Karl Marx did his best writing on deadline.
Commissioned by the Communist League in mid-1847 to write a “profession of faith,” Marx and Engels procrastinated, traveled, experimented with form and might never have written the manifesto of the Communist Party if not for a sternly worded letter from the league ordering them to deliver the document by February 1, 1848.
A few all-nighters later, Marx produced a stirring document that by now has been read by tens of millions of people. Far fewer realize that regular deadline commentary provided Marx with the closest thing he ever had to actual employment. From 1852 to 1862 he was a regular London correspondent for the New York Tribune. All told, Marx contributed almost 500 columns to the Tribune (about a quarter of which were actually written by Engels). Marx’s newspaper writing takes up nearly seven volumes of the fifty-volume Collected Works of Marx and Engels–more than Capital and indeed more than any of Marx’s works published in book form.
The Tribune was in some ways a logical place for Marx’s journalism. The paper was founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley as a crusading organ of progressive causes with a pronounced American and Christian flavor; one contemporary writer described the paper’s political stance as “Anti-Slavery, Anti-War, Anti-Rum, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Seduction, Anti-Grogshops, Anti-Brothels, Anti-Gambling Houses.” During Marx’s tenure as a correspondent, the Tribune was the largest newspaper in the world, reaching more than 200,000 readers.
At the same time, there was probably no publication in the world that would have been a perfect fit for Marx’s cantankerous prose and personality. Even when Marx wrote in English, his strident Germanic tone dominated. His analysis was so unsparingly radical that at times the Tribune felt the need to distance itself from its fulminating London correspondent; introducing one of his 1853 essays, for example, the editors wrote, “Mr. Marx has very decided opinions of his own, with some of which we are far from agreeing,” but then conceded that “those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the greatest questions of current European politics.”
And the ambivalence was mutual–to put it mildly. At times Marx viewed newspaper writing as just one more form of capitalist exploitation. “It’s truly nauseating,” he wrote to Engels in 1857, “that one should be condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard by a blotting-paper vendor such as this. To crush up bones, grind them and make them into soup like paupers in the workhouse–that is what the political work to which one is condemned in large measure in a concern like this boils down to.” Yet Marx was proud when his work attracted attention. In November 1857, he predicted that the Bank of England would have to be suspended, a prophecy the New York Times labeled “simply absurd”; when the bank was suspended in early December, he boasted to Engels about his “gratifying” scoop. Moreover, as some modern Marxist scholars have noted, Marx’s newspaper articles–far from impeding his book-length work–enhanced it by providing him raw material he could then revisit in a fuller context.