A New Biography Focuses on Karl Instead of Marxism
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Lev Kerbel works on a clay model for a monument to Karl Marx.Credit...Voller Ernst/ullstein bild via Getty ImagesBUY BOOK ▾
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By Peter E. Gordon
Oct. 21, 2016
KARL MARX
Greatness and Illusion
By Gareth Stedman Jones
Illustrated. 750 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $35.
“If anything is certain,” Karl Marx once declared, “it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” This remark, though often quoted, is rarely understood with the depth it demands. The 20th-century intellectuals and party ideologues who proudly called themselves Marxists typically had a clear sense of their doctrine: Marxism as they conceived it was a theory of society that pulled away the mystifying veil of capitalism to reveal the economic exploitation at its core. It promised a bracing and universal concept of human history that portrayed class conflict as the final engine of change. More than this, it served as the modern name for an ancient but enduring dream: to put an end to unfreedom, and to realize the words of the old prophet, to “wipe the tears off every face.”
It was this notion of Marxism that the historian Isaiah Berlin ascribed to its founder when he wrote of Marx that “his intellectual system was a closed one, everything that entered was made to conform to a pre-established pattern.” This is doubtless true of the so-called “dialectical materialism” that became doctrinal orthodoxy in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Suspicious of all heretics even to the point of airbrushing their faces from history, Eastern-bloc Communist leaders had little patience for the niceties of philosophical speculation. For them Marxism was not an interpretation of society but an objective science, fixed in its laws and determinist in its theory of historical change. As evidence they could cite Marx’s colleague Friedrich Engels, who in his 1883 graveside speech for his deceased friend said, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” Setting aside the fact that Darwinism is antideterminist, Marxism’s alleged status as a natural science has been hard to shed. In the lands where Marxism became a warrant for one-party rule, it was turned into a cudgel to wield against enemies whose opinions were declared objectively false. But Marx the man was rather more improvisatory in his thinking than the official ideologies that later borrowed his name.
“Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion,” by the British historian Gareth Stedman Jones, has many virtues, among them a graceful style of narration that will guide even readers unfamiliar with 19th-century history through the period’s political controversies. Stedman Jones has a keen grasp of intellectual history, and skillfully conveys the various themes in philosophy and economics from which Marx forged his own ideas. He has written the definitive biography of Marx for our time.
Stedman Jones’s Marx is a man who was responsive to the political world and capable of changing his mind, sometimes in dramatic ways. The Marx of later legend was (in Stedman Jones’s words) “a forbidding bearded patriarch and lawgiver, a thinker of merciless consistency with a commanding vision of the future.” Although this was the hero who would later be chiseled in stone (think of the hulking statues of Marx and Engels in Berlin), it was not the historical person. Eager that we distinguish between the individual and the ideology, Jones calls his subject “Karl,” a whimsical device that rescues him from “Marxism” (a term that Jones wraps in scare quotes).
Karl was born in the Rhineland town of Trier in 1818, during an age of reaction. Yet memories of the French Revolution remained strong. Karl’s father, Heinrich, a lawyer and a baptized Jew, was known to sing the “Marseillaise” at the local club. His son, more radical in outlook, chafed at the conservative policies of the Prussian government and while a student in Berlin attached himself to the radical circle of “left Hegelians.” Karl was a contributor to Rhenische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper, and fled the Rhineland when state censors forced the paper to close. In the aftermath of the 1848 uprisings, he resettled with his family in London, where he wrote bitter essays on the failure of the midcentury revolution and the unexpected rise of the demagogue Louis Napoleon.
Stedman Jones is not always sympathetic to his subject. He faults Karl for “political myopia” in his understanding of 1848, and his impatience shows when Karl reconceives specific struggles of history as a grand battle between proletarians and bourgeoisie. Still, he recognizes that even a responsibly historical portrait of Marx cannot condemn his ideas wholly to the past. “Karl was not just the product of the culture into which he was born,” Stedman Jones insists; he was also “determined to impress himself upon the world.” Reading old theories can always yield fresh lessons. A generation ago scholars still felt burdened with the question of whether Marx himself was somehow responsible for Stalin’s crimes. If this question has now lost its urgency, the debate over globalization has brought new questions to the fore. Did Marx allow for variations in time and space? Can he be redeemed from his own universalist hubris?
In his early writings and well through the 1860s, Marx propounded a theory of history that extolled the heroic achievements of the bourgeoisie as the collective agent of global change. Before the proletariat could develop into a mature class and become truly conscious of its revolutionary task, he reasoned, it was first necessary for capitalism thoroughly to modernize the world. All remnants of feudalism would dissolve; local custom and tradition would be swept aside, and industrial production would surge, condensing the two remaining classes into radically opposed groups in anticipation of capitalism’s final crisis.
This theory implied a certain inevitability to the gathering processes of historical change. It also left little room for the possibility of independent revolution in less developed regions around the globe, in the east or in the outer reaches of Europe’s empires. Marx’s universalism found its classic expression in “The Communist Manifesto,” which declared that all nations must submit “on pain of extinction” to the forces of bourgeois modernity. Elsewhere, Marx celebrated the introduction of steam power into India and the consequent dissolution of the archaic “village system.” And in the first volume of “Capital,” completed in 1867, he still reserved special disdain for what he called “ancient Asiatic” forms of production, condemning them as symptoms of a despotism that must be swept aside on the way to revolution.
After 1870, however, Marx relaxed these strictures, in part because the failure of the Paris Commune left him dismayed at the prospects for a Communist revolution in the West. This change of perspective brought a new openness to the possibility of revolution in Russia and the non-European world. In 1881, Marx answered a query from Vera Zasulich, a Russian noblewoman and revolutionary living in exile in Geneva. Pressed to explain his views on the Russian village commune, Marx agonized over his response — his letter went through no fewer than four drafts. Though still insisting that the isolation of the village commune was a weakness, he granted that the historical inevitability he had once discerned in the process of industrialization was “expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe.”
Historians of Marxism may disagree on the significance of such changes. Some may see them as a retreat, born of a desperate wish to find revolution in the least hospitable locales. For Stedman Jones, however, they signal a late change of heart as Marx abandoned the illusion of a single historical path and awakened to a major lesson of European romanticism: In his late research on medieval communal life, especially in German-speaking lands, he came to appreciate the possibility of new and diverse paths to the future that did not conform to the model of the West European bourgeoisie.
Just a year before his death and gravely ill, Marx wrote with Engels a short preface to the Russian edition of the “Manifesto.” It entertained the prospect that the common ownership system in the Russian village might serve as “the starting point for a communist development.” Three and a half decades later, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and by the late 1920s the government commenced its brutal collectivization of agriculture. Like all intellectual legacies, Marx’s work remains open to new interpretation. But it seems clear that the man himself would never have accepted the inhumanity undertaken in his name.
Peter E. Gordon’s latest book is “Adorno and Existence.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 23, 2016, Page 24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Call Him Karl. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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