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Marx and the British Government
Why didn't the British expel Marx? Had he agreed not to attack Queen Victoria, or call for revolution in Britain?
He attacked British policy in India, Ireland and the U.S. southern states; also attacked British capitalism, of course, child labor, etc. So why did the British let him stay? Bourgeois liberalism?
Yep, liberalism. The British bourgeoisie have always been very confident of the passivity of the working class in this country. Marx also wasn't that involved in actively organizing British workers. He was more involved as an emigre in German and French matters. So he certainly kept a lower profile than he did on the continent. Possibly for that reason too they saw him as a destabilizing effect on the rival powers of europe.
Funny thing about liberal democratic imperialism is that they often let people get away with dissent and will even allow those who want to violently overthrow the government to keep on talking.
But once you reach their colonies, it's a damn police state.
So long as he didnt directly call for the overthrow of the crown there was nothing legally they could do IIRC. Also he only become known in his later years. The first mentions of Marx in the press I could find, beyond him writing letters to newspapers debating shit, are from the 1870s when some newspapers accuse him of being the conspiratorial mastermind behind planning the Paris Commune. If he had become massively known earlier in his life though I'm still unsure the British government would have expelled him though. Maybe they wouldn't know where to send him either, as he was, i assume, effectively stateless after the creation of the German Empire (unless he would have been automatically granted citizenship due to being Prussian?)
afaik there are a few newspaper articles from the 1870's/80's on marxists.org and a few other sources i've read that seem to suggest that the British establishment eventually came to view Marx as a relatively harmless eccentric*?
albeit a very well read one with potentially dangerous ideas.
