Over the past month I have read both Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life and Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Both books have their strengths and weaknesses. Both do a convincing job of correcting the record on Marx and his relationship to the doctrine that bears his name. They put him and his ideas in their proper context, and show that the ideology that developed after his death was a marked departure from what Marx himself believed. Along with a wealth of fascinating biographical detail, they trace the development of Marx’s ideology as he engaged with the intellectual milieu around him, drawing on the works of Heraclitus, Savigny, Kant, Hegel, Proudhon, Owen, Smith, Ricardo, Bauer, Fourier, and other big names in the learned world of the nineteenth-century.
Sperber, a historian of nineteenth-century Germany, gives a detailed account of Marx’s family origins. He provides a treasure trove of information about the plight of the Jews in the Rhineland, and the liberation that the French Revolution provided them. These emancipatory measures, which were furthered by the Emperor Napoleon, were rolled back when Prussia annexed the area after the Napoleonic Wars. Marx’s father, Heinrich, had to convert to Christianity in order to keep his job as a lawyer. Still, the gains of the revolution could not be entirely pushed back, and the Jews settled down to an uneasy existence as subjects of a new kingdom which barely tolerated their existence. Sperber is at his best when discussing these biographical details and situating Marx’s family in their geographical, cultural and social context. Marx was ambivalent about his Jewish heritage, and his anti-Semitic outbursts later in life are partly down to the internalised prejudices of the society from which he came – a society which never fully accepted people of his background.
Sperber is perhaps a little less solid when dealing with the evolution of Marx’s political and philosophical ideas. I found Sperber’s attempt to explain away Marx’s anti-Semitism in “On the Jewish Question,” largely unconvincing (pp.127-134). Sperber argues that the ‘scientific racism’ that would later be used to justify the Holocaust was not yet in vogue, and thus, charging Marx with racism is anachronistic. But racial antisemitism predates the ‘scientific’ attempts to justify it with the use of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Whilst to his credit, Marx argued against Bauer’s view that Jews could never be citizens of a secular state because of their status as a particular, self-absorbed, materialistic people, he still bought into Bauer’s anti-Semitic characterisations of the Jews. He simply argued that these weren’t immutable but could be washed away through the abolition of private property. In other words, the Jews would be cleansed of their Jewishness once they had become part of a homogeneous communist society in which class divisions ceased to exist, and the trades that were associated with Jewry vanished. Ugly as this sounds, this view that the Jews needed to be emancipated from their ethno-religious heritage was not unique to Marx. Even the French revolutionaries, among them the Emperor Napoleon, saw the work of Jewish emancipation as a means of dissolving the Jews into a homogeneous national community, which would see Jewishness vanish forever. Stedman Jones, in his book, is much better at fleshing out this issue than Sperber. The sinister undertones behind ‘Jewish emancipation’ are an example of the kind of ‘benevolent’ Enlightenment racism that Marx inherited as a result of his time and place. The actual history of Marxist regimes, which have brutally repressed ethnic minorities (Jews included) in the name of social homogeneity, shows that Marxism and anti-racism, contrary to what Marxists love to say, do not exactly go together. Engels’ disgusting musings about ‘non-historical peoples’ who failed to rise up in the 1848 revolutions deserving to be subjected to genocide is part of this problematic tradition, albeit a more malevolent interpretation of it. Sperber’s whitewash makes Marx seem more ‘liberal’ than he truly was. Marx and Engels’ insistence on a socially homogeneous society of the future, that would unite the individual with the society and restore the lost humanity enjoyed by primitive societies, as well as completely cleansing society of the ‘alienation’ of which religion is a symptom (and thus abolishing religion, among other marks of differentiation within the population) is at odds with the liberal-democratic idea that ethnic, religious and cultural particularities are all compatible with a harmonious social order in which different groups agree to live alongside one another side by side in a secular state, with religion being relegated to the private sphere.
