“Marx was a nut” – Storm-rider – Not big on undue reverence for Master thinkers, but, trust me, Marx’s work will survive your disregard…The historical record confirms his genius (as well as his faults). It’s all there in the corpus of even his minor works – LAst year, Hitchens zeroed in a couple things that might make you rethink your contempt for Marx in a review of a new collection of the M’s journalism (and Francis Wheen’s recent biography). But, of course, that’s only if you’re willing to THINK as opposed to ideologize…You can check Hitchens piece on a recent collection of Marx’s journalism here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/16/classics.history

Since you’re intent on comparing Marx with the Founders, thought you might be interested in a few passages on Marx’s response to the American Civila War…If they pique your interest read on…And you might consider that most of the heroes of Western thought have offered up some STUPID (even ugly)stuff along with the insights that still stick…

Here’s some Hitch on Marx’s journalism…

Much of this journalism was devoted to upholding and defending the ideas not of the coming Russian and Chinese or…Cuban revolutions, but of the earlier American one.

…he and Engels considered Russia the great bastion of reaction and America the great potential nurse of liberty and equality. This is not the sort of thing they teach you in school (in either country). I beseeched Wheen to make more of it in his biography, and his failure to heed my sapient advice is the sole reproach to his otherwise superb book. Now James Ledbetter, himself a radical American scribbler, has somewhat redressed the balance by reprinting some of Marx’s most lucid and mordant essays on the great crisis that preoccupied Greeley and Dana: the confrontation over slavery and secession that came near to destroying the United States.

In considering this huge and multi-faceted question, Marx faced two kinds of antagonist. The first was composed of that English faction, grouped around the cotton interest and the Times newspaper, which hoped for the defeat of Abraham Lincoln and the wreckage of the American experiment. The second was made up of those Pharisees who denied that the union, and its leader Lincoln, were “really” fighting a war for the abolition of slavery. Utterly impatient with casuistry, and as always convinced that people’s subjective account of their own interests was often misleading, Marx denounced both tendencies. Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents and at that time a witness of his father’s embattled ambassadorship to London, wrote in his celebrated memoirs that Marx was almost the only friend that Lincoln had, against the cynical Tories and the hypocritical English Gladstonian liberals. Surveying the grim landscape of the English industrial revolution, he wrote, in The Education of Henry Adams, that it “made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill”.

Marx himself, in reviewing a letter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s to Lord Shaftesbury (and how splendid to have the author of “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” seconding the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), ridiculed the smarmy arguments of papers such as the Economist, which had written that “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue”. The Lincolnians, it was generally asserted, were fighting only for the preservation of the union, not for the high-sounding cause of emancipation. Not so, said the great dialectician. The confederacy had opened hostilities on the avowed basis of upholding slavery, which meant in turn that the union would be forced to tackle emancipation, whether its leadership wanted to or not. See how he makes the point in so few sentences, and shows that it is the apparently hard-headed and realistic who are in practice the deluded ones: “The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of the Washingtons and Jeffersons was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institutional good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the 18th century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr Spratt, cried out: ‘For us, it is a question of founding a great slave republic.’ If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?”

Written in 1861, this cut like a razor through the cant of the pseudo-realists, while not omitting a good passing slap at the luckless Mr Spratt (remember that Marx was teaching himself English as he went along).

As war progressed, Marx and Engels were to predict correctly that the North would be able to exert industrial power as against Dixie feudalism, that ironclad ships would play an important role, that the temporising union generals such as George McClellan would be fired by an impatient Lincoln, and that an emancipation proclamation would be required as a war-winning measure. For good measure, Marx helped organise a boycott of southern slave-picked cotton among British workers, and wrote and signed a letter from the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, congratulating Lincoln on his re-election and his defeat of the anti-war Democrats. No other figure of the time even approached his combination of acuity and principle on this historic point, which may contain a clue as to why the American revolution has outlasted the more ostensibly “Marxist” ones.

