Marx and the bluebooks

[mullrae]

Did Marx falsify what he found in the blue books to suit his own ends.

[ALB]

mullrae wrote:

Did Marx falsify what he found in the blue books to suit his own ends.

Who makes this claim and what is their evidence?

[alanjjohnstone]

I also read something about this a long time ago, so it is not a new claim…forget when and where.So i did a google and came up with this  

Quote:

In 1885, two Cambridge scholars, Joseph Robson Tanner and F.S. Carey published a monograph titled Comments on the Use of the Blue Books Made by Karl Marx in Chapter XV of Le Capital, in which they exposed how Marx had misquoted, misrepresented and falsified data and information published in British government reports (the Blue Books) to make his points, while citing them as his sources. And, mind you, it’s just one chapter that they studied. They wrote: “He uses the Blue Books with a recklessness which is appalling…to prove just the contrary of what they really establish.” They went on to say that their evidence certainly showed “an almost criminal recklessness in the use of authorities” and warranted treating any “other parts of Marx’s works with suspicion”.

https://books.google.co.th/books/about/Comments_on_the_Use_of_the_Blue_Books_Ma.html?id=ETMctwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

[mullrae]

Lynx kepler on Quora stated that marx had basically falsified steel and iron imports,exports to belgium in support of the belgium workers union.I followed the link but it doesn't make much sense to me so I wondered if anyone else had any views on Marx and the blue books regards ian.

[ALB]

Not been able to find the original article to see exactly what they wrote. But here's what Eric Hobsbawn, who evidently has read it, says in his How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism:

Quote:

The first serious attack on Marx's scholarship as we have seen came from two Cambridge dons in 1885 (Tanner and Carey) (…) It is the tone of denigration rather than the content of the Cambridge critics which is interesting: phrases like 'the mongrel algebraical expressions' of Capital or 'an almost criminal recklessness in the use of authorities which warrants us in regarding other parts of Marx's work with suspicion' indicate – at least in economic subjects – something more than scholarly disapproval. In fact, what made Tanner and Carey mad was not simply his treatment of the evidence – they shied away from 'the charge of deliberate falsification especially since falsification seems so unnecessary' (i.e., since the facts were black enough anyway) – but 'the unfairness of his whole attitude towards Capital'. Capitalists are kinder than Marx gives them credit for; he is unfair to them;  we must be unfair to him. Such, broadly, appears to be the basis of the critics' attitude.

So, according to him, the answer to your question is "No, Marx did not falsify what he found in the blue books". The two did not make the charge of "falsification" nor  of "misquoteation" only of "misrepresentation" of role of capitalists. Not at all the same thing but just the sort of defence of capitalism you'd expect from Cambridge economists, then as now.Their article has recently become part of anti-Marx folklore but I doubt if most of those using it will have read it.

[twc]