In tracing Marx’s transition from anti-communist liberal to born-again revolutionary socialist, Sperber confirms the conclusions reached by others, such as Leszek Kolakowski, that Marx derived his political commitments to the working-class almost entirely from his philosophical speculation, not on the strength of any empirical information. He projected his own dreams and aspirations for humanity onto a working-class that he knew very little about. ‘Marx’s personal acquaintance with the actual working class,’ says Sperber, ‘with its own suffering, actions, aspirations, and ideas, was barely beginning when he placed his revolutionary hopes in it.’ (p.126). Sperber also debunks the idea, beloved of a generation of Cold War Marxologists, that there is a clean break between a ‘young Marx’ and a ‘mature Marx’, the former the Hegelian humanist, the latter the stolid determinist (pp.141-142). We know that Hegelianism remained a thread throughout Marx’s writings, up to the very end of his life.
Sperber gives a vivid account of Marx’s life in exile, and his interactions with his fellow German radicals. We get portraits of figures like Moses Hess and Arnold Ruge, and we are presented with a community which was rife with both personal and political antagonisms. Indeed, Marx often confused the two. The backbiting and rancour reminded me of some of my unpleasant experiences in Socialist Appeal. It also recalls the experiences of Lenin and the Russian Marxist exiles in their small study circles scattered across Europe. It is in his disputes with people like Feuerbach, Bauer, Ruge and Stirner that Marx developed his materialist philosophy, from which he derived his communist political commitments. In the run up to 1848, Marx and Engels’ quarrels with their fellow emigres appear to have driven away most of their following, and they were largely isolated until Marx and some fellow revolutionaries founded the Democratic Association in late 1847 in Brussels. ‘By late 1847 and early 1848, as political tensions in Europe ratcheted steadily higher, these meetings attracted as many as 1,000 attendees.’ (p.198). I cannot imagine any Trotskyist sect today holding a meeting with that many people in attendance – and this was an organisation with only a couple hundred members. It was in this context that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, which would gain world-historical renown in the decades to come. I remember the religious fervour with which we treated this text in the IMT. Yet, as Sperber points out, much of it – including the absurd predictions about the elimination of nations as a result of the development of capitalism – has not aged well.
The 1848 German Revolution is interesting because of the parallels in Marx’s approach (and that of his rivals) with the dilemmas faced by the Russian revolutionaries decades later. Sperber almost never mentions the Russian Revolution in his book, nor does Stedman Jones, a weakness of both texts that I will come to later. Marx believed that the German revolution would follow the same path as the French, with the bourgeoisie taking power, followed by a workers’ revolution to establish communism. This is the ancestor of what later became disparagingly known as ‘two-stage theory’, which we rubbished in the IMT as Menshevism. Marx was not convinced at this point that the workers could come to power on their own and establish communism. He saw it as the outcome of a protracted process, and was contemptuous of people like Andreas Gottschalk, who sought to skip this process entirely (pp.220-221). Gottschalk is the kind of person I would have disparaged in my Trotskyist days as ‘ultra-left’. He boycotted elections to the German National Assembly in Frankfurt, and the Prussian Constituent Assembly in Berlin in May of 1848, deeming them to be a ‘bourgeois farce’. He called for a workers’ republic, denouncing the liberals as insufficiently radical. Marx’s own efforts to build a workers’ organisation loyal to his ideas, rather than the maximalist communism of his rivals Gottschalk and Hess, came to nothing, and led him to sever his ties with the Communist League as a result. In some ways, Alexander Bogdanov and his followers in the Bolshevik Party in the 1900s were the Russian equivalent of Gottschalk and his supporters in 1848.
There are parallels in the militant anti-liberalism of Gottschalk and the position that would later be taken by Marx’s rival, Ferdinand Lassalle, who, in his hatred of the liberal bourgeoisie, ended up aligning himself with Bismarck and the Prussian aristocracy. By contrast, Marx and Engels preferred the tactic of pushing the liberal bourgeoisie in a more revolutionary direction, for the overthrow of the Prussian aristocracy in favour of a bourgeois republic. Indeed, Marx gave a speech in August 1848 at a meeting of the Cologne Democratic Society, in which he repudiated his glowing remarks about the workers’ uprising in the June Days in Paris, and insisted that a future revolutionary dictatorship could not rule in the name of a single class, as his rival Weitling had suggested, but would be made of up of ‘heterogeneous elements’ (p.227). Sperber says, ‘This renunciation, even condemnation, of the class struggle, coming from the man who had just written the Communist Manifesto six months earlier, sounds, well, downright un-Marxist. The Marxist-Leninist compilers of the admirable collection of documents about the Communist League refused to believe in the authenticity of the speech, and concluded that Marx must have been misquoted.’ Needless to say, we never mentioned this astounding fact when I was in the IMT. Karl Marx, a ‘Menshevik’ adherent of ‘two-stage theory’! You couldn’t make it up.
