MARX’S DAS KAPITAL: A Biography
By FRANCIS WHEEN
Allen&Unwin, 2006, 130 pp, $22.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
The state censors in Tsarist Russia were, in the short term, justified in their decision to pass Marx’s greatest work, Das Kapital, for publication in 1867, reasoning that it would not be read by workers because the text was so impenetrable that “few would read it and still fewer understand it”. Fifty years later, however, they had come to regret their decision as Marxists (like Trotsky, who studied the book in exile in Siberia, and Lenin, who read it at age 18) took the Russian workers’ movement to victory.
Francis Wheen’s story of Das Kapital charts the writing and the impact of the book, which had a laboured (overdue by at least 21 years) passage to the publisher. The first volume of Das Kapital was the only one to appear in Marx’s lifetime. It took nearly four decades for the remaining three volumes to be assembled from notes and drafts found by Engels in Marx’s study after his death.
The literally painful progress of the opus (Marx’s infamous carbuncles caused him to finish volume 1 standing up) was a result, says Wheen, of Marx “never being able to resist a distraction”, including “polemical pamphlets and articles, and wasteful feuds and score-settling” (although the Communist Manifesto, written in the midst of barricades and revolution in Europe in 1848, and much other output, can hardly be brushed off as a “distraction”).
Wheen more accurately catalogues the domestic interruptions that hampered Marx’s work on Das Kapital in London where he spent over three decades of his political exile from Germany, facing evictions for non-payment of rent, irate creditors banging on the door (“I don’t suppose anyone has written so much about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff”, he joked), continual illnesses, a brood of children to lavish attention on and to grieve over when some of them died young.
Das Kapital was also delayed by Marx’s demanding requirement for research. He studied algebra and the movement of the celestial spheres, he taught himself Russian so he could read books on the Russian land system, he explored the myriad byways of economic theory. His research was heroic but often untamed, however, and Engels was perpetually badgering Marx to finish the book.
Overdue but worth the wait is Wheen’s assessment of Das Kapital. Wheen does a fair job in limited space of capturing the major elements of the Marxist economic analysis of capitalism – surplus value (the extraction of profit from the labour of the worker), the human alienation that results from this, the permanent boom-bust cycle of capitalism.
Wheen is also judicious in assessing the common criticisms of Marx’s predictions (and thus Marxism itself) in Das Kapital, particularly the imminent demise of capitalism which, say the critics, has been disproven by the fact that capitalism is still going strong a century and a half later. Marx’s gleeful forecasts of capitalism’s terminal crisis, with which he greeted “every flutter in the markets or rash of bankruptcies”, have self-evidently proved premature, notes Wheen, adding, however, that Marx was not really surprised by the resilience of capitalism.
Previous economic modes of production lasted centuries, even millennia, before giving way under their contradictions, and capitalism is a far more dynamic and powerful productive system than any of its predecessors. “Such an awesome force is unlikely to fizzle out after only a century or two”, says Wheen, noting that “when one studies his work as a whole”, Marx’s expectation (of capitalism’s longevity) was on a different plane to his hope (of its near death).
Reading Das Kapital has not always been easy, even for Marxists. Wheen quotes the late nineteenth century English socialist and designer, William Morris, who was not the only one who has “thoroughly enjoyed the historical part” but suffered “agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics of that great work”. But to those not intimidated by the hard-going early chapters of the first volume (of which Marx himself was apologetic), or the highly abstract final volumes, the rewards are rich, not least as a literary experience.
Wheen classes Das Kapital as “radical literary collage”, mixing mythology, literature, factory inspectors’ reports, fairy tales and mathematical formulae in a modernist “fractured narrative” which is often mistaken by Marx’s critics for “formlessness and incomprehensibility”. Das Kapital could have been a “conventional economic treatise” but Marx made it into a work of art, its dramatic pathos, satire and imagery (with vampires a favoured Gothic motif) central to what Wheen sees as the book’s ultimate aim – “penetrating the veils of illusion to reveal the exploitation by which capitalism lives”.
Wheen particularly praises Marx for the “penetrating accuracy” of his analysis of capitalism. In this, Wheen is not alone amongst a new breed of Marx commentator, noting that the billionaire speculator, George Soros, and a growing faction of mainstream economics journalists and Wall Street bankers, are signing on to various Marxist insights on globalisation and monopolisation.
These ‘bourgeois’ Marxists, however, believe that the point now is to interpret the world (to their benefit) and not to change it, thus reversing the belief of Marx the revolutionary socialist. Wheen, too, is silent on what to do with the new-found Marxist wisdom. What to do about the “instability, alienation and exploitation” of capitalism? Well, its your lot, mate, is the best answer Wheen seems to have. Wheen’s obligatory vilification of Lenin as the authoritarian, elitist political progenitor of Stalin shows that Marx’s liberal admirers, too, have a no-go area when it comes to using Das Kapital against capital.