KARL MARX

9
234 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Harney was the orphaned son of a Kentish sailor and had been in
Chartist journalism all his life. Engels had met him as early as 1843 when
Harney was editing The Northern Star. He was the most internationallyminded
of the Chartist leaders and this, together with his republicanism,
led to his forced resignation from the Star in 1850. He then started his
own paper, The Red Republican, later renamed The Friend of the People,
which in November 1850 published the first English translation of the
Communist Manifesto of 'citizens Charles Marx and Frederic Engels'. A
similarity in outlook, combined with the fact that Harney had a mass
following and a newspaper, induced Marx to attempt a close collaboration
with him. But Harney was above all a pragmatist and, while willing
to join Marx and the Blanquists in the World Society of Communist
Revolutionaries, he was at the same time embarking on a course that was
bound to estrange him from Marx. By the summer of 1850 Harney
had become convinced of the necessity of allying the National Charter
Association with the expanding, but not so radical, Co-operatives and
Trade Unions. The immediate cause of their estrangement was Harney's
indiscriminate enthusiasm for the various refugee groups in London who
could all rely on getting their views published in The Friend of the People.
In February 1851 Harney's catholicity went further: he attended an international
meeting to commemorate the Polish patriot Bern and gave the
best speech of the evening. The meeting was supported by Louis Blanc
and the Blanquists and held under the presidency of Schapper. Other
incidents followed. On 24 February Harney contrived to be present at
banquets organised by the rival French factions and failed to protest
energetically enough when Schramm and Pieper, two of Marx's young
hangers-on, were expelled from the one organised by Louis Blanc, a large
affair with more than 700 present, mostly Germans. Marx professed to
be tired of 'the public incense with which Harney indefatigably covers les
petits grands hommesand described Harney, with that touch of snobbery
which he sometimes found impossible to suppress, as 'a very impressionable
plebeian'. 100 And concerning the 24 February banquet he wrote to
Engels:
Harney has got himself involved in this affair, first because of his need
to have great men to admire, which we have often made fun of in the
past. Then, he loves theatrical effects. He is stuck deeper in
the democratic mud than he wishes to admit. He has a double spirit:
one which Friedrich Engels made for him and another which is his
own. 101
This disagreement (which Engels partly ascribed to his own departure
from London and Marx's poor command of English) 102 marked a definite