Marx wrote his famous India dispatches mainly for money

Evidence

Marx sent, in all, thirty-three dispatches on Indian affairs to the New York Tribune (‘this wretched paper’, as he unjustly called it in a letter to Engels in 1858) and thought of the whole enterprise as ‘a great interruption’ to the economic studies he was then undertaking, having put the defeats of 1848–49 behind him after writing The Eighteenth Brumaire. The likelihood is that the journalism might not have come if he had not needed the money so very desperately. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 451

Categorization

• CANDY: The canonical anti-colonial texts were born of desperate bankrolling journalism for a paper Marx himself despised — a delightfully humanizing fact about Marx.
• XREF: Crucial evidence for Ahmad’s reading-history method: the material conditions of production of the very texts Said treats as pure discourse.