The father of communism is demystified in this dogma-free biography, says Ben Wilson.
This is not a book about how Karl Marx changed the world. It is not about the revolutions and crimes committed in his name in the 20th century.
Without a doubt Marx remains an iconic and mythologised figure, bogeyman for some, prophet for others.
In much contemporary discussion of him, whether it be in academia or popular journalism, the tendency is for Marx to become unmoored from his own times, leaving us free to project on to him our own prejudices and controversies as if he were our contemporary.
The Right rages at him to this day as the inveterate foe of the capitalist status quo; the Left venerates the thinker who so effectively highlighted the anarchic and destabilising effects of capitalism.
Jonathan Sperber is unwaveringly true to the book’s subtitle: this is pointedly a 19th-century life. It is refreshingly free from the dogma and partisan passion which bedevilled discussions of the great man in the blood-soaked 20th century.
Sperber seeks to understand and explain Marx purely within the context of his times: “The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialisation and the political economy stemming from it.”
Sperber succeeds magnificently in this task. He charts Marx’s intellectual evolution with enviable clarity, elucidating his ideas and putting them in context. He draws upon fresh material from the gigantic archive of Marx’s complete published and unpublished works – known by its German acronym, MEGA. It yields no smoking gun, “but it does bring to light hundreds of small details that subtly change our picture of him”.
The notion of “Marxism” dissolves; instead we have a man who, like the rest of us, accepted and repudiated ideas and held a wide variety of competing beliefs. As a journalist with deadlines forever looming and debts to pay, he reacted swiftly to events, firing out his articles. He did what was expedient.
In 1842, for example, when he was appealing to a liberal audience, he attacked communism and advocated force of arms to halt it. In 1848, just six months after co-authoring The Communist Manifesto, he dismissed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as nonsense in a speech at Cologne.
1848 was the year of revolution in Europe, and Marx was torn between two imperatives – realising communism and ridding Germany of autocracy. In his Cologne speech he reached out once again to liberals, reassuring them that revolution could occur without violent class warfare.
Sperber shows how Marx’s views on capitalism were built up during the course of a life of research. He also shows convincingly how Marx was a man of the mid-19th century, steeped in the writing of the British political economists, most notably David Ricardo. Like most of us, he drew upon the past to understand the present; in that way he was more a “backward looking figure” than a prophet or someone who can offer a guide in our present or future crises.
Sperber also shows how the development of Marx’s ideology was shaped not just by contemporary events but by personal miseries, financial woes and, most interestingly, by “factional pettiness” in the ranks of the socialists. Sperber does a brilliant job at recreating these poisonous conflicts and inflated egos, taking us into the murky world of émigré revolutionaries in the middle of the 19th century.
As Sperber writes, the feature of Marx’s life that had the most resonant appeal is his “passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising, and intransigent nature”. The biography is rich in detail about Marx’s upbringing and education, his travails as a journalist and editor, his loves, his friendships and his family life.
Marx breathes in these pages. We follow him on his wanderings, settling in one seedy apartment after another. We trudge around with him as he seeks cash to stave off his creditors and redeem his wife’s jewellery from the pawnbrokers. We enter the chaos of his study, where manuscripts tottered in piles.
Marx’s life was nothing if not precarious; he lived forever on the brink of financial ruin and personal tragedy. Most endearingly, we encounter Marx spending hours playing with his children and grandchildren and setting off for picnics on Hampstead Heath.
The Marx who emerges is “patriarchal, prudish, bourgeois, industrious, independent (or trying to be), cultured, respectable, German, with a distinct patina of Jewish background”. In other words he was very much the conventional middle-class man.
The result is to demystify Marx and return the man to us shorn of the mythmaking and iconography. He remains a towering figure, but becomes a less forbidding, more human one.
Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber
512pp, WW Norton & co, £23 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £25)
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