There was a problem, however, and that was that Marx could not hope to combine the revolutionary democratic and the revolutionary socialist prongs of his strategy. Commenting on Gottschalk’s disparaging description of an attempt by Marx to indoctrinate the workers in the Cologne Workers’ Association in support of a bourgeois revolution against the Prussian monarchy, Sperber notes: ‘The workers themselves were not interested; under the direction of Marx and his associates, membership in the Cologne Workers’ Association dropped by over 90 percent from the level it had reached under Gottschalk’s leadership. Either prong of Marx’s strategy of a double recurrence of the French Revolution – a democratic revolution against Prussia, or a workers’ revolution against the bourgeoisie – had its possibilities. Combining the two proved impossible. Attacking Prussian rule meant neglecting class antagonisms; cultivating the workers’ hostility of the bourgeoisie meant ceasing to work with other democrats in Cologne and the Rhineland.’ (pp.228-229)
Marx succeeded in getting his proto-Menshevik strategy of cooperation with the bourgeois democrats adopted by the Workers’ Association in January 1849, against the arguments of Gottschalk. (p.233) In words reminiscent of the fiery anti-liberalism of the Russian Populists, ‘Their leader got in a parting shot, denouncing Marx for wanting to have the workers “escape the hell of the Middle Ages, by voluntarily plunging into the purgatory of a decrepit rule of capital” – in other words, through a revolution against Prussia, leading to a liberal-democratic, capitalist regime, that the workers would then have to oppose.’
That month, the elections to the Prussian parliament (which Marx participated in) were a victory for the democrats, and a vindication of Marx’s strategy. (p.234) After this, he shifted back to his focus on the concerns of the working-class. However, just as he seemed to be abandoning the bourgeois-democratic path, the National Assembly offered the crown of Germany to Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia – something Marx and his fellow radicals condemned, but which the German public supported. ‘This was the insurrectionary moment Marx had been expecting ever since he began publishing the New Rhineland News. Only the radical-democratic revolution he had been seeking happened just as he had broken with the democrats and called for a separate, socialist and working-class political organization.’
During this final phase of the revolution, which saw the king turn down the crown, insurrectionary violence seized the Rhineland, and Engels himself took part (p.235). Engels, ever the hothead, was so over-the-top in his behaviour (to the point of committing the ultra-left action of replacing all of the black-red-gold German national flags with red ones) that the insurgent leadership in his native Wupper Valley told him to leave town. In the event, the revolution that Marx and his followers had worked so hard for was crushed, and Marx was expelled from the country. For the rest of his life, he would be an exile.
Sperber then does an analysis of Marx’s 1850 March Address, in which he explained to the revived Communist League the tasks for revolutionaries going forward. On the basis of his experience in 1848-9, Marx emphasised, 56 years before Trotsky did, the need for ‘permanent revolution’, in which the working-class would organise itself independently of the cowardly bourgeois liberals, who were incapable of seizing power. Ironically, he plagiarised this idea from none other than his rival Gottschalk, who wrote an article in January 1849 denouncing Marx’s policy of class-collaboration and calling for ‘The revolution in permanent session!’. This is a recognisably proto-Leninist/Trotskyist position.
It was during the 1850s that Marx began to draw a connection between economic crisis and revolution. This set the tone for Marxists ever after. In the IMT, we awaited each crisis for capitalism with apocalyptic fervour. Our ‘perspectives’ were filled with cherry-picked news reports of the very worst, most pessimistic nature as reported by The Economist and the Financial Times. Marx applied a similar method, desperately searching for the slightest hint of economic turmoil:
A renewed revolution, Marx had proclaimed in 1850, would begin with a new economic crisis. No sooner had he made this proclamation than he began to search for glimmers of an emergent crisis, finding them in harvest failures, a rise in interest rates, or declines in the stock market. Marx was not chary of alerting readers of the New York Tribune of the “approaching economic disasters and social covulsions”; he informed them that British industrial production’s “movement of expansion is becoming accelerated at the very moment when markets are contracting,” asserting in 1855 that “a few months more and the crisis will be at a height which it has not reached in England since 1846.” He queried Engels about business conditions and market outlets in the Manchester textile industry, seeking signs of an economic crisis, which his friend was quick to provide. As Wilhelm Liebknecht remembered, Marx’s constant expectation of an economic crisis became a standing joke among his London friends and associates.
