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Francis Wheen on Marx

Mark Abrham

Mark Abram reviews Karl Marx by Francis Wheen (Fourth Estate 1999) £20

When Karl Marx died in London in 1883 he was not well known in Britain, the country where he had spent more than half his life. There were a handful of mourners at his funeral.

Yet at Marx’s graveside his best friend, dearest comrade and lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, predicted that “his name and work will endure through the ages”.

Engels was spot on. The flood of tributes from workers’ political organisations around the world gave a hint of the tremendous legacy he had bequeathed them. Others such as Lenin and Trotsky were to take up and elaborate his ideas, fighting in Russia to bring the working class to power. Unfortunately, Marx also became more widely known as a result of the crimes committed in his name – but owing nothing to his ideas – by bureaucratic dictators such as Stalin.

Despite the incessant propaganda against him by our rulers, polls investigating the people’s choice of “man of the millennium” keep putting him top or near about.

His work forces even those who reject his aims to pay attention. Only last year on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, many hacks of the right-wing press had to admit that it contains a tremendously accurate portrait of the inner dynamics of capitalism. His political pamphlets on the failed revolutions of 1848 or on the Paris Commune of 1871 are unsurpassed pieces of revolutionary journalism and historical analysis.

Francis Wheen’s new biography treats both the man and his work with evident respect and sympathy.

It is not a biography of political ideas. Wheen does not often venture into an explanation of Marx’s intellectual contributions. His early attempt to explain the nature of the dialectic is embarrassing; he makes a better stab explaining Marx’s debt to and critique of Hegel and Feuerbach as Marx and Engels laid down the bedrock of historical materialism in the German Ideology.

His account of Capital is frankly bizarre. He claims that it “is not really a scientific hypothesis, nor even an economic treatise”. The reader should treat it “as a work of imagination: a Victorian melodrama, or a vast Gothic novel”. The abundant irony, use of metaphor and literary allusions by Marx is taken by Wheen as proof of this claim.

Wheen notes that Marx had the ambition to go beyond the realm of appearances of capitalism to the underlying reality in this work. But the only way the author can make sense of this is to interpret Marx’s quest as a journey through the hidden underworld of capitalism, to bring to the reader’s attention the grim realities of brutal exploitation that the capitalists try to hide from view.

Marx’s scientific method is totally unfathomable to Wheen. Marx’s Capital is a work which seeks to establish the laws that govern the mode of operation and reproduction of capitalism, above all its contradictory tendency to ratchet up the productivity of labour and at the same time – and because of this – a tendency towards a profitability crisis from which it cannot escape. Marx’s concern to go beyond the realm of appearances involves much more than showing the most brutal sides of capitalism. Marx is concerned to show how the nature of capital itself obscures its working, how, for instance, exploitation is disguised, how relations between humans appear as relations between things.

All this it seems is too much for Wheen who confesses himself maddened by Marx’s insistence on putting the “most impenetrable chapters first” and having his head “spin uncontrollably” at Marx’s dense conceptual presentations.

But you will not buy this book to learn about Marxism; for that read Marx himself. Or if you want a rounded, if dated, introduction to his ideas and life then get a copy of David Riazonov’s book Karl Marx; and if you want to know what Marx was really attempting in Capital read the introductions to the Penguin edition of the three volumes by Ernest Mandel.

Buy Wheen’s book for his hugely sympathetic account of Marx’s struggles – both domestic and political. Wheen does make the man leap from the page. First we get the young Marx of the 1840s with his huge capacity for enjoying life, his searing polemical skills and haughty arrogance as he makes his iconoclastic way through German philosophy and French socialism to arrive at historical materialism, the Communist Manifesto and a practical if brief involvement in the 1848 revolutions.

Next comes the 1850s – the start of the long exile, the serious study of political economy, the eschewing of practical organisational politics as the ebb tide of revolution gives rise to sects and squabbles in England. Also, a decade of grinding poverty, relieved only by the selfless financial help of Engels, and a series of family tragedies – above all the death of his only son.

The 1860s sees Marx answer the call of duty once more to involve himself in the formation and growth of the First International after 1864. Here Wheen shows Marx’s political skills in fashioning a principled socialist political profile for an extremely heterogeneous and increasingly fractious international movement, but one which succumbed to the defeat, dispersal and demoralisation that came in the wake of the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Poverty now gave way to hardship of the down-at-heel Victorian gentleman that was so trapped within Victorian bourgeois values of how he should bring up his three daughters (private education, entertaining etc.) that the Marx household remained well known to the pawnbrokers.

The rest of the 1870s sees Marx in a more backroom role, inspiring the formation and growth of a truly mass socialist party in Germany grounded in his ideas. Marx’s last five years were not very fruitful intellectually. His illnesses, many of them brought on by stress and tiredness, increasingly overwhelmed him. The early death of his daughter Jenny and then his wife, broke his health. He spent the last year of his life seeking respite in Algiers, France and the Isle of Wight before returning home to die.

On 14 March 1883 the “greatest living thinker ceased to think”, said Engels in his oration. He concluded:

“Marx was above all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life in one way or another was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalist society and the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and needs, of the conditions under which it could win its freedom.”

Until that freedom is finally won Marx’s life and work will continue to teach and inspire.

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