An entertaining example of Marx’ selective methodology was his quotation – or misquotation – in Das Kapital of W.E. Gladstone’s Inaugural Address of April 1863. It sparked a controversy that lasted until many years after Marx’ death, with both Engels and daughter Eleanor rising to his defense. Finding the truth of this matter takes some unraveling, as there’s a nice dialectic going on here, for sure.
First a word about Gladstone. He was a liberal politician, an English statesman who at the time of the speech served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gladstone was of the opinion that government spent taxpayers' money wastefully and carelessly. During his political career, he lowered income tax four times, more than halving it, so as to let money “fructify in the pockets of the people,” as he put it.[i] Optimists would see this as a good thing, pessimists would be skeptical; Marx took it a step further.
In his speech, Gladstone spoke about a great increase of national wealth observed through an increase in income tax revenue. Marx quoted Gladstone as follows, giving as his source The Morning Star newspaper:
“This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property.”
Gladstone’s words bluntly confirmed Marx’ conviction that the wealth created by capitalism benefits only the wealthy. Nevertheless, the chancellor added:
“[This] must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say.”
Marx’ scoffed at Gladstone’s conclusion:
“How lame an anti-climax! If the working class has remained ‘poor’, only ‘less poor’ in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class ‘an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power,’ then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have.”
Nine years later, the German magazine Concordia published an anonymous letter accusing Marx of deliberately falsifying Gladstone’s quotation (Concordia issue No. 10 of March 7, 1872).[ii] The letter cited Gladstone’s speech, correctly sourced from Hansard, the British government’s parliamentary records:[iii]
“I must say that I should look with some degree of pain, and with much apprehension, upon this extraordinary and almost intoxicating growth, if it were my belief that it is confined to the class of persons who may be described as in easy circumstances.”
So, Gladstone had not said that the intoxicating increase of wealth was entirely confined to classes of property – he’d merely stated that he would have felt sad if it had been the case!
Marx sent a reply to the German magazine, excusing himself for not finding the original newspaper cuttings from The Morning Star, but quoted Gladstone from another source: The Times of April 17, 1863.
“I must say for one, I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power, if it were my belief that it was confined to classes who are in easy circumstances. This takes no cognizance at all of the condition of the labouring population. The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to classes of property.”
Marx had not fabricated a false quote after all, then. But how could it be that the last sentence (stating that the augmentation of wealth is “entirely confined to classes of property”) was omitted from Hansard? It was not unusual for speeches to be revised once more before being submitted to the official records (such as for literary reasons), but this was a remarkable revision given that it inversed the meaning of Gladstone’s message. That said, the quote in The Times – though not word for word exact – was without question an accurate representation of what Gladstone had actually said. At the very least, The Morning Star, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily News and The Standard all published substantively identical quotes in comparable wordings.[iv]
Years later, Eleanor Marx responded to the enduring controversy.
“Marx has not suppressed anything worth quoting, neither has he ‘lyingly’ added anything. But he has restored, rescued from oblivion, a particular sentence of one of Mr. Gladstone’s speeches, a sentence … which somehow or other had found its way – out of Hansard.”
So does that settle the matter? Not quite, for there was a hidden reason why the increase in wealth was confined to the classes of property, which Gladstone mentioned earlier in his speech, in a passage not published in the newspapers (here quoted from Hansard):
“The figures which I have quoted take little or no cognizance of the condition of those who do not pay income tax; or, in other words, sufficiently accurate for general truth, they do not take cognizance of the property of the labouring population, or of the increase of its income.”
It should be noted that income tax in Victorian England only applied to higher incomes. The threshold for income tax liability was set at £150 in 1842, lowered to £100 in 1853, still in effect at the time of Gladstone’s speech.[v] Consider then for a moment that the average workers’ salary in those days barely amounted to £50 a year.[vi] When the working class is exempt from paying income tax, then any increase of income tax revenue (national wealth) can of course only be “confined to classes of property.”
Surely, Marx would have known this much about the income tax. To consider him ignorant of even the most basic fiscal laws of his time, would be absurd. Or is it? Then did he knowingly misrepresented Gladstone when he discussed the increase in “taxable income” in Das Kapital? And in his subsequent replies to Concordia and Volksstaat?
In fact, Gladstone’s message told quite the opposite of what Marx had him say. From Hansard:
“It is a matter of profound and inestimable consolation to reflect, that while the rich have been growing richer, the poor have become less poor. I will not presume to determine whether the wide interval which separates the extremes of wealth and poverty is less or more wide than it has been in former times. But if we look to the average condition of the British labourer, whether peasant, or miner, or operative, or artisan, we know from varied and indubitable evidence that during the last twenty years such an addition has been made to his means of subsistence as we may almost pronounce to be without example in the history of any country and of any age.”
Using examples of working conditions of only the worst and most abhorrent kind, Marx persuasively painted capitalism as an incorrigible system, and the bourgeoisie – the ruling classes – as its incorrigible accomplice. Yet virtually all of the data that he based himself off to make his case, the data which he used to write Das Kapital, however selectively deployed, was gathered by the ruling classes themselves – by inspectors, commissions, magistrates, etc., dispatched to investigate abuses in order to correct them. If the system had been as incorrigible as Marx claimed, it wouldn’t have initiated a process of self-examination, and Marx would not have had access to the data he needed to write Das Kapital.
Excerpt from: Deconstructing Karl Marx & Communism
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[i] L.C.B. Seaman, Victorian England: Aspects of English and Imperial History 1837–1901, Routledge, 1973, pp. 183–84
[ii] Marx Engels Werke (MEW), Vol. 22, p.139
[iii] Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series, Vol. 170, p.244
[iv] For a side-by-side comparison between Marx’ citations and the reporting of The Times,The Morning Star and other newspapers, see: MEW, 22, pp.182-83
[v] A Collection of the Public General Statutes Passed in the Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Years of the Reign of her Majesty Queen Victoria, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1862, p.115. See also: 16 & 17 Victoriae, p.157
[vi] A. L. Bowley, Wages and Income in the United Kingdom Since 1860, Cambridge University Press, 1937, p. 46
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