The long-awaited crisis finally did occur in 1857, beginning in the United States and spreading across the globe. It was a substantial downturn, generally regarded as the first worldwide recession. Exulting in the viral expansion of economic distress, Marx wrote to Conrad Schramm, his old ally from the Communist League, about the “earthquake-like effects of the general crisis, which every connoiseur must savor….” Jenny added an observation aboiut how the onset of an economic crisis had dispelled the long period of gloom and depression in which Karl had been mired since the death of his son…
…When the Bank of England raised the discount rate to 9 percent, Marx became especially excited, seeing this move as evidence that the crisis had reached the heart of world capitalism and a new revolution could not be far off.
…A large part of Marx and Engels’ jubilant mood came from following the progress of the crisis from one country to the next. Marx wrote Engels in October 1857: “The American crisis…is beautiful. The setback to French industry was immediate….The complaints of the English money-article writers that their English trade is sound but their clients abroad unhealthy is original and lively. How are things with the Manchester manufacturers?”
Engels replied: “The effect back on England seems now to have commenced….All the better. Commerce is now once again worthless for 3-4 years. Now we have some good fortune.” A month later, he turned to Germany: “In Hamburg, things look terrific….There has never been a panic so complete and classical as in Hamburg. Everything is worthless, absolutely worthless, except for silver and gold…for the moment, Hamburg is commercially annihilated. The German industrialists…will once again suffer heavy blows.”
“So much as I myself am in financial distress, following this outbreak I have not felt so cozy since 1849,” Marx summed up for his friend. Contributing to these expectations was early evidence that the age of reaction in Europe was coming to an end. In 1858, Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia became mentally incapacitated and had to turn the reins of state over to his brother, Prince Wilhelm, who promptly dismissed from office from the reaction-era government ministers.
Such political developments helped keep Marx’s hopes up even as signs of economic recovery became increasingly apparent in the course of 1858. The long-awaited economic crisis had not led to a new wave of revolutions. But it had energized Marx, bringing him out of the torpor and depression that had plagued him since the death of his son. At the end of the 1850s, just as at the decade’s beginning, Marx’s private mood and broader trends of European politics seemed to coincide. The age of reaction waned, and the position of the great powers became unsettled. After a long period of hibernation, movements of political opposition began to stir in 1858-59, and Marx was prepared to end his role as a detached observer and become, once more, a political activist.’-Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: W.N. Norton, 2013), pp.320-325
There is something utterly disturbing about Marx and Engels rejoicing at the prospect of misery and starvation for millions of people simply because it would bring forward the promise socialist revolution. This attitude is known as accelerationism. It is one of the defining characteristics of Marxism, especially its Trotskyist variant.
Marx’s attitude to foreign policy is also touched on in the book. Identifying Russia as the most reactionary power in Europe, much like how leftists identify America today, Marx fell for Tory conspiracy theories about Russia controlling the Whigs/Liberals who were in the British government at that time, and saw the hand of Russia behind every misfortune. He opposed France in the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, because he was convinced that a French victory would weaken Austria at Russia’s expense (pp.328-329). The fact that the Italian nationalists were supporting France in the hope of gaining more territory did not sway him. Needless to say, Marx’s opinions were of no relevance as he was of no political importance. ‘Strong opinions had little value if they could not be heard…In the three ensuing years, Marx made three separate attempts to bring his opinions before a wider German-language public. Each of these attempts was, ultimately, a failure…’ (p.329-330). One is reminded of Trotskyist cults that issue endless appeals that go unheard by the workers of the world. Marx’s cynical attitude to foreign policy reminds me of Marxists today who give ‘critical support’ to Putin’s Russia or any nation that happens to be fighting against America, regardless of the virtues of its form of government. We can see this today in the support so many on the hard-left are giving to Russia’s fascistic invasion of Ukraine.
