In her History of England that forthright young anti-Lancastrian historian, Jane Austen, prefaces her remarks on Henry VI with the following words: ’I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York who was of the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other history, for I shall not be very diffuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen against, and shew my hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information.’

What a lot of confusion it would save if some historians of our own time, particularly those who have a similarly specific axe to grind, could state their prejudices with such unashamed candour. Certainly some such declaration seems to be lacking from A.J.P. Taylor’s Introduction to this new and very welcome Penguin edition of the Manifesto, for its tone is at times so shrill as to be positively gimcrack and, one would have thought, thoroughly out of keeping with the Penguin tradition of solid and sound scholarship.

Taylor’s essay is unnecessarily long – only one or two pages shorter than the Manifesto itself – tells us nothing new, gives the impression – as does all his occasional work – of being written with an eye to the academic gallery rather than for the intelligent reader interested in the history of ideas, and is also shot through with the sort of inaccuracies which no historian who takes it upon himself to debunk Marx should be allowed to get away with.

Thus, for instance, on page 9 the reader is told that the dialectic, as conceived by Hegel, was ‘an outside force which drove things on’. In fact the ’outside force’ in Hegel’s philosophy was what he called ‘the World Spirit’ and the dialectic was only the form of its progress in the world. Having misinterpreted Hegel, Taylor proceeds accordingly to misinterpret Marx’s relationship to him, failing to point out that the decisive difference between them is the replacement of idealistic dialectics by materialist dialectics, and the revelation by Marx of the social relations between men as the prevailing factor instead of Hegel’s totally abstract World Spirit. In addition, Taylor further confuses himself and his readers by misquoting Marx, citing him as having said that ‘he stood Hegelianism on its head’, whereas in point of fact he said the reverse. (The relevant passage occurs in the Preface to the Second Edition of Das Kapital and runs: ‘In Hegel’s writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.’)

Further down on the same page, Taylor states: ‘Marx was a radical before he began as a philosopher, and a radical he remained.’ This again is inaccurate. Mr. Taylor would only have to read Marx’s Dissertation and his juvenilia – poems and other imaginative works to discover for himself that Marx was philosophising well before becoming a radical, which was not until he worked as a journalist in the Rhineland in 1842.

It would be laborious and time-consuming to attempt to put right all Taylor’s misconceptions and this is not the right place for doing so. One or two of his wilder and more distasteful statements should however be singled out to give an idea of what readers should expect.

Thus, on page 11, we read with astonishment that ‘Marx lacked the historical spirit even by nineteenth-century standards and still more by our own. In Marx’s lifetime, true history was beginning. He was not interested.’

On page 12 we are told that ‘He (Marx) spent a year or two in Cologne as a radical journalist – the only time when he earned his own living. After this he depended on remittances from Engels and no doubt murmured: “Capital! Capital!” as each instalment arrived’. (The ‘year or two in Cologne’, presumably refers to the year Marx spent there as chief editor of the liberal newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Taylor’s contemptible pun about Capital should be seen in the light of Marx’s continual political persecution which forced him to leave first his own country, then his homes in Paris and afterwards Brussels, and the resulting death, in circumstances of appalling poverty, of three of his children.)

On page 24 we are assured, with no qualification, that ‘the fundamental cause of the 1848 revolutions was the increase in population’; a statement surely rivalling in historical inanity McLuhan’s idea that the fundamental cause of nationalism was the discovery of the printing press.

On page 41, Taylor tries to play the part of the divine fool and enquires, giving us a classical example of his obstinately chicken-headed approach: ‘What economic need was Marx serving when he sat for long hours at a desk in the British Museum or attended hole-in-corner meetings of half a dozen obscure men?’ And he answers predictably: ‘He was asserting his personality, and this, rather than class conflict, has often been the driving force of history’. (Engels has of course good-humouredly answered this sort of ‘wonderful rubbish’, as he called it, in his letter to Bloch about the over-mechanical application of the materialist concept of history, which Taylor would do well to re-read.)

Passing by such historically irresponsible remarks as (page 44) that ‘the Twentieth Century has been singularly free from Social revolution’, we come to Taylor at his most unpleasant and distasteful. ‘The fascist leaders [he writes on page 45] were exactly of the type which Marx had postulated for the proletariat … though Hitler never had Marxist leanings, he would have been at home a century earlier with the exiled tailors of the German Educational Workers’ League.’ (It hardly needs pointing out that this grotesque smear is of course made over the dead bodies of thousands of communists and Marxists and millions of Jews who died in the fascist camps: any self-respecting historian would know that a good many of those exiled tailors would have been Jews. The idea that any of these people were ‘fascist types’ could only come from someone who values his own self-appointed role as a historical maverick more than the search for truth.)

It is good that Penguin have produced an edition of the Communist Manifesto. It means that now, when our friends tell us they know nothing about Marxism and ask what they should read, we no longer have to refer them to what to them might still be a suspiciously cheap little book with a Moscow imprint, but can recommend them a volume from a conventional publisher which carries a certain authority and widespread intellectual respectability. The pity of it is that Penguins have in this case sacrificed their usual traditions for the sake of a ‘pop’ name to write the Introduction. Almost any nineteenth-century historian could have done the job better and there are a number of people who could probably have done it outstandingly (not forgetting, as Taylor seems to have done, that this is the hundredth anniversary of Capital and the fiftieth of the October Revolution). As it is, when recommending our friends this Penguin edition, we shall have to warn them about the extremely liverish Introduction, not to mention the scandalous perfunctoriness and superficiality of the Notes, and perhaps also remind them that the Moscow edition of the same translation is readily available, without the tiresome Introduction and with better notes, at a third of the price.

[ Labour Monthly, October 1967, pp. 471–4 ]