Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Behind the public roar about the slave trade and its abolition, we hear the sour whine of sceptics who demand that someone should apologise to them for the sufferings of working-class and peasant Britons at the hands of mill- and land-owners. These nigglers seem to pride themselves on their "political incorrectness" in questioning a liberal shibboleth. They ought, perhaps, to know that a great Victorian writer made just this case in 1853. In a glorious polemic, he scorned the Duchess of Sutherland for her sympathy with American slaves while her family and similar grandees were neck-deep in Highland Clearances and the "expropriation" of the Gaelic Scots.

"The enemy of British Wage-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery," the author signed off with a typical flourish, "a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton Lord - never". This piece appeared in the top-selling New York paper, where for a decade the Chris Hitchens of his day published sizzling essays on world events, in a style that yoked cool forensic detail with white-hot satire. His name? Karl Marx, and he's not available for op-ed work.

Global-capitalist publishing has scored a real triumph with James Ledbetter's new Penguin Classics edition of Karl Marx's Dispatches for the New York Tribune (£12.99). The editor, by the way, works as a managing editor for that notorious Bolshevist sect, CNNMoney.com. Handy, wide-ranging selections from Marx's often dazzling articles have always been hard to find, for all the decades of Soviet-subsided "collected works".

The Tribune pieces from 1853 to 1862, which Francis Wheen in his preface rightly ascribes to "one of the great 19th-century journalists", would fascinate at any time. At present, they sound absurdly relevant on topic after topic. Marx looks at the hypocrisy of abolitionism while Britain went on profiting from the wider slave trade; the commercial challenge of China, and the role of British-shipped opium in muffling that threat; Indian industry in the wake of the 1857 uprising, which he follows Tory leader Disraeli in calling not a mutiny but a "national revolt"; the refusal of cartels to live up to their free-trade rhetoric; even the folly and shame of a military adventure in the Near East, with its "ruin of the army" and "outcry in the country" - the Crimean War.

When he discusses falling turn-out at the polls, Marx remarks that "this is in no wise apathy against politics in general, but against a species of politics" which "can only consist in helping the Tories to oust the Whigs, or the Whigs to conquer the Tories". Just change a solitary word...

Was the Marx who wrote these splendid pieces a "Marxist" in the later sense? The experts differ, although in the patient gathering of data on Bank of England rates or exports to Shanghai, you can see the theorist of Capital emerging from the hot-blooded romantic revolutionary. For Marx, and Europe, these are interregnum years, between the failure of the liberal revolts of 1848 and the labour-movement politics he helped kick-start in the "First International" of 1864. As an activist, he's marking time; as a writer, he's in his prime.

The bearded one's shade would be more than interested to learn that Dame Marjorie Scardino - the ultimate boss of Penguin Books, as CEO of parent group Pearson - this year enjoyed a pay package that took her income to an eye-watering £1.96m. John Makinson, chief of Penguin itself, pocketed a useful £1.33m. Marx might point out that their free-market victories rest, in Britain, on a vast hidden state subsidy from the education system, and on VAT exemption for books. But, in spite of Penguin's renewed health, rumours of a sale by Pearson still persist. If any future owner dares to tamper with Penguin Classics on this form, it's time for barricades across the Strand.