and the interval before the storm was a good time to study the “general social state … of the convulsed nations” that led inevitably to such upheavals.

He went on to speak of “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”—strange new words to a readership absorbed at the moment with the Whig state convention, the late gale off Nova Scotia and with editor Greeley’s strictures against Tammany and Locofocoism. “The man goes deep—very deep for me,” remarked one of Greeley’s closest friends, editor Beman Brockway of upstate Watertown, New York. “Who is he?”

Karl Marx, a native of the Rhineland, had been for a short time the editor of a leftist agitational newspaper in Cologne until the Prussian police closed it down and drove him out. At thirty, exiled in Paris, he had composed as his own extremist contribution to the uprisings of 1848 an obscure tract called the Communist Manifesto. At least at this moment it was still obscure, having been overtaken by events and forgotten in the general tide of reaction that followed the surge of 1848 abroad. Thrown out of France in turn as a subversive character, he had settled in London, tried unsuccessfully to launch another left-wing journal there, spent the last of his small savings, and now was on his uppers with his wife and small children in a two-room hovel in Soho, desperately in need of work.

. . . .

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/when-karl-marx-worked-horace-greeley

Surely, history has played a whimsical joke on American. An early leader of the Republican Party and Karl Marx so closely linked.

Who would have guessed?

This just strikes me as such a cosmic prank.

What do you think?

It's almost as if Horace Greeley, a Republican at his time (of course far more liberal than today's Republicans) unknowingly underwrote the penning of Das Kapital. Unbelievable.

[Ken Burch]

1. In Greeley's era, Republicans were the more-liberal party

Remember, they were founded by abolitionists and women's suffrage activists.

They didn't become the party of reaction until later.

Also, IIRC, Abraham Lincoln carried on a correspondence with Marx during his presidency.

[Paul Edward Snyder]

2. The Problem with Manifestos

Karl Marx was not in the late 19th century the monster he is today portrayed as being. He was more of what might be seen today as a particularly gifted union activist concerned with the powerlessness of the working poor, and who had apparently read Thomas Mores’ book, Utopia, about a fictional country whose society was pretty much based on Christian values. Being intellectually inclined and idealistically motivated, he researched the possibility that such a state might be attained and, based on his research and his background in Hegelian philosophical logic, he concluded that such a state was inevitable and proceeded to explain why it was inevitable and how it would come to be.

Unfortunately, though a Communist State sounds wonderful, it is fictional. It cannot possibly work beyond a relatively small community and even then in a world of ever expanding community it would be short lived. Marx speculated that it could only work under a benevolent dictator (much as Democracy has worked so far under an American Republic and similar government institutions), but he assumed the dictatorship would wither and die as the populace became accustomed to mutual cooperation.

Two problems (probably more) were not considered; number one, a benevolent dictator will not live forever and there is no assurance that a benevolent dictator will be followed by another benevolent dictator – in fact, history suggests just the opposite – and number two, though evolution is not the survival of the fittest, life does survive by feasting on other life (we are combative and personal advantage is inborn, part of who we are and may be suppressed for a time, but probably not eliminated altogether (even if it could be, we would be at a serious disadvantage if a situation should arise that threatens our life or the lives of our loved ones and we are unable or unwilling to fight back effectively).

Even if the above were not true and a successful Communist State were possible, all visionaries become the victims of their disciples. I am pretty sure that the authors of our Holy Books would be horrified and mortified if they could see what their followers have done with their message. The same is true of a lesser book, “Das Kapital” and its related pamphlet, “The Communist Manifesto”.