Three books on the life and thought of the `red terror doctor’
Karl Marx: A Biography
By
David McLellan, Palgrave Macmillan
4th
Edition 2006
487
pages, paperback
Unlike
Wheen, McLellan has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Marx’s published work, and
pulls off the difficult feat of interweaving exposition of Marx’s main works
with a detailed and sympathetic account of his life, both public and private.
Compares
well to classics
McLellan’s
biography also compares well to some of the classic biographies in the Marxist
canon. Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx: The
Story of His Life is still very much worth a read, especially for the
wonderfully clear chapter on the second and third volumes of Capital, which Mehring tells us was
written as a favour by no less than Rosa Luxemburg. However, Mehring’s book was
written in 1918 and thus predates the publication in the 1930s of such
important works of Marx’s as the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse of 1857-8, as well as numerous items of Marx’s
correspondence.
Boris
Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen’s Karl
Marx: Man and Fighter, completed under the shadow of Hitler in
It
would be futile in a brief review to attempt to summarise McLellan’s succinct
summaries of Marx’s main works, such as the 1844 Manuscripts, the political writings about the 1848 revolutions and
their aftermath, the Grundrisse, the
various volumes of Capital, through
to the late political writings about the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Programme. I’ll
simply encourage readers to pick up McLellan’s book for themselves. Although
Marx’s writings can be extremely hard going, McLellan does an excellent job of
extracting the main lines of Marx’s thought, and by deft quotation does so in a
way that conveys a sense of Marx’s great skills as a writer. Readers are likely
to leave McLellan’s volume with an appetite to read Marx’s works for
themselves, which is the best sign of success in an intellectual biography.
Tempestuous
life
However,
this is more than simply an intellectual biography. McLellan seamlessly
integrates his account of Marx’s writings with the story of his sometimes
tempestuous and chaotic life, giving detailed accounts of Marx’s activities as
a revolutionary in both continental
Again,
I won’t attempt to summarise McLellan’s account of Marx’s political life here.
Instead, I’ll limit myself to some observations about Marx the man, and some
critical remarks about the short concluding chapter on ``Marx’s Legacy’’.
Marx’s
most important works – the Grundrisse
and Capital among them – were written
in extremely difficult conditions, conditions that would surely have silenced
many a lesser human being. Marx was living in
Perhaps
the most harrowing episodes in Marx’s life were the premature deaths of his
children. Marx’s only son, Edgar, died in 1855 at the age of eight while the
Marx family was living in a squalid two-room flat in
William
Leibknecht, a friend of the family, wrote of what he saw:
The mother silently weeping, bent
over the dead child, Lenchen sobbing beside her, Marx in a terrible agitation
vehemently, almost angrily, rejecting all consolation, the two girls clinging
to their mother crying quietly, the mother clasping them convulsively as if to
hold them and defend them against Death that had robbed her of her boy.
A
few months later, Marx wrote to Lassalle:
Bacon says that really important men
have so many relations with nature and the world that they recover easily from
every loss. I do not belong to these important men. The death of my child has
deeply shaken my heart and mind and I still feel the loss as freshly as on the
first day. My poor wife is also completely broken down.
Despite
these setbacks and grinding poverty – probably only the handouts from Engels
saved the Marx family from complete destitution, and Marx often was unable to
go out because his coat was in the pawnshop – Marx worked incredibly hard,
regularly researching in the British Museum from nine in the morning to seven
in the evening and then staying up late into the night writing.
But
there are many lighter moments, including one hilarious episode in which
William Leibknecht, Edgar Bauer and Marx get drunk on a pub crawl on the
Tottenham Court Road.
`Shallow
optimism’?
The
short concluding chapter on Marx’s legacy is in many ways the weakest part of
McLellan’s otherwise fine volume. For example, McLellan accuses Marx of ``shallow
optimism’’ and cites the environmental crisis facing humanity as a problem for
Marx’s world outlook:
Marx shared the common 19th-century
view that progress was somehow inexorably written into the story of human
development. There would no doubt be setbacks and sufferings, but humanity, in
its struggle to dominate nature, would in the long run produce a society in
which human capacities were more extensively exercised and human needs more
fully met. But more recent developments in the productive forces, and
particularly atomic energy, have led many to wonder whether humanity’s efforts
to dominate nature have not taken a fundamentally wrong turning. The
potentially disastrous impact of global warming is only just beginning to be
realized. We have lost our nerve and our own inventions have made us more
dubious about ‘progress’ than at any time for the last two hundred years.
