Karl Marx is for the Kids
Opium and Infanticide
Satirical cartoon by French artist Jean-Jacques Grandville depicting a British official ordering the Chinese emperor to buy opium. The caption reads: I tell you to immediately buy the gift here. We want you to poison yourself completely, because we need a lot of tea in order to digest our beefsteaks
(ca. 1840).
Maya Singhal
Maya Singhal is a doctoral student in anthropology at Harvard University. Her research is concerned with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and histories of capital in African American and Chinese American communities.
In October 1862, a sixteen-month-old baby died from an opium overdose in East London. The baby had had a cough, and his mother had gotten a series of medicines from a local chemist. On the final treatment, the chemist had written the wrong instructions on the bottle, accidentally prescribing twice the intended amount. Another doctor concluded that the baby died from narcotic poisoning and moreover, that opium should never have been prescribed for the baby’s particular ailment.[1]
Similar cases of opium-induced deaths of children, both accidental and intentional, circulated frequently in 19th century English newspapers. An 1853 case in Cambridgeshire blamed a death on a mother giving her child “a piece of crude opium to suck.”[2] The mother, the New York Daily Times reported, was from a family of opium eaters, and despite being poor (“laboring people”), “spent four shillings a week on the drug.”[3] While acknowledging the deaths of children from opium prescriptions, many people instead focused on low-class, provincial opium eaters, who had “local knowledge of opium” that made them comfortable giving their children liberal doses to quiet them while they worked.[4] The medical officer of the Privy Council remarked, “The mothers—namely, the agricultural gangwomen—appear often to be very reckless whether children live or die. The children are an encumbrance to them.”[5]
Karl Marx writes about these opium infanticides in Capital, volume 1 (1867). But unlike many of the people quoted in the newspapers, Marx is not concerned with whether or not opium eating is moral, so he does not discuss addiction or the moral failings of addicts. Instead, Marx is interested in the societal causes and effects of opium in England. In this sense, one might read Marx’s approach to opium infanticide as in keeping with later works like Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record (1895) and Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897). Rather than becoming preoccupied with the individual reasons people might kill their children with opium, Marx looks at the conditions “on which the definite fact” of the infanticide rate depends.[6]
There are two ways that Marx writes about opium more generally. One, which is best exemplified in Capital, volume 3 (1894), is as an important commodity in England’s trades with India and China. Another is as a commodity with specific moral implications. In his journalism, Marx is preoccupied with the moral problem that the illicit opium trade in China undermined the Chinese government by promoting bribery and corruption. In Capital, volume 1, Marx is largely concerned with the effects of opium in Europe, where opium and its derivatives morphine and laudanum were still legal pharmaceuticals. Marx mostly highlights the use of opiates in both accidental and intentional infanticide, which he blames on the increasing imperative of factory and gang work for women. This paper argues that Marx’s understandings of the impact of opium in China and England are related: opium, for Marx, helps reveal how capitalism affects familial relationships.
As such, Marx’s analysis of China also intervenes in orientalist understandings of Chinese political and social life, which had circulated widely as politicians around the world argued over the morality of England during the Opium Wars. In an 1841 speech, which concluded that Britain was in the right in its “War with China,” John Quincy Adams argued that:
The principle of the Chinese government is, that the whole nation is one great family, of which the emperor is the father. His authority is unlimited, and he can, not only appoint such of his sons as he pleases to succeed him, but may even transfer the succession to another family. Idol worship, polygamy, infanticide, are the natural consequences of such a system within the realm, and the assumption of a pretension to superiority over all other nations regulates their intercourse with foreigners.[7]
Adams clearly does not account for infanticide in England at the time, instead highlighting what he sees as indicators of Chinese immorality. Marx’s approach suggests societal reasons for infanticide in England, as well as for the relationship between opium and the decline of familial bonds in China, which might explain the infanticide rates attributed to China’s immorality by other public figures at the time.
In Chapter 15 of Capital, volume 1, Marx discusses machinery as “a means for producing surplus value.”[8] One effect that machines have is to enable weaker people, like women and children to work. But as such, the innovation of machinery also forces “every member of the worker’s family” to work, lowering the value of men’s labor-power.[9] He writes, “Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of children’s play, but also of independent labour at home, within customary limits, for the family itself.”[10] Marx condemns this change as making men into “slave-dealer[s],” selling their wives and children. [11] He goes on to describe the perilous positions in which this places children, both from the conditions of the factory and from the lower amount “independent labour at home” by women because of their factory work:
[T]he high death-rates [of children] are, apart from local causes, principally due to the employment of the mothers away from their homes, and to the neglect and maltreatment arising from their absence, which consists of things such as insufficient nourishment, unsuitable food and dosing with opiates; besides this, there arises an unnatural estrangement between mother and child, and as a consequence intentional starving and poisoning of the children.[12]
Rather than blaming mothers for feeding their children opium, Marx shows how working conditions necessitated extreme measures to balance working in factories and in the home.[13]
In provincial areas, infanticide was generally much lower. When there were comparable rates to factory districts, reports found that the causes were similar: women were being employed in labor gangs. Marx writes, “All the phenomena of the factory districts are reproduced here, including a yet higher degree of disguised infanticide and stupefaction of children with opiates.”[14] Later, Marx describes these gangs as bastions of immorality, with many young girls getting pregnant by boys of similar age. He adds, “Their children, when opium does not finish them off entirely, are born recruits for the gang.”[15] Again, rather than ascribe infanticide to mothers’ addictions like many of his contemporaries, Marx suggests that the conditions of labor make it difficult for mothers to care for their children. Children are only valued within this system as potential laborers, so their deaths are not major concerns.