An example of Marx’s failure of ‘dialectical foresight’ was his position on German unification. Despite insisting in 1859 that German unification was only possible under Austrian leadership (pp.328-329), in 1871 Germany was unified under Prussian auspices. Ferdinand Lassalle, who had entered into contact with them around this time, warned Marx and Engels that the German national war against France that they were calling for would strengthen the Hohenzollern monarchy in Prussia, rather than paving the way for a German republic (p.340). In the event, Marx and Engels were both astonished when Bismarck took up the program of the liberal revolutionaries and began the process of unifying Germany. In the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, they supported Austria, hoped for a Prussian defeat and believed it would bring about a revolution. (pp.365-366) Instead, Prussia won and unified its allies into a North German Confederation. Bismarck’s old enemies among the revolutionary liberals rallied to his banner. Marx and Engels were surprised again in 1870 when Prussia unexpectedly went to war with France, defeated Napoleon III and unified the German states (p.374). Despite the best efforts of Wilhelm Liebknecht, who argued for socialist neutrality in the war, Marx and Engels were swept in the wave of nationalism and gave ‘critical support’ to Bismarck’s Prussia (pp.375-376).
Marx’s failure to realise the inherent contradiction between his bourgeois-democratic program and his revolutionary-democratic one could also be seen in the case of Irish nationalism, which Marx and Engels saw as a step towards sparking revolution in England. ‘The devoutly Catholic Irish workers were similarly less than enthralled with the political goals endorsed by Marx and his left-wing English allies, such as the campaigns of the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi to seize the territory of the Pope for a united Italian nation-state. Marx’s endorsement of Irish nationalism to revolutionize the English working class pointed to a future long-term problem of the labor movement: the obstacles that religious, national, and ethnic differences presented to working-class solidarity.’ (pp.371-372). Marxists have always argued that the ‘national question’ could only be ‘solved’ under socialism, and ‘critical support’ to nationalist movements is always made conditional upon the idea that they will lead to socialism. Yet applying this policy in practice is easier said than done, and historically, national liberation movements across the world have marginalised radical left-wing forces. Sperber’s account of the Paris Commune also intrigued me – indeed, it was interesting to find out that the Commune was not particularly socialist (p.382), which did not stop Marx from seizing upon it as a prototype of the Marxist theory of the state in action.
Sperber makes the point that Marx and Engels diverged strongly on the relationship between his ideas and positivism. Despite the myth that Marx saw his work as an extension of Darwin’s biology, Marx remained to his dying day a sceptic of Darwinism, despite generally agreeing with Darwin’s findings. It was Engels, influenced by positivism, who developed what became known as ‘dialectical materialism’ after Marx’s death. This merged Marx’s ideas with Darwinism, and saw the natural sciences as an outgrowth of Hegelian concepts. Marx, by contrast, maintained a tension in his mind between scientific data as collated by positivist methods and Hegelian thinking, which he continued to see as distinct. Here is an example of the ridiculous conclusions Engels drew as a result of his a priori application of Hegelian dogma to science, idiocies that Ted Grant and Alan Woods also committed in Reason and Revolt:
If Engels saw dialectical philosophy, in good positivist fashion, as the expression of the natural sciences, he also could reverse the procedure, rejecting scientific findings when they did not fit his philosophical views. Denouncing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he wrote to Marx: “You cannot imagine anything stupider.” The idea of gradual equalization of temperatures, or, as it would later be formulated, increasing entropy, led to a world “that begins in nonsense and ends in nonsense.” Although the second law was seen as “the finest and highest perfection of materialism,” it envisaged a progressive cooling of the universe. Such a development implied “the original hot condition, from which things cooled off, absolutely inexplicable, even absurd, thus presupposes a God.” Since, for Engels, philosophy included atheism and materialism, and that philosophy was based on the natural sciences, a science that led to a questioning of atheism and materialism could not be science.-p.417
Sperber’s account of Marx’s political economy added nothing earth-shattering to my understanding of Marx’s economic theory, though it confirmed for me that the Marxist labour theory of value is complete and utter nonsense. Sperber does an admirable synthesis of the literature on this topic, in particular, Marx’s failure to solve the transformation problem (pp.444-446). Sperber points out how dated Marx’s understanding of political economy was, given the fact that ideas like Ricardo’s labour theory of value were already under assault even as Marx took up this old orthodoxy.
