KARL MARX

LONDON 235
estrangement between Marx and the Chartist movement as a whole. Marx
met Harney three months later at a tea party to celebrate the eightieth
birthday of Robert Owen. Although they corresponded from time to time,
a quarter of a century was to pass before their next meeting (a brief
encounter on Waterloo Station). 103 In 1852 Harney resigned from the
(Chartist executive, moved to the North of England, thence to Jersey and
eventually to the United States where he continued a correspondence
with Engels to whom he was always more attached than to Marx.
As Marx's enthusiasm for Harney waned, so his relations with Ernest
Jones, the other leader of the Chartist Left, increased. Engels wrote to
Marx on Jones's death in 1869 that he had been 'the only educated
Englishman among the politicians who was, at bottom, completely on
our side'. 104 Jones, the son of a cavalry officer, was a barrister by profession
and a novelist and poet in his spare time. He was born to wealth and
high social standing, all of which he threw away on his conversion to
Chartism in 1846. He had been imprisoned for two years in 1848 and
on his release was tireless in trying to keep the Chartist movement alive
through lecture tours (he was a very effective speaker) and through the
paper which he started in 1851 and which continued until 1858, called
originally Notes to the People and later The People's Paper. In the early 1850s
Jones, unlike Harney, emphasised the doctrines of class struggle, the
incompatibility of interests between capital and labour, and the necessity
of the conquest of political power by the working class - views which his
close association with Marx and Engels did much to reinforce. Although
he was the only notable Chartist, once Harney had retired from active
politics his influence steadily declined. The workers did not welcome a
doctrine of class war and were more concerned to defend their own
interests inside the capitalist system. Marx kept up a regular contact with
Jones during the 1850s and attended his public lectures, some of which
he found 'great stuff (though Jenny Marx considered his lecture on the
I listory of the Popes to be 'very fine and advanced for the English, but
for us Germans who have run the gauntlet of Hegel, Feuerbach, etc., not
quite a la hauteur). 105
Marx at first suspected Jones of siding with Harney; later, however, he
came to regard Jones as 'the most talented of the representatives of
Chartism' 106 and approved of the tone of The People's Paper. This he
contrasted favourably with Harney's criticism of Chartism as a 'class
movement' which had not yet become 'a general and national movement',
107 expressions that particularly annoyed Marx in that they reminded
him of Mazzini's phraseology. Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1852 Marx
considered that Jones was making far too much use of him as a source
of information on foreign affairs and for general editorial support. 'I told