In a footnote, Marx adds:
In the agricultural as well as the factory districts of England the consumption of opium among adult workers, both male and female, is extending daily. ‘To push the sale of opiate… is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article’ ([Public Health, Sixth Report, London, 1864], p. 459). Infants that received opiates ‘shrank up into little old men’, or ‘wizened like little monkeys’ (ibid., p. 460). We see here how India and China have taken their revenge on England.[16]
It is a curious footnote, especially the final sentence. Can vengeful intention really be ascribed to trades between de facto and de jure colonies and a metropole? To try to understand what Marx might mean by this, it is useful to read his journalism, in which he is much more concerned with the “demoralizing” effects of the opium trade on China. Describing the impacts of the Opium Wars, Marx writes:
Up to 1830, the balance of trade being continually in favor of the Chinese, there existed an uninterrupted importation of silver from India, Britain and the United States into China. Since 1833, and especially since 1840, the export of silver from China to India has become almost exhausting for the Celestial Empire. Hence the strong decrees of the Emperor against the opium trade, responded to by still stronger resistance to his measures. Besides this immediate economical consequence, the bribery connected with opium smuggling has entirely demoralized the Chinese State officers in the Southern provinces. Just as the Emperor was wont to be considered the father of all China, so his officers were looked upon as sustaining the paternal relation to their respective districts. But this patriarchal authority, the only moral link embracing the vast machinery of the State, has gradually been corroded by the corruption of those officers, who have made great gains by conniving at opium smuggling.[17]
Again, Marx is not concerned with the demoralizing effects of addiction in China. Instead, it is the bribery and corruption inherent to illicit trade that destroys the “hereditary” structure of the state. If the opium infanticide of English children is not actually the “vengeance” of India and China, then it is certainly a satisfying reversal that the substance that undermined the “paternal relation” of the Chinese government also plays a central role in the devastation of the English family.
However, Marx does not mean that the destruction of the paternal Chinese state was negative. Reflecting on the impacts of the 1850 Taiping rebellion, which he reads as a response to the condition of China after the Opium Wars, Marx goes on to say:
It is almost needless to observe that, in the same measure in which opium has obtained the sovereignty over the Chinese, the Emperor and his staff of pedantic mandarins have become dispossessed of their own sovereignty. It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity.[18]
According to Marx, the destruction of the paternal state in China because of the opium trade might have actually been a good thing, leading to revolution and social change. But this raises the question of how Marx evaluates the destruction of the English family…
[1] “Inquests,” The Observer, October 26, 1862, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
[2] “English Opium Eaters,” New York Daily Times, September 7, 1855, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
[3] Ibid.
[4] British Medical Journal, “Infanticide in England,” Medical News, 1865, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Emile Durkheim, Suicide (London: Routledge, 1952), 1.
[7] “Art. III. Lecture on the War with China, delivered before the Massachusetts Historical Society, December, 1841, By the hon. John Quincy Adams of Mass., U.S.A. Extracted from an American Paper,” The Chinese Repository, May 1, 1842, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
[8] Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1867 [1976]), 492.
[9] Ibid., 517.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 519.
[12] Ibid., 521.
[13] Marx also describes how food and medicine was “adulterated” to try to make rations cheaper and keep workers’ wages down:
From the reports of the most recent Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of the means of subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception, in England. For example, the examination of thirty-four specimens of opium, bought from the same number of different chemists in London, showed that thirty-one were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, etc. Several specimens did not contain an atom of morphine. (Marx, Capital, volume 1, 750)
So there are other reasons that mothers might give their children incorrect doses of drugs or malnourish them. In an attempt to increase profits, people selling these necessities adulterate their products.
[14] Ibid., 522.
[15] Ibid., 852.
[16] Ibid., 522 n.51.
[17] Marx, “Revolution in China and in Europe,” New York Daily Tribune, June 14, 1853, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/14.htm.
[18] Ibid.