Marx Was a More Audacious Forger than Engels; Marx Falsified a Sentence from Gladstone's Budget Speech; Marx Falsified Quotations from Adam Smith

Marx cannot have been unaware of the weaknesses, indeed dishonesties, of Engels’s book since many of them were exposed in detail as early as 1848 by the German economist Bruno Hildebrand, in a publication with which Marx was familiar. Moreover Marx himself compounds Engels’s misrepresentations knowingly by omitting to tell the reader of the enormous improvements brought about by enforcement of the Factory Acts and other remedial legislation since the book was published and which affected precisely the type of conditions he had highlighted. In any case, Marx brought to the use of primary and secondary written sources the same spirit of gross carelessness, tendentious distortion and downright dishonesty which marked Engels’s work. Indeed they were often collaborators in deception, though Marx was the more audacious forger. In one particularly flagrant case he outreached himself. This was the so-called ‘Inaugural Address’ to the International Working Men’s Association, founded in September 1864. With the object of stirring the English working class from its apathy, and anxious therefore to prove that living standards were falling, he deliberately falsified a sentence from W. E. Gladstone’s Budget speech of 1863. What Gladstone said, commenting on the increase in national wealth, was: ‘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 the class who are in easy circumstances.’ But, he added, ‘the average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know, has improved during the last twenty years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in the history of any country and of any age.’ Marx, in his address, has Gladstone say: ‘This intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power is entirely confined to classes of property.’ Since what Gladstone actually said was true, and confirmed by a mass of statistical evidence, and since in any case he was known to be obsessed with the need to ensure that wealth was distributed as widely as possible, it would be hard to conceive of a more outrageous reversal of his meaning. Marx gave as his sources the Morning Star newspaper; but the Star, along with the other newspapers and Hansard, gives Gladstone’s words correctly. Marx’s misquotation was pointed out. Nonetheless, he reproduced it in Capital, along with other discrepancies, and when the falsification was again noticed and denounced, he let out a huge discharge of obfuscating ink; he, Engels and later his daughter Eleanor were involved in the row, attempting to defend the indefensible, for twenty years. None of them would ever admit the original, clear falsification and the result of the debate is that some readers are left with the impression, as Marx intended, that there are two sides to the controversy. There are not. Marx knew Gladstone never said any such thing and the cheat was deliberate. It was not unique. Marx similarly falsified quotations from Adam Smith.

--Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, rev. ed. (Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins e-books, 2008), 66-67.