Klaus Fuchs, Max Beer, and Our Anonymous Pamphleteer

Klaus Fuchs makes only a cameo appearance in this tale. But because he is far better known than Jürgen Kuczynski, his relationship to the latter helps establish the milieu in which our main character operated.

Fuchs is routinely referred to pejoratively as a "spy" who "stole" atomic secrets. A more nuanced view of his activities was offered by Sir Dick Goldsmith White, Director General of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of MI6 from 1956 to 1968: "He was a scientist who got cross at the Anglo-American ploy in withholding vital information from an ally fighting a common enemy."

In 1942, Fuchs met with Jürgen Kuczynski, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics. Kuczynski introduced him to the Soviet agent, Simon Kremer (codename: "Alexander"). After meeting with Kremer several times, Fuchs's intermediary was changed to Jürgen's sister, Ursula (codename: "Sonya"), so Fuchs wouldn't need to travel to London to hand over information. Biographies of both Klaus Fuchs and Ursula Kuczynski were published in 2020: Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan and Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben MacIntyre.

Although not as cinematic as his sister's or Fuchs's careers, Jürgen Kuczynski had his own moments of transnational intrigue, beginning in the mid 1920s with a stint as director of the American Federation of Labor's newly established statistical department. During his time with the AFL, Kuczynski developed new relative wage statistics and advised AFL president William Green on what Green proclaimed as Modern Wage Policy. In Labor Statistics and Class Struggle, Marc Linder described Kuczynski's contribution to AFL wage policy, characterizing him as "President Green's Marxist Ventriloquist." More on Kuczynski's eight-year sojourn in England can be found in "Jürgen Kuczynski: A German-Jewish Marxist Scholar in Exile" by Axel Fair-Schulz in German Scholars in Exile.

Kuczynski was a prolific writer, publishing over 4,000 articles and books during his career. In 1980, he wrote a piece for the Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte titled, "Das Verhältnis von Arbeit und Freizeit: Überlegungen zur Entwicklung vormarxscher Vorstellungen" ("The relationship between work and leisure: Reflections on the development of pre-Marxist ideas"). The last four and a half pages of the article consists mainly of long quotations from William Godwin and Karl Marx, interspersed with brief commentary, at a ratio of 3:1. Kuczynski's argument is not particularly original and, in fact, he credits Max Beer's Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (1913) for any original insights.

Like Kuczynski and Fuchs, Max Beer was a German émigré who was declared an enemy alien in England when war broke out between the two countries. In Beer's case, however, it was the First World War and he, a Jew, was safely deported back to Germany for the duration. After the war, he returned to England and published the greatly expanded History of British Socialism.

Unintentionally, Kucyzinski's gloss on Beer's interpretation reveals a subtle but significant difference between the German and English versions. In the English version, Beer greatly expanded his discussion of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, from slightly less than a page to six full pages. But the German version contained a footnote in its section on William Godwin that was not replicated in the English version. Translated, that footnote read, "This sentence was later used by the pamphleteer. See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value. III. 303." The sentence in question was, roughly, "the true wealth of man is leisure."

In the English version, Beer paraphrased Godwin's statement as "Real wealth was leisure." The pamphleteer's "beautiful" statement, "Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more" appears 128 pages later with no commentary linking it back to Godwin's idea or forward to Marx's appreciation. 

Of course, Beer's footnote was incredibly opaque unless one had a copy of Theories of Surplus Value on hand to explain who "Pamphletisten" referred to. Kuczynski's gloss on Beer's cryptic footnote was, I believe, correct:

Industrious leisure as wealth is indeed a wonderful idea that has been achieved by the [imaginative] flights of humanity into the future, an idea that Marx also happily adopted as an inheritance from the past. 

Not directly from Godwin, however, but from an anonymous pamphleteer who wrote a generation later and who, as Beer rightly suspects, adopted the idea of leisure as the wealth of the nation from Godwin. 

I suspect (that ol' hermeneutics of suspicion) that both Beer and Kuczynski were avoiding something, probably unconsciously, that would be unflattering to Karl Marx. For Beer, the clues are more explicit. Instead of expanding on an idea hinted at in a footnote, he eliminated it. For Kuczynski, Marx's "happy adoption" of the "wonderful idea" as "an inheritance from the past" elides the uncomfortable conclusion that Marx credited the pamphlet's "wealth is disposable time" nowhere in his published work but effusively in his unpublished writings. 

I don't mean this as crying foul. Marx made an analytical contribution that far surpassed Godwin's and Dilke's boldly-stated convictions. The standards for crediting sources are not written in stone. And, presumably, Marx fully intended to publish Theories of Surplus Value, which contained an extensive review of the pamphlet. He just never got around to finishing it.

The spectre of "plagiarism" haunts Marx's appropriation of the idea that wealth is disposable time for several reasons. First, Friedrich Engels brought up the matter of the pamphlet that "Marx saved from falling into oblivion" in the context of refuting accusations of plagiarism from Karl Rodbertus and his acolyte. Later, along with Karl Kautsky, Engels again refuted Anton Menger's charges that Marx was deliberately deficient in citing his sources. Oddly enough, Engels and Kautsky ignored Menger's disparagement of Engels's earlier claim that Marx's views on surplus value had been influenced by the pamphlet "which," according to Menger, "contains only faint hints of the theory."

Beer was ambivalent about Herbert Foxwell's introduction to Menger's book. In 1913, he wrote, "As a result of the author's passionate anti-Marxianism, I was thrown into a polemical mood during the lecture, which seemed to me to be a poor preparation for scientific research. I therefore soon put the book down..." Six years later, he referred to Foxwell's introduction as the only "adequate exposition" of the writings of Gray, Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, whose works were "almost unattainable."  Beer had little else to say about Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour other than to complain that Menger spread the exaggerated view of William Thompson's importance he received from Adolf Held's  Zwei Bucher Zur Socialen Geschichte Englands.

Giancarlo de Vivo said back in 2019 that The Source and Remedy "has not received the attention it deserves" considering Marx's own claims. Having immersed myself in Marx's appropriation and elaboration on the pamphlet's themes, I would put the case much stronger. Close attention to the pamphlet's influence on Marx fundamentally transforms what we know about the development of Marx's thought and what he meant by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.