Pages 505-515 deal with Marx’s epic fight to keep control of the First International from Bakunin and his supporters. Reading about Marx’s bureaucratic maneuvering and dictatorial actions, I got uncomfortable reminders of the way in which Trotskyist organisations today behave. Back in 2010, when the IMT was going through a split, Alan Woods wrote a series of lengthy pieces about Marx and Engels’ fight against Bakunin and the anarchists, slanted of course to assert that Marx’s actions – and, by analogy, Woods’ actions against the opposition at that time – were justified. Unfortunately, one is forced to conclude that the heavy-handed, cultish and totalitarian actions of Trotskyist leaderships against dissidents can be traced to Marx’s own behaviour – suspending sections for non-payment of subs (even though a pro-Marx section was guilty of precisely this, and allowed to remain part of the International), holding ‘secret’, extra-constitutional meetings packed with supporters of the leadership, the spreading of slanders against rebels, etc. In the end, Marx dissolved the organisation rather than allow it to fall to his political enemies. An unpleasant precedent was set for similar acts of bureaucratic trickery by Lenin and other Marxist leaders.
Stedman Jones’ biography of Marx is largely an intellectual biography, and devotes less time to personalities than Sperber’s book. Stedman Jones is a historian of ideas, and therefore much more comfortable discussing the complex evolution of Marx’s philosophical, economic and political views over time. He has a solid command of the sources in question, tracing pretty much every intellectual who influenced Marx in his lifetime, from Savigny to Chernyshevsky. Where Sperber sometimes seems out of his depth, Stedman Jones shines. Like Sperber, Stedman Jones has as his task the placing of Marx and his ideas in their 19th century context, shorn of Engelsian and Plekhanovite distortions. A weakness is that the sheer amount of detail about Marx’s ideas can be overwhelming. The dullest and most forgettable part of the book is his lengthy discussion of Marx’s political economy, which, admittedly, was what Marx spent most of his life engaged in. Another irritation is the way in which Stedman Jones, in his criticisms of Marxism, seeks to insert his own misconceptions about class into the book. In his 1983 book, Languages of Class, he argues that the traditional Marxist understanding of class as a creation of political economy is flawed – rather, class is a construct of language, which is a distinctively post-structuralist position. He bases his argument on the primary sources of Chartism, which showed that the Chartists had a political conception of their class interests rather than an economic one. They saw emancipation as being included within the political sphere, rather than being given economic rights. Indeed, he argues on page 306 that ‘…historians have come to understand class no longer as the expression of a simple social-economic reality, but as a form of language discursively produced to create identity.’ Impressed by such a sweeping statement, I checked the endnotes to see the prestigious array of scholars whose work he had assembled to back up this assertion. Instead, I found that he only cited himself. I don’t doubt that there is some truth in Stedman Jones’ position, but I find a poststructuralist conception of class as unconvincing as an economistic one. I am still enough of a Marxist to believe that language has material reality as its basis.
What I particularly enjoyed about Stedman Jones’ book is how less original Marx’s ideas seem when properly contextualised. Marx was an avid synthesiser, who borrowed from everyone, even when he was denouncing and even slandering the people whose ideas he borrowed. One is forced to accept that, far from being a world-historical genius, Marx was simply a very good collector of facts and ideas, and able to work them into a compelling narrative. As a young man, he dreamed of being a poet. In his writings, one detects a merging of the literary with the intellectual in a manner that must have made a strong impression on many people.
Stedman Jones’ account of Marx’s philosophy is not only superior to the still passable summaries given by Sperber, but it coincides with some of my own thoughts about Marxism. In particular, I wholeheartedly agree with his criticism of Marx for seeing individualism only in terms of an ‘alienation’ from a lost world of social harmony embodied in the Greek polis (p.135). Stedman Jones argues that this dismissal of bourgeois society, influenced strongly by Rousseau and his ideas about uniting individual and particular interests in a homogeneous political order, led Marx to disparage future working-class movements who fought to become part of the ‘bourgeois’ sphere of political representation through Parliament, instead of fighting for socialist revolution. He deftly summarises the dispute between Marx and Stirner over the quasi-religious aspects of communism, which Marx tried in vain to counter by renouncing a normative conception of socialism in favour of a ‘scientific’ one (p.190).