Marx’s appreciation of the laws of unintended consequence, and his disdain for superficial moralism, also allowed him to see that there was more to the British presence in India than met the eye. No doubt the aim of the East India Company had been the subordination of Indian markets and Indian labour for selfish ends, but this did not alter the fact that capitalism was also transforming the subcontinent in what might be called a dynamic way. And he was clear-eyed about the alternatives. India, he pointed out, had always been subjugated by outsiders. “The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” If the conqueror was to be the country that pioneered the industrial revolution, he added, then India would benefit by the introduction of four new factors that would tend towards nation building. These were the electric telegraph for communications, steamships for rapid contact with the outside world, railways for the movement of people and products, and “the free press, introduced for the first time to Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans”. His insight into the Janus-faced nature of the Anglo-Indian relationship, and of the potential this afforded for a future independence, may be one of the reasons why Marxism still remains a stronger force in India than in most other societies.

His belief that British-led “globalisation” could be progressive did not blind him to the cruelties of British rule, which led him to write several impassioned attacks on torture and collective punishment, as well as a couple of bitter screeds on the way in which Indian opium was forced upon the defenceless consumers of foreign-controlled China. As he wrote, reprobating Victorian hypocrisy and religiosity and its vile drug traffic, it was the supposedly uncivilised peoples who were defending decent standards: “While the semi-barbarian stood on the principle of morality, the civilised opposed to him the principle of self.”

And in writing about another irony – the fact that the Indian “mutiny” of 1857 began not among the wretched peasants, but among the sepoy soldiers whom the British had themselves trained and clothed and armed – he hit upon a powerful formulation: “There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended but by the offender himself.”

This recalls his more general proposition that, by calling into being a skilled working class concentrated in huge cities and factories, capitalism itself had given birth to its own eventual gravedigger. Of course, it goes without saying that this concept of his was in turn to fall prey to its own unintended consequences….

The genius of the old scribbler was to see how often the sheerly irrational intruded upon the material and utilitarian world of our great-grandfathers. That he knew and loved the classical texts as much as his despised antagonists was no disadvantage to his muscular prose style. Murray Kempton, indeed, puts him second only to Edmund Burke in this and other respects.

And I think it is with Kempton’s compliment that I ought to close. How can it be, he asked, that Marx knew so much about countries he had never visited and politicians he had never interviewed? How was it that we can read his scornful dismissal of the British government that was elected in 1852, and then turn to the memoirs of the statesmen who were directly involved and discover that they privately feared the very same paralysis and inanition that Marx had diagnosed?

Part of the answer involves a compliment to the Victorians, who compiled honest statistics about death rates and poverty and military spending (and even torture in India), and who published them for all to read. Like the late IF Stone, one of Washington’s greatest muckrakers, Marx understood that a serious ruling class will not lie to itself in its own statistics. He preferred delving in the archives to scraping acquaintance with the great and the good. When it came to the ghastly twin trades of slavery and opium, he was “a moralist with every stroke of his pen”, as Perry Anderson once phrased it. But he never lost his anchorage in the material world, and never ceased to understand that a purely moral onslaught on capitalism and empire would be empty sermonising. Isaiah Berlin, contrasting the two Jewish geniuses of 19th-century England, preferred Benjamin Disraeli to Karl Marx because the former was a hero of assimilation and accommodation and the latter was a prickly and irreconcilable subversive. Well, you may take your pick between the Tory dandy who flattered the Queen into becoming the Queen-Empress and the heretical exile who believed that India would one day burst its boundaries and outstrip its masters. But when journalists today are feeling good about themselves, and sitting through the banquets at which they give each other prizes and awards, they sometimes like to flatter one another by describing their hasty dispatches as “the first draft of history”. Next time you hear that tone of self-regard, you might like to pick up Dispatches for the New York Tribune and read the only reporter of whom it was ever actually true.

· Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, edited by James Ledbetter with a foreword by Francis Wheen, is published by Penguin Classics (£12.99). Christopher Hitchens is the author of Karl Marx and the Paris Commune. His new book, God Is Not Great, is published by Atlantic Books (£16.99). To order Dispatches for £11.99 or God Is Not Great for £15.99 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call call 0870 836 0875