However,
in many ways the global environmental crisis is the perfect illustration of
Marx’s idea – outlined in the famous Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, which McLellan earlier quotes –
that the capitalist system of production relations, like the feudal system of
production relations that preceded it, at a certain stage begins to fetter the
development of the productive forces, the things necessary for the satisfaction
of human needs. As well as fettering the development of the productive forces,
the capitalist system of production relations, in which every aspect of life is
subjected to the demands of the market and the pursuit of private profit, makes
dealing with the problem of climate change effectively impossible, threatening
the cessation of life on the planet altogether. Only planned production on a global scale can begin to address the
challenge of climate change; but planned production requires co-operation between the owners of
productive units, and the major players in the global capitalist system can no
more co-operate to save the environment than a pack of wolves can co-operate to
protect a baby lamb. It simply cannot happen: co-operation on a global scale
between the owners of productive units can happen only on the basis of
collective ownership of the productive forces on a global scale.
Despite
this and other weaknesses in the concluding chapter, though, McLellan’s book
remains the standard biography of Marx, scholarly and well informed, but at the
same time an enjoyable and compelling read.
One
thing that is clear is that Marx had an enormous sense of humour, so I will end
this review on a light-hearted note. In the later years of his life Marx
attained a certain degree of notoriety due to his association with the First
International and was referred to in polite circles as ``the red terror doctor’’.
But he also gained a degree of grudging respect, and in 1867 he was elected by
his respectable English neighbours to the prestigious post of ``Constable of
the sinecure of St. Pancras’’.
Marx
declined the invitation with the comment, ``I should tell them that I was a
foreigner and that they should kiss me on the arse.’’ His last recorded words
on the
*
* *
Marx’s London
Marx in London: An Illustrated Guide
By Asa Briggs & John Callow
Published by Lawrence & Wishart, in association with the Marx Memorial
Library
Revised edition, 2008
110 pages
Australians visit
Fleeing continental Europe after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, Marx lived in London from 1849 until his death in 1883, and it was there that he wrote the great works on political economy on which his fame principally rests.
The first edition of this guide, written by the eminent social historian Asa Briggs, was published in 1982, and now a revised and updated version has been published with the assistance of John Callow, the chief librarian of the Marx Memorial Library.
The guide interweaves the social history of London with the story of Marx’s
life and work, and with the aid of numerous maps and photographs guides the
reader through the places most associated with Marx: Soho, where he lived on
the edge of poverty in the early 1850s; the British Museum, where he did the research
for his masterpiece, Capital; Hampstead Heath, where the Marx family
regularly escaped the smoke and grime of the city on Sunday afternoons; Covent
Garden, scene of the meetings of the First International; and Highgate
Cemetery, the site of Marx’s tomb and a place of pilgrimage for socialists the
world over.
If you’re visiting
*
* *
The story of a book that shook the world
Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography
By
Francis Wheen
Atlantic
Books 2006
130
pages
Francis
Wheen, who produced an entertaining (if over-hyped) biography of Karl Marx in
1999, returns to Marx with a ``biography’’ of the revolutionary philosopher’s
most famous and important single work, in the series from
Unlike
most commentators, Wheen conveys a vivid sense of Das Kapital’s vastly under-appreciated qualities as a great work of
literature, infinitely superior in this regard to the bourgeois political
economists whose work Marx trounced on purely scientific grounds: ``The book
can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by
the monster they created.’’
Wheen
does a good job of destroying some of the myths that surround the book. For
example, he recounts how British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed
never to have read it, giving up because of a page-long footnote on page 2. As
Wheen points out, a glance at page 2 of the book reveals this to be a wild
exaggeration.
