Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

Title: Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion - A Life

Author: Gareth Stedman Jones

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780713999044

Pages: 750

If you are asked to name a single person who had influenced the political economy the most in the twentieth century, it would undoubtedly be Karl Marx. Marxian theory, or what his followers thought he taught, directed the economic and political destinies of nations. The twentieth century began with the rise of Marxism through a revolutionary upheaval in the Soviet Union and it ended with the Marxist sun setting with the disintegration of the same country into as many as fifteen daughter republics. The man, who moved millions to a utopian goal he cherished so much, must have been an out and out intellectual. He was the foremost theoretician who directed the workers movement, but without being imprisoned a single time in the turbulent times of the nineteenth century. Marx was a man made up of energy, willpower and invincible conviction. For most of his working life, he and his family were reeling under grinding poverty which was alleviated to some extent by the generous contribution of his close friend Friedrich Engels, who was immensely rich. Earlier, scholars were patronized by kings who looked after their financial needs. In modern times, this role was taken up by academic Institutions, but a scholar like Marx who nourished ideas detrimental to the established political order could not have come under such a protective umbrella. This book describes Marx’s life in a peripheral way, with much of the volume dedicated to a narrative of how his ideas meshed with contemporary philosophical thought. Early biographers tended to offer descriptive accounts of Marx’s theoretical writings and preferred to concentrate on his life. This work pays attention to Marxian thought as much as or perhaps more than his life. Gareth Stedman Jones is a historian and Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary University of London.

Marx was an intellectual of the first calibre, but with all attendant human weaknesses such as professional jealousy, contempt of political opponents, ignoring the family in favour of his ideals and a possible adulterous affair with his housekeeper too. Apotheosis of Marx took place in the three decades after his death by clever propaganda of the German social democrats. Many of its workers were sustained by the idea that the approaching demise of capitalism was proved definitively in a book written by the great philosopher. Marx’s miserable poverty was assuaged to some extent in the late 1850s by working as the European correspondent of an American journal called New York Daily Tribune. This fact is also resented by some hard core leftists who find it shameful to conceive that their master was once in the payroll of a Yankee publisher. This argument does not take into account the intellectual worth of Marx’s articles and what the publishers were willing to pay for them. Jones describes another deviation in which twentieth century communism which pins on the indelible association between Marxism and revolution with a violent overthrow of capitalism and a leading role for the revolutionary party with more gentle theoretical concepts. The author attributes this to a selective reading of a small number of prescribed Marxian texts. In the making of Capital, he believed that workers in England might, by peaceful means, conquer political supremacy.

The book gives a general description of the social changes brought in by the French Revolution and a primer on the divided German political scene. The concepts of nationalism and religious tolerance developed with a grudging acceptance of the Jews for the first time in history. However, with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Marx’s hometown of Trier came under the rule of Prussia which re-introduced harsh discriminatory laws. This forced Marx’s father Heinrich to convert to Prussian Evangelical Christianity, in order to continue his legal career. Moreover, the Prussian King Frederik Wilhelm IV viewed the new Hegelian ideas popular among young intellectuals with growing suspicion. This denied an academic position to Marx even though he possessed a doctorate degree and diverted his career to journalism in the Rheinische Zeitung. Perhaps if he had had a comfortable teaching position, the history of the world would have been different! Marx always fell afoul of authority and had to move to France, then to Belgium and finally to England. The new Kingdom of Belgium resisted Prussian pressure to deport Marx, but he had to give an undertaking in writing of good conduct. He renounced his nationality at that time and remained stateless thereafter. The book gives a summary of the works of Marx when they are encountered in the narrative. This would have been harmless if the author had not assumed the readers to be fully familiar with abstruse concepts of philosophy and political economy. A large part of the book is hence rendered an uphill task for the ordinary readers.

The author presents some interesting information on Marxian concepts. The term ‘communism’ was coined by the French radical republican Etienne Cabet as an inoffensive substitute for the forbidden idea of an egalitarian republic. Radical republican societies mushroomed in the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 that introduced Louis Philippe as the citizen-king. However, the republicans considered the parliamentary monarchy, propertied franchise and laissez-faire economics of the king as a betrayal. Republican societies were outlawed in 1835 as a result. They hit back with a botched uprising in 1839. This explains the background of Cabet’s advocacy of the peaceful establishment of ‘communist’ society as something distinct from the republican. Jones is very liberal in including obscure theories in the narrative, but the tiresome exposition of the concepts of philosophy which were studied by Marx and other scholars is a nightmare to the readers. This hair-splitting description turns them away from the book.

The partnership between Marx and Engels was a very productive one for the workers’ movement and extremely beneficial for Marx’s family. Engels became very rich after he inherited the wealth of his industrialist father in 1860. Marx’s daughters requested money straight from him as he was almost like a father to them. Engels was the first to identify the revolutionary possibilities of modern industry and the place of the factory worker. There were occasions when the two had some issues between themselves. However, Engels’ tendency to defer to Marx’s intellectual authority smoothed out some areas of possible contention. Jones portrays the poverty of the Marx household in some detail. Anyway, there were also periods of plenty. When they had money, the family was extremely profligate. Marx never wanted to live the life of a member of the working class whose interests he was protecting through his writings. They rented expensive buildings and bought tasteful dresses for the women in the family and employed two servants. When the money was exhausted, they returned to poverty with stoic Indifference.

The two great events that exercised Marx’s political creativity were the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. In the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, he combined a brilliant thumbnail sketch of the development of modern capitalism with a depiction of the contemporary conflicts between classes and its necessary outcome. The Paris Commune lasted for just ten weeks and was nothing more than a rebellion of the working class in which they withstood a siege of Paris city by royalist troops and conducted the internal administration on their own. Marx was immensely excited by both and expected the triumph of the revolution around the corner. Anyhow, within weeks the revolutions lost steam, driving Marx to dejection. He also founded the International Working Men's Association (IWMA), also known as the First International. Organisational work ate into his literary time and he could publish the first volume of Capital only in 1867. It was Engels who brought out the second and third volumes after his demise. Marx's diligence in publishing was exemplary. He rewrote many parts of the French edition of Capital when he felt that the translation was not up to the mark in these areas.

The discussion amply demonstrates that Marx's philosophy followed the gist of the time. This was a crucial transition period in which monarchy was beating a slow but inevitable retreat. When his revolutionary ideas were taking shape, the working class was very poorly remunerated and didn't have any right to vote. In fact, the concept of an elected legislature was still inchoate. Evidently, even a great visionary like Marx could not have foreseen the great changes the revolution of 1848 and the uprising of 1871 would bring about. With a stream of reform measures that continually relaxed the norms of franchise, a new alternative was opening up for labour other than armed rebellion. Jones hints that Marx was getting around to a concept of peaceful change, at least in Britain. However, the revolutionaries who came after his death was in a hurry to bring change at the flick of a switch, instead of waiting for a lengthy democratic process. In that sense, the entire blame for the precipitous collapse of communism should not be attributed to Marx alone. The greatness of Marx was his feat of thinking up a scheme to explain how the present political economy came into being. The illusion was his inability to see much beyond the present state of things and a lack of general optimism.

The book is awfully huge and the diction is not reader-friendly. You need to have tons of determination and patience to sail through to the end. There are 123 pages full of notes to clarify the main text. You need to have a very thorough prior knowledge of nineteenth century Europe and its political, social and philosophical terms to fully appreciate the narrative. The author’s hands-free approach in this regard is highly reprehensible. It was almost a sacrifice of one’s leisure for nearly ten days to complete this book.

The book is not recommended. Very serious readers may give it a try at their own risk.

Rating: 2 Star