Black, white, blue, red: struggles against death and vampires in Marx’s Capital

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Notes

1 John Green confirms Engels's close attention to the Parliamentary Reports while making a film on the life of Marx for German television he went to film in Chetham’s Library in Manchester. As Green relates in the opening of his Engels, A Revolutionary Life, they had wanted to shoot footage of one of the Blue Books held there and on leafing through it, Green was “amazed to find some lightly pencilled notes in the margins that turned out to be in Engels’ own hand” (Green 2008, 9). The motive for one of the then-few English language biographies of Engels has its inauguration in these dry, informative tomes – their significance cannot be underestimated, and though there are thousands of them, they are as unwieldy for researchers now as they were then. The 1000 volume selection of the more than 7000 total papers in folio for the nineteenth century alone, even as prepared in more accessible format by the Irish University Press (1968–1971), often remains neglected by Marx’s readers.

2 We should recall this fine talker, Macauley, was considered a child prodigy at the age of eight when he asked if the smoke from the factory chimneys came from the fires of hell.

3 In a text in preparation, I have documented Disraeli, Dickens, and Gaskell’s use of the Parliamentary Blue Books. I do so to consider how they represent a wider public appreciation of the material, and, although though Disraeli plagiarises shamelessly, how the model of the literary investigation can be a motivation for research and commentary today. I also explore the commentary on Gaskell and the cotton trade in Sukanya Banerjee (2020, 499), and the debate about sources identified by Joseph Kestner (1985) for Disraeli (Smith 1962; Fido 1977), and how this also raises relevant questions for Marx’s sources.

4 I have discussed Morris’s work in detail in a manuscript, “Vassals,” where I set out a longer-form appreciation of Marx’s writerly stratagems.

5 The sometimes-overlooked figure of Leonard Horner looms largest over the production of content for these Blue Books. A one-time Warden of London University and a member of the Royal Society, Horner was “one of the Factory Inquiry Commissioners in 1833” and inspector and then “Censor of Factories until 1859.” Marx’s big tribute is that Horner “rendered undying service to the English working class” by engaging in “a lifelong contest (Kampf [battle]), not only with the embittered manufacturers, but also with the Cabinet, to whom the number of votes given by the masters in the Lower House was a matter of far greater importance than the number of hours worked by the ‘hands in the mills’” (Marx [1867–1887] 1990, 195; [1867–1890] 1991, 202n). Despite the tribute, offered when Marx first properly introduces the inspector, it is not an uncritical endorsement but recognition that Horner’s investigations exposed, in official reports, the “nefarious practices” of the factory owners (Marx [1867–1887] 1990, 243n). There are over forty references to Horner in Volume One alone, and, in the body of the chapter on ‘The Working Day,' time after time, “the ruthless factory inspector … was again to the fore” (246).

6 The Factory Inspectors had generally pushed for reform. It is now widely recognised that “Legislation such as the Ten-Hour-Day Bill and various Factory Acts made limited attempts to mitigate the exploitation of women and children in industry” (Foster and Clark 2018). But the circumstances of that time were so dire that legislation was hardly enough – necessary as it at least was to recover time from work. However, working “seven days a week, often for twelve or more hours a day … contributed to the almost complete disintegration of the working-class family” (Foster and Clark 2018).

7 The Verse Krüdener written by the poet in Jena in April 1818, “Junge Huren, alte Nonnen Hatten sonst schon viel gewonnen, Wenn, von Pfaffen wohlberaten, Sie im Kloster Wunder taten” (Verse Krüdener, Jena 4.4.1818, cited in Marx [1867–1887] 1990, 873apparat) [“Young whores, old nuns had already won a lot when, well advised by priests, they performed miracles in the monastery”].

8 To track Hegel in Marx in the light of contemporary concerns, the reader today could do no better than to see Tom Bunyard’s book, Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (2018).

9 Sturm and drang – attributed to “von Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752–1831)” (Kuczynski in Marx (1867–1890) 2017, 190). It is more probable that Marx picked up this terminology from other members of the Sturm and Drang movement of the late eighteenth century, such as Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), or from Schiller’s play Die Räuber [1782] 1995. I’d like to think it was the latter, since Schiller’s “rob from the rich, give to the poor” anti-hero is called Karl Moor and “Moor” was the family nickname for Marx himself.

10 “The deployment of white imperial sovereignty leads to the creation of death worlds; new forms of social existence in which precarious communities are subject to social death through the violent process of racialization, subjugation, and systematic oppression … settler-occupation renders and compartmentalizes space into an ongoing project of militarisation, terror, and death … the colony creates both the law and its exception, enabling the settler state to kill Indigenous lives with impunity” (Rata, Brayne, and Barber 2023, 12).

11 Marx’s comments on the Russian–Turkish conflicts of the first half of the century went deep into the history of Walachia and Moldovia, as documented in the collection of his journalism by his daughter, Eleanor, years later: The Eastern Question (Marx 1897, though subsequently several of the texts attributed to Marx in the volume were said to be by Engels's hand).

12 Adapting a famous quote and expanding its context a little: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness” (Marx [1844] 2008).

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John Hutnyk

John Hutnyk is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He is author of the 1996 book The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation (re-released in India after thirty years), and others on Marxism, cultural studies, and film. His most recent book is Global South Asia on Screen (2018), with Bloomsbury.