No, Marx misquoted no-one!Read Engels’s rebuttal — actually performed by Marx’s daughter Eleanor looking through the Times and Hansard — in the fascinating “Preface to the Fourth German Edition” of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (Engels 1890).In the process Eleanor exposed the shonky practice of “silently correcting” compromising speeches in the printer’s proofs to British Hansard.  That is, she exposes the parliamentary practice that permits politicians a chance to falsify the parliamentary record to save their political skins.You can find Engels’s account of this shonky practice of parliamentary falsification that trapped Marx’s gullible accusers, on both sides of the English Channel: Mr Sedley Taylor in Cambridge, who was confidently parroting his exultant European informant, Professor Brentano. The famous rebuttal is available, for all the world to see — here at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdfThese modern accusatory “scholars” might first have read Capital.  But no these modern “scholars” didn’t bother.  They thought they had landed upon anti-Marx dynamite, and their shonky scholarship blew up in their bare faces a century.  Mere adventurers in a serious realm — the shonky lot of them!Ah, he who laughs last…Do you really think that Karl Marx was a mere adventurer, like these shallow shonks, in the science of political economy?  Something he sacrificed his life over.  Do you really think so?If you really can think so, then you might read his book, Capital Vol 1, and then see if you, or anyone else, can seriously maintain the thought that Karl Marx would stoop as low as his accusers expect people to behave, just like their own shonky selves, because it is their own miserable shonky practice, and then to express with crowing hypocracy the fraud’s jubilation in finding self-confirmation in detecting someone else’s fraud.Marx inhabited a different world when it comes to integrity!No, a thousand times no, Marx didn’t misquote anyone. In his inaugural address to the First International, Marx quoted the Times, whose reporter, along with those of the other London dailies, quoted exactly what Chancellor Gladstone had said on the floor of the house — i.e. before Chancellor Gladstone had second thoughts about the compromising words he had just uttered to parliament, and had surreptitiously changed the Hansard record of his speech.All of a sudden.  There is fraud, all right.  Fraud too right!  But it now transpires that it is the bourgeois apologist who is caught out lying.  Hansard, has been “corrected” and so contradicts the verbatim reports in the London dailies.  Therein lies the blatant Parliamentary fraudulence.  Or do you trust everything politicians say they said?Now, who who would you have us believe?  Marx and the London dailies, or shonky falsifying whitewashed Hansard?Answer me that one please, because I am not standing idly by the unretracted propagation of innuendo against Marx’s scientific practice, by you, or by anyone else, when it comes to the integrity of socialism.  Retract the charge, or substantiate it!No, Marx was absolutely right about the Chancellor’s speech, as reported hot off the press next morning.As Gladstone actually did say, before he had second thoughts about putting into print ecactly what he had just uttered in parliament — The wealth divide in Britain had escalated since 1851.Do you, like Chancellor Gladstone, wish to deny that proposition?  Because denying that proposition is a large part of the motivation behind these long-running smeers upon Marx’s credibility.And no, and it wasn’t in the Blue Books.  It was the Chancellor’s Budget speech.  Do you believe everything the Chancellor says?No. A thousand times no.  Marx didn’t falsify anything.  Marx wouldn’t, and Marx didn’t.Y’ know something — the terrible truth is that he didn’t need to!Parliamentary reports truthfully condemn capitalism.

[Brian]

mullrae wrote:

Lynx kepler on Quora stated that marx had basically falsified steel and iron imports,exports to belgium in support of the belgium workers union.I followed the link but it doesn't make much sense to me so I wondered if anyone else had any views on Marx and the blue books regards ian.

Could posters please note the above isn't about poverty or the increase in the wealth gap but about imports and exports.  However, although the link did not make much sense to mullrae does not mean to say none of us can.  So a link to the article in question would be helpful.  Also a link to the original Quora answer/comment where this accusation is made would also be appreciated so it can be directly nailed.Quora may I remind posters is used and viewed by millions whereas this site if followed by just a few thousand. Here is a wonderful opportunity to put the socialist case to millions of workers and any rant on here rebutting the accusation is not likely to get any impact.  Fcs sake do the sums!Links mullrae, links please. 

[alanjjohnstone]

Paul Johnson’s ‘Intellectuals’ repeats the hatchet job

Quote:

“…Marx's systematic misuse of sources attracted the attention of two Cambridge scholars in the 1880s. Using the revised French edition of Capital (1872-75), they produced a paper for the Cambridge Economic Club, 'Comments on the use of the Blue Books by Karl Marx in Chapter XV of Le Capital' (1885).30 They say they first checked Marx's references 'to derive fuller information on some points', but being struck by the 'accumulating discrepancies' they decided to examine 'the scope and importance of the errors so plainly existing'. They discovered that the differences between the Blue Book texts and Marx's quotations from them were not the result solely of inaccuracy but 'showed signs of a distorting influence'. In one class of cases they found that quotations had often been 'conveniently shortened by the omission of passages which would be likely to weigh against the conclusions which Marx was trying to establish'. Another category 'consists in piecing together fictitious quotations out of isolated statements contained in different parts of a Report. These are then foisted upon the reader in inverted commas with all the authority of direct quotations from the Blue Books themselves.' On one topic, the sewing machine, 'he uses the Blue Books with a recklessness which is appalling . . . to prove just the contrary of what they really establish.' They concluded that their evidence might not be 'sufficient to sustain a charge of deliberate falsification' but certainly showed 'an almost criminal recklessness in the use of authorities' and warranted treating any 'other parts of Marx's work with suspicion'….”

[alanjjohnstone]

A more detailed expose of Marx selective quotations here of a Gladstone speechhttp://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/05/marxs-dishonesty-in-his-quotation-of.html

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

A more detailed expose

I don't think "exposé" is the right word here as it begs the question that there was something underhand to "expose". If you wanted to be neutral rather than taking the critics' side, a better word would have been "claim" or something like that.

