Il più reputato e seguito giornalista economico del suo tempo

“In 1851, Charles Dana, the editor of the ‘New York Tribune’ (NYT), invited Marx to become one of his European correspondents. Marx accepted, and from August 1851 until February 1862 he and Engels regularly wrote several articles for the NYT a week. Actually, the first series of articles (on ‘Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany’) for that journal was provided by Engels and published under Marx’s name. In about ten years time, Marx and Engels wrote several hundred articles, the ‘Tribune’ published more than 490 of them, many (about 45 per cent) unsigned, as leading articles. Engels contributed a lot, more than one-quarter of these articles, mostly dealing with military affairs and war events. A large part, about one-third of Marx’s articles were devoted to the analysis of actual economic and financial matters, mostly in Britain but also in other European countries and on the level of the world economy at large. As the NYT was rapidly growing, selling eventually nearly 300,000 copies altogether, and became the largest newspaper in the English-speaking world, Marx was actually one of the leading and most widely read economic journalists of his time, a renowned expert on all economic and financial matters whose judgement on monetary and financial crises in Europe was highly respected. Marx also earned himself a reputation as a leading expert of international politics – he wrote on all the major international conflicts and wars of his time. In 1859, in his ‘Foreword’ to ‘A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx referred to his work for the NYT, stressing the fact that he had to acquaint himself with a lot of practical details of economic life that went far beyond the range of the science of political economy proper. While Marx wrote the ‘Grundrisse’ manuscript, his journalistic work, although reduced under the pressure of the crisis, continued as he described and analysed the major events of the great crisis of 1857-8. Actually, a lot of his journalistic work in the preceding year of 1856 had been devoted to monetary crises in Europe which he saw as harbingers of the greater crisis he had been waiting for since 1850. In November 1857, Marx saw to his delight one of his many predictions come true: this time, the British government, pressed hard by the spokesmen of the City, had suspended the Bank Act of 1844 again – exactly as Marx had predicted in an article published a few day before in the NYT. Until the spring and summer of 1858, Marx continued to comment upon the crisis events in Europe and tried to explain the rapid turn to an unexpected recovery as it occurred in Britain and other European countries. His regular work as a journalist ending in 1862, Marx did not comment upon the events of the following crises of 1866 and 1873 (1)” [Michael R. Krätke, The first world economic crisis. Marx as an economic journalist] [(in) ‘Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the critique of political economy 150 years later’, a cura di Marcello Musto, London, 2010] [(1) Actually, Marx continued writing articles for German and Austrian newspapers, notably ‘Die Presse’, on the course of events and the background of the American Civil War until the end of the year 1862]