Moreover, Stedman Jones shows how, in his philosophical views, Marx’s conception of human nature was a synthesis of Feuerbach’s materialism and the idealism of Hegel and Kant (pp.191-199). In the IMT, I was indoctrinated into the ridiculous view put forward by Engels’ in his later writings that the philosophical battles of the 1840s were a titanic fight between idealism and materialism, one that has been waged throughout the whole history of philosophy. Stedman Jones argues that this is a distortion, a projection of later intellectual disputes in the nineteenth century onto the debates between the Young Hegelians decades earlier. In fact, things were more complex. Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach’s materialism was that it was a one-sided materialism, which saw man as a passive’ merely ‘sensuous’ being. Drawing on the idealism of Kant and Hegel, Marx made the not especially profound observation that man was also a thinking being. Rather than being a mere product of his material environment, man shaped his environment, and in so doing, transformed himself, through the exercise of labour in line with rational goals. This conception of labour was not original, but taken from Kant and Hegel before him. Marx synthesised idealism and materialism to produce a holistic, realistic (but not wholly original) conception of human nature. Under capitalism, man’s labour was no longer the free exercise of his mind and body upon nature, but something he undertook on behalf of another for the purpose of feeding himself. His labour had become estranged from him. Communism, implemented by the working-class, would restore the lost humanity of the labourer. Yet Marx never explained how the proletariat could possibly come to this radical conclusion from the mere fact of its existence (pp.202-204). As Bruno Bauer pointed out, if the proletariat was as oppressed as Marx acknowledged, how could it possibly develop a theoretical consciousness that would lead it to overthrow capitalism in favour of a free society?
One will read in this book of Proudhon telling Marx in a letter (much to my amusement) not to allow himself and his followers to become the founders of a new religion (p.216). We all know how that went. Rejection by Proudhon played a part in Marx choosing to make him an enemy by writing his ferocious attack on Proudhonism, The Poverty of Philosophy. Meanwhile, we also learn that what we now know as the Communist Manifesto was in part a product of bureaucratic manipulation by Marx and Engels of their fellow communists in the Communist League:
‘At the Conference of June 1847, Engels had only managed to get himself nominated as a delegate as the result of a “presidential trick” on the part of his one-time friend, Stephen Born, who instead of encouraging a discussion of nominations, asked for those opposed to Engels to raise their hands. When a majority failed to do so, Born declared Engels elected. Engels congratulated Born on his “beautiful” manoeuvre, but Born himself later felt ashamed of his action. A little later, Engels boasted how he had managed to sideline what had been a majority in support of Moses Hess’s draft of what ultimately was to become the “Communist Manifesto”. In a letter from 25-26 October 1847, he confided to Karl, “Strictly between ourselves, I’ve played an infernal trick on Mosi. He had actually put through a delightfully amended confession of faith. Last Friday at the district, I dealt with this, point by point, and was not yet half way through when the lads declared themselves satisfaits. Completely unopposed, I got them to entrust me with the task of drafting a new one which will be discussed next Friday by the district and will be sent to London behind the backs of the communities.” Late in 1847, Engels therefore managed to get the drafting of the League’s “Credo”, or “Manifesto”, as it was now to be called, into his and Karl’s hands.-p.221
Moreover, we discover that Marx’s rival, Karl Grün, warned upon reading the Manifesto that the emphasis placed upon centralisation and nationalisation of the economy would lead, not to greater individual freedom, but state tyranny (p.222). Who can say he was wrong? We learn also that Marx’s understanding of political economy was based on misinterpretations of leading economists, especially Ricardo, whose labour theory of value Marx made a centrepiece of his economic theory despite Ricardo’s later reservations and qualifications to this concept (p.233).
Stedman Jones’ provides a well-researched account of Marx and Engels’ activism during the 1848 revolutions, and Marx’s unsuccessful attempt to balance the bourgeois-democratic and revolutionary socialist parts of his program. A pertinent criticism he makes of Marx is his belief that the revolution would be modelled on that of the French Revolution of 1789 (pp.281-283). This was derived from Marx’s understanding of revolutions are arising out of objective social developments, ignoring the independent role of political institutions and the need for some sort of compromise if the revolution was to achieve its bourgeois-democratic goals.