[Anonymous]

Engels before Marx was the person who used the bluebooks to write about the conditions of the working class in England, and his conclusions, research, and writing were accurate, even more, it is one of the best books written by Engels.Marx did not falsify anything that is only a negative propaganda made by the anti-Marxists, even more,  Paul Lafarge who was his secretary indicated that he was one of the person who used them in a very appropriate way

[mullrae]

The only thing I could find was this but how Marx was supposed to have falsified anything is beyond me https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1867/blue-book-speech.htm any views gratefully accepted regards ian.

[Brian]

mullrae wrote:

The only thing I could find was this but how Marx was supposed to have falsified anything is beyond me https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1867/blue-book-speech.htm any views gratefully accepted regards ian.

Thanks for that.  But until we have a direct link to the Quora post where the original accusations were made and be in a position to rebut them effectively this extract from the Marxists Archive is not that helpful.

[twc]

Out of the mouths of babes.The author of the blog selectively fails to highlight the sole contentious point, namely that Chancellor Gladstone actually admitted 

The Press, quoting Gladstone, wrote:

The augmentation I have described, and which is founded, I think, upon accurate returns, is an augmentation entirely confined to the classes possessed of property.

 Here is Marx on the only contentious issue that so delighted Bretano and his acolyte Mr Sedley Taylor of Cambridge 

Marx, quoting Gladstone, wrote:

From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20 per cent! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible …. this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power …. entirely confined to classes of property …. 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.’ 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

 Here is what Gladstone falsified — in his extended trickle-down apologetics — for the Hansard record 

Marx, quoting Gladstone, wrote:

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. 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. Indirectly, indeed, the mere augmentation of capital is of the utmost advantage to the labouring class, because that augmentation cheapens the commodity which in the whole business of production comes into direct competition with labour. 

 Gladstone’s piffle is no more than contentious apologetics that the rich getting richer is the means by which the poor do.The only rational conclusion is that the beneficent rich should keep on getting richer.  Anyone here prepared to defend Gladstone’s pro-exploitation argument?  If you are comfortable with it, then you’ll swallow any capitalist apologetics.The truth is that there is no truth in the charge against Marx and no truth in Gladstone’s apology for capitalist accumulation — that it benefits the working class.The case should have ended in 1890.  It has no legs in the 21st century.  Don’t propagate it!

[twc]

How Karl Marx QuotesThe expert on “How Karl Marx Quotes” (in the absence of Karl Marx himself, who innocently assumed that his practice of quoting sources was obvious) is Frederick Engels — the one man who was more familiar than anyone else with Karl Marx’s quotation practice, having himself edited and checked Karl Marx’s quotations, ultimately in all three volumes of Capital.Engels explains “How Karl Marx Quotes” in the ‘Preface to the Third German Edition’ of Capital Vol. 1 (1883)

Engels wrote:

In conclusion, a few words on Marx’s art of quotation, which is so little understood.When Marx’s quotations are pure statements of fact, or are merely descriptions — such as his quotations from the English Blue Books — they serve as documentary proof pure and simple.When Marx cites the theoretical views of other economists, he intends merely to state where, when and by whom an economic idea conceived in the course of development was first clearly enunciated.

And, for the benefit of the crank calumniators,who deliberately misrepresent Engels’s conception of knowledge as absurdly staticwho deliberately misrepresent Marx’s quotes as tendentiously partisan…In the wash up, Engels trashes their deliberate misrepresentations by immediately following on with what should strike Marx’s serious readers as the scientifically bleeding obvious — that Marx intended his quoted citations of economists to behistorical (i.e. not static) documentationthat is scrupulously (i.e. trustworthy) non-partisan.

Engels, continuing, wrote:

When Marx cites the theoretical views of other economists, his only consideration is that the economic conception in question must be of some significance to the history of the science of political economy, that it is the more or less adequate theoretical expression of the economic situation of its time.But whether this economic conceptionstill possesses any absolute or relative validity from the standpoint of the authorwhether it already has become wholly past historyis quite immaterial.Hence these quoted citations are onlya running commentary to the text,a commentary borrowed from the history of economic science,establish the dates and originators of certain of the more important advances in economic theory.And that was a very necessary thing in a science whose historians have so far distinguished themselves only by the tendentious ignorance characteristic of careerists.

And that, dear reader, is “How Karl Marx Quotes”.

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