`Immiseration’
Another
example concerns the familiar claim that Marx’s predictions about the
progressive immiseration of the proletariat under capitalism have been refuted
by the actual development of capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries: ``Countless pundits have taken this to mean that capitalism’s
swelling prosperity would be achieved by an absolute reduction in the workers’
wages and standard of living, and they have found it easy to mock. Look at the
working classes of today, with their cars and microwave ovens: not very
immiserated, are they?’’. Wheen points out that the idea that Marx has been
refuted in this way is based on a complete misreading of Chapter 25 of Das Kapital: Marx in fact argued only
that under capitalism there would be a relative
– as opposed to absolute – decline in wages, and Wheen shows that this is in
fact ``demonstrably true’’.
In
addition, Wheen makes the excellent point that ``immiseration’’ concerns not
just the wages workers receive, but how long and how hard they have to work in
order to get them. And in fact: ``The average British employee now puts in
80,224 hours over his or her working life, as against 69,000 hours in 1981. Far
from losing the [capitalist] work ethic, we seem ever more enslaved by it’’.
Wheen quotes Marx’s uncanny prescience regarding this in a passage in Chapter
12: ``We may read on one page that the worker owes a debt of gratitude to
capital for developing his productivity, because the necessary labour time is
thereby shortened, and on the next page that he must prove his gratitude in future
for 15 hours instead of 10.’’ So much for the imminent leisure age predicted in
the 1970s by apologists for capitalism!
Selective
quoting
There
are parts of the book where Wheen is less convincing. For example, in the
chapter on the influence of Das Kapital
after Marx’s death, by highly deceptive selective quotation from What Is To Be Done?, Wheen portrays
Lenin as laying out an abstract blueprint for the future tyrannies of
Stalinism. This is an all too familiar trick, and it is a pity that Wheen
succumbs to the temptation to play it.
Also,
Wheen objects to the labour theory of value (according to which the exchange value
of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary amount of labour time
required to produce it): ``Why do people sometimes pay hundreds of thousands of
pounds for a single diamond ring or pearl necklace? Mightn’t these
extraordinary prices also owe something to scarcity value, or perceptions of
beauty, or even to simple one-upmanship?’’
But
this is a weak objection. For one thing, there is a difference between the
concepts of exchange value and price. True, Marx and the classical
political economists generally held that in the long run, the prices of
commodities tend in the direction of their exchange values. However, this
clearly does not imply that the price of each and every commodity sold on the
market is equivalent to its exchange value.
Moreover,
even waiving this point there is a further problem with Wheen’s objection: as
almost any modern philosopher of science will attest, empirical explanatory
theories are confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of their capacity to
furnish a whole body of predictions. The holistic
nature of theory confirmation means that a theory can issue in an inaccurate
prediction yet still be confirmed overall if the theory’s predictions on
sufficiently many and sufficiently important other matters are sound. So even
if the labour theory of value did yield the wrong prediction about the exchange
value of a diamond ring, it might still be justified in virtue of its capacity
to predict the exchange values of more common commodities or, at a further
remove, the long-term qualitative characteristics of the capitalist mode of
production.
And,
indeed, Wheen acknowledges the greatness of Marx’s achievement in just this
regard: despite some wildly over-optimistic predictions about the imminence of
socialist revolution, Marx pulled off the remarkable feat of accurately
portraying the general shape and qualitative character of globalised capitalism
in the 21st century from the vantage point of its infancy in one small part of
the world in the 19th century. In this respect, no bourgeois economist or
social scientist has ever come near to Marx.
Wheen
concludes: ``Marx’s errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are
eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the
nature of the beast. While all that is solid melts into air, Das Kapital’s vivid portrayal of the
forces that govern our lives – and of the instability, alienation, and
exploitation they produce – will never lose its resonance, or its power to
bring it into focus. Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall,
Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the
most influential thinker of the 20th century.’’
Readers
of Wheen’s stimulating book will leave it with the desire to tackle Marx’s
masterpiece for themselves: for this especially, Wheen is to be commended.
[Alex Miller is a member of the Scottish Socialist Party and of the
Democratic Socialist Perspective in the Australian Socialist Alliance. Abridged
versions of these reviews first appeared in the Australian socialist newspaper Green Left Weekly.]