Other highlights of the book are Stedman Jones’ discussion of the Paris Commune (p.505), which we learn was not exactly the proletarian revolt Marx envisaged it as being, but resulted from a coalition of wage-workers and small business owners. The development of Marxism in the 1880s onwards sees Engels putting in place the building blocs of what would become known as ‘Marxism’ to a generation of politicians that would go on to found the Second International. Increasingly old and ill, it seems that Marx allowed Engels to act on his behalf. He was not in much of a position to openly dispute political questions with him due to his dependence on Engels’ money. Nevertheless, Stedman Jones points to three differences between the two of them (pp.565-568). The first is Engels’ interpretation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall bringing about the collapse of capitalism, for which there is no evidence in Marx’s manuscripts for Volume III of Capital. Secondly, Engels was much keener on Darwin than Marx was. Marx never fully accepted that human beings were simply evolved products of their environment, believing that man was a product of history – that is, accumulated human activity that sought to transform nature, including man’s own. Class struggle was not the necessary result of a natural struggle for survival, but resulted from a contingent form of society that humans had created. Thirdly, Engels did not share Marx’s enthusiastic belief in the primitive village community as a basis for a transition to socialism – illusions which Marx had encouraged in the Russian Populists (pp.565-568, p.591).
If I have a major criticism of these two books, it is that, in their efforts to place Marx back in his proper context, they play down the extent to which Marx’s ideas were, whether one likes it or not, an ample basis for the totalitarianism that was imposed in his name on millions of people in the 20th century. One could too easily say, on the basis of the research of these two authors, that the Marxism of the twentieth century is something so completely divorced from what Marx really thought, that Marxism is blameless for the horrors of Stalin and Mao etc. I don’t think that this is what Sperber or Stedman Jones think, but their revisionist accounts, convincing though they are, can leave the door open for those who want to absolve Marx of all blame for his dubious legacy entirely. But reading these two texts has only strengthened my conviction that, whatever differences existed between Marx and the generations of ‘Marxists’ who came after him, the core of his doctrine remains, by its very nature, a totalitarian one, or at the very least, open to a totalitarian interpretation, among others. Indeed, the Menshevik-Bolshevik divide in the Russian socialist movement in the years leading up to 1917 can both be seen as legitimate interpretations of Marx’s brand of Marxism. The Mensheviks inherited the ‘stagist’ politics of the Marx of the 1840s and applied it to Russia. The deterministic, positivistic interpretation of Marxism put forward by Engels and Plekhanov, gave this further justification – the idea of ‘stages’ of historical development being something that was supposedly vindicated by scientific study – of history, sociology, anthropology, economics and biology. Lenin and his Bolsheviks recall another aspect of Marx’s Marxism – his emphasis on human agency, the power to transform one’s environment, and, in doing so, transform one’s nature. This was at odds with the Darwinian idea of man as an evolved product of his environment. Lenin’s voluntarism represents, in some ways, a break with Engelsian determinism in favour of a more originally Marxian attitude – the search for revolutionary opportunities that did not conform to a given schema of social development. Though Lenin initially followed Engels and Plekhanov in disregarding Marx’s writings on the potential of the village community as a starting point for the socialist revolution, it didn’t take long before he and Trotsky independently arrived at the position that one could not simply wait for capitalism to fully develop for the transition to socialism to begin, but that an imminent social explosion would occur that would necessitate building an alliance between the workers in the cities and the peasant communes so as to hasten the process of revolutionary transformation, without the assistance of the weak and pathetic bourgeoisie. Marx anticipated such a strategy in his March Address of 1850 – not that either Lenin or Trotsky would have known of it, as these early, obscure writings had not yet been published in the 1900s. Whatever distortions the Russian Marxists inherited from Engels, the fact remains that Leninism was a legitimate interpretation of Marxist doctrine – and it led to tyranny, slavery and mass death on an astonishing scale.
Besides, from a Marxist perspective, we cannot judge Marx solely by virtue of what he wrote, but by the real-world impact of his ideas – just as Marx judged ‘bourgeois’ thinkers not on the basis of their abstract ideas, but their real-world consequences. Recovering the original Marxism of Marx is a worthwhile effort if only to see how Marx is open to multiple interpretations that he may or may not have agreed with. Both Stedman Jones and Sperber’s books are required reading for those who want a deeper understanding of Marx and Marxism, shorn of distortions. Sperber’s is more accessible, Stedman Jones’ more thorough. Both are masterly, and far more informative than all the hagiographic versions of Marx presented by Trotskyist sects.