Karl Marx
By Francis Wheen
Fourth Estate, 1999
431 pp., $49.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/20603
Ever since he wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the theories of Karl Marx have been systematically pronounced dead and buried by the professional scribes of capitalism. Marx's political grave, however, is dug up by the biography industry with such regularity that one begins to suspect there is still life in the old boy yet and certainly that his ideas weren't buried with him in Highgate cemetery in 1883.
English writer and journalist, Francis Wheen, is the latest to have a crack at Marx in his jaunty biography of the founder of modern communism.
With a middle-class upbringing, Marx's first tryst with radical politics came at Bonn University, when, as president of the Trier Tavern Club, dedicated to liberal politics and pub crawls, he found himself engaged in street battles with gangs of soldiers who used to make the students kneel down and swear allegiance to the king. Marx refused to capitulate, acquired a gun and was wounded in a duel.
He soon found a weapon more suited to his tastes: the ideas of philosopher Georg Hegel, whose radical methodology for explaining the clash and overthrow of ideas — the dialectic — was put to progressive use in understanding social change by Marx and other student radicals.
With the revolutionary temperature rising in Germany in the 1840s, academic repression by the authorities put an end to any prospects Dr Marx, PhD, had for a university career. Revolutionary journalism and a discovery of the combative Parisian working class shaped Marx into a revolutionary communist.
Armed with pen (and pistol), Marx, with the dashing Frederick Engels who rode with insurrectionary troops, gave the 1848 revolution in Germany its communistic fervour. Defeated by a liberal bourgeoisie more scared of its working-class allies than of Prussian autocracy, the German revolutionaries were dispersed into exile. Marx and Engels found their final refuge in England, the country least touched by the revolutionary contagion.
In London, Marx turned his attention to the "dismal science" of economics to explain how capitalism worked and why the proletariat was economically placed to be the social force for human emancipation.
Unwilling to be entrapped by wage slavery himself, and incapable of de-classing himself to proletarian status (his one attempt to get a job, as a railway clerk, failed because of his illegible handwriting), Marx was financially supported by Engels. Engels spent 20 years at the Manchester office of Ermen and Engels, filching money from his father's textile firm to keep Marx funded for his bouts of all-night work on the monumental Capital, fuelled by cheap ale and foul cigars, whilst police spies from Prussia and irate butchers, bakers and bailiffs hammered on his door.
Other trials came in the form of emigre politics and the often frustrating but unavoidable contest over political ideas and strategies within the exile community. Marx frequently found himself embroiled in lengthy and exhausting polemics with those who wanted a short cut to instant revolution through utopian dreaming or authoritarian "socialism".
But it was not all vexations during the 30 years of Marx's British exile. The European working class began to organise, on an international basis, to defend its class interests against the triumphant bourgeoisie, forming the International Working Men's Association (IWMA) in 1864. The IWMA immediately coopted Marx onto its general council and Marx was back in his activist element as de facto leader of the first mass movement of the international working class, until Bakunin's anarcho-terrorist clique managed to infiltrate and destroy the organisation.
The Paris Commune in 1871 also inspired Marx with its confirmation that the working class could take state power and wield it democratically.
With the first volume of Capital completed, and a mass of notes for the remaining volumes piling up, Marx spent his last years in declining health. His funeral was attended by only a handful of supporters, but his ideas were burrowing away in all corners of the globe. Lenin, for instance, was soon reading Capital.
So what does Wheen's biography make of all this? A bit of a mixed bag, politically. Refuting the caricature of Marx as an "intellectual bully", Wheen shows how some of the left-wing targets of Marx's combative personality deserved their fate. Ferdinand Lassalle was an example of the left dictator, a "tyrant-in-waiting", a pompous, vain megalomaniac who believed that workers "look naturally to dictatorship". Wilhelm Weitling was an "insufferable egomaniac", a "vain, utopian dreamer" and a crank. Mikhail Bakunin was an "incorrigible fantasist" and schemer who did not trust working-class democracy.
Yet Wheen concludes, contradictorily, that "Marx disliked organisations or institutions which he couldn't dominate", that he was "undoubtedly a sadistic intellectual thug" who revelled in "intriguing, score-settling and striving for mastery". Marx's jealousy of his rivals, says Wheen, came from a power fetish, a flaw which has made purges and dictatorship sins of all revolutionary organisations and regimes.
This lapse into anti-communist orthodoxy by Wheen is unwarranted. Certainly, Marx was not free from extravagant vendettas and ill-judged verbose sarcasm, but this was merely the regrettable waste-product of serious political debate.
What drove Marx on to the heights of polemical excess was a profound difference between his concept of mass working-class movements for democratic power and the elitist or utopian political concepts of his left opponents.
Despite a declaration that "only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag", Wheen occasionally strays down the path of equating Marxism with Stalin's slave labour camps by portraying Marx's personal behaviour as the seed of Stalinist dictatorship. Wheen, with all the indignation of outraged liberalism, charges Marx with failing to embrace pluralism.
Actually, the evidence that Wheen displays shows the opposite. For example, Marx successfully held together, over many years, a fractious bunch of trade unionists, cooperationists and anarchists in the IWMA. Marx polemicised against their political ideologies but what mattered to him was the unity in action of the working-class forces they mobilised.
Marx's major political and theoretical concepts are treated somewhat skimpily by Wheen, generally subordinated to a focus on Marx's personality and behaviour. This results in a rather unattractive picture of Marx and Marxism.
Every dodgy acquaintance (Marx's extremely limited dalliance with one eccentric Tory politician), every deviation from communist rectitude (not practising what he preached), every personal indiscretion (in private correspondence with Engels), every filial demerit (Marx didn't like his mother), every aspect of his middle-class lifestyle (piano lessons for his daughters, seaside holidays), all are flourished by Wheen like a prosecuting attorney wielding incriminating exhibits. They do little more, however, than show that Marx was no saint (which is hardly unique to Marx) and was not entirely free from the trappings of his class and era (again, unsurprising but not damning).
For all that, Wheen's biography of Marx is far better than most. Its breezy, journalistic style is entertaining and the error count is at the lower end of the Marxicological scale.
Overall, however, Wheen's view of Marx-through-the-keyhole obscures, and in some cases seriously misrepresents, what was truly significant about Marx's theoretical and practical contribution to communist and working-class politics.