A World to Win
A World to Win
The Life and Works
of Karl Marx
Sven-Eric Liedman
Translated by
Jeffrey N. Skinner
First published in English by Verso 2018
First published as Karl Marx: En Biografi
© Albert Bonniers Förlag 2015
Translation © Jeffrey N. Skinner 2018
Every effort has been made to secure permission for images appearing herein
that are under copyright. In the event of being notified of any omission,
Verso will seek to rectify the mistake in the next edition of this work.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-504-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-507-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-506-8 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Liedman, Sven-Eric, 1939– author.
Title: A world to win : the life and works of Karl Marx / by Sven-Eric Liedman.
Other titles: Karl Marx. English
Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, [2018] | ‘First published as Karl Marx: En Biografi.’
Identifiers: LCCN 2018003399| ISBN 9781786635044 | ISBN 9781786635068
Subjects: LCSH: Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. | Communists – Biography. | Communism – History – 19th century.
Classification: LCC HX39.5 .L47913 2018 | DDC 335.4092 [B] – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003399
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Preface
1.The Great Project
Misconceptions and Exaggerations
The Diversity of the Books
A Great, Unfinished Body of Work
A Guide Through the Work
2.The Time of Revolutions
The Industrial Revolution
Reorganization of the Sciences …
… And of Philosophy
The Revolutions
3.The Darling of Fortune
Background
Family
Student and Poet
Jenny von Westphalen
Father and Son
The Letter to His Father
The Young Hegelians
The Doctoral Thesis
The Families
The Journalist
On the Way Out
Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, the Jewish Question, and Analysis of the Mystical
4.In Paris
A Simmering Environment
In Salons and Cafés
Socialism and Communism
Wilhelm Weitling
Vorwärts, the Weavers’ Uprising, and Ruge
Friedrich Engels
5.The Manuscripts
Belated Renown
A Great Project Is Born
The Struggle between Worker, Capitalist, and Landowner
Alienated Labour
Private Property and Communism
Needs, Division of Labour, and Money
And Finally, Hegel…
An Important Stage in Marx’s Development
6.The Years of Ruptures
The Holy Family
A Painful Farewell and a New Life
The German Ideology
Max Stirner and His Book
The Hard Edges of Polemics
The Poverty of Philosophy
Theory and Practice
7.The Manifesto and the Revolutions
The Struggle for Influence
Wandering Journeymen, Intellectuals, and a few Industrial Workers
A Catechism Becomes a Manifesto
The Time of Revolts
The Impotence of Parliament and Freedom of the Press
Retreats
With Words as Weapons
8.Difficult Times, Difficult Losses
Ideological Change
Poverty and Death
9.Journalist on Two Continents
Work, Despite Everything
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung as Periodical
A Little Masterwork that Brought in ‘Less Than Nothing’
Conquering the World with a Pen
The Workers and Their Opportunities
Political and Economic Crises
London and the World
The United States and the World
10.The Most Intensive Effort
The Grundrisse
A New Joy and a Sick Liver
Independent Work, or Preparatory?
A Flow Teeming with Ideas
Totality, According to Marx
Economy and Philosophy
Internal Discord
A More Manageable Project?
Base and Superstructure
Value and Money
The Chapter on Capital
Society Beyond Capitalism
The Great Matrix
11.The Unfinished Masterpiece
New Trials
The Long Road to Volume I
The Structure of Capital
The Interpreters
Essence and Appearance; Form and Content; Surface and Depth
Natural and Supernatural; Freedom and Equality
Striving for Exactitude
Historical Development in Capital
Humanity and Classes
The Unknown Masterpiece
12.Twin Souls or a Tragic Mistake?
Mathematics
Encounter with the Natural Sciences
Carl Schorlemmer
Quantity turns into Quality
Anti-Dühring
‘The Foundation of Our Theory’
Human Prehistory
Interpreting the World and Changing it
Conclusion
13.Marx the Politician
Herr Vogt
The International
The Address
Value, Price, and Profit
Bakunin and Marx
The Paris Commune of 1871
The Dissolution of the International
The German Social Democrats
Critique of the Gotha Programme
The Russian Road
The Forms of Politics
14.Statues, Malicious Portraits, and the Work
The Road from Highgate to the Winter Palace
The Soviet Union, Orthodoxy, and Deviationists
The Range of Deviationists
The Sum Total of Marx
Marx and Posterity
Postscript
Marx Chronology
Notes
Index
Preface
It is a great joy for me that my biography of Marx, originally published in Swedish in September 2015, has now reached the English-speaking world. Prior to the translation, the text was updated and a few mistakes in the original have been corrected. The great majority of references to Swedish and other Scandinavian literature have been removed. On the other hand, the German, French – and to some extent Italian – books and articles remain. I think it important that substantial portions of international Marx research are taken into consideration.
There are two crucial reasons why I – having worked on Marx, and Engels as well, from the 1960s unt
il now – took on the task of writing a major biography of Marx in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
First, a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it has finally become possible to provide a portrait of Marx unobscured by what happened after his death. Quite simply, we have an opportunity to assess the whole of Marx’s multifaceted work in a way that would have been impossible only a few years ago.
The second reason is a little more down-to-earth: the major critical edition of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe has now come so far that the greater part of his work – including important, previously unpublished manuscripts and excerpts – has been edited in an exemplary manner. It is now possible, for example, to compare Engels’s editing of the third volume of Capital with Marx’s own manuscript in a completely new way. In excerpts of his reading, with accompanying commentary, Marx’s prodigious literary consumption becomes apparent in both its breadth and depth.
In the first chapter of this book, I take a position on a great number of prominent representations of Marx. Since 2015, however, an important English-language biography has become available, namely Gareth Stedman Jones’s Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. It has earned glowing reviews from many quarters and deserves a few words here; I have to be able to explain why another sweeping biography of Marx is needed.
To begin with, it should be said that Stedman Jones’s work deserves a lot of praise. It is an extremely thorough study that clarifies important parts of the background to Marx’s work. In particular, he has mapped out in detail the confusing diversity of the generally short-lived workers’ movements, from the Chartists up to the time of Marx’s death, when various social democratic parties had begun to take shape. There is hardly anything to be added in this regard. In my own biography, these movements have been dealt with to the extent that they are important to understanding Marx’s activities, and no further.
Stedman Jones has also very energetically elucidated many important sources of inspiration for Marx. Not infrequently, he does so in such detail that Marx’s own writing is actually overshadowed. For my own part, I have certainly provided an account of the literature that influenced Marx. I examine a broader sphere of influence, such as the natural scientists Marx eagerly studied.
But, for me, it was important first of all to present Marx’s work in all its breadth. My estimation of Marx as an author is a world away from Stedman Jones’s assessment of him. He depicts a relatively brief period when Marx was successful both as a theoretician and a politician: the years from 1864 to 1869, when he completed the first volume of Capital and simultaneously played a decisive role in the development of the International Workingmen’s Association. It is natural to consider this a high point. But for me, the whole body of his work – everything from the early years up to the last incomplete manuscripts – amounts to a towering achievement, though the great majority of it never went to print during his lifetime.
Stedman Jones sums up rather neatly the original thinking found in the Communist Manifesto, but as regards the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts he is significantly more reserved. The noteworthy aspects of the substantial preparatory work for Capital, known as the Grundrisse, do not emerge. He judges the text ‘clumsy and disjointed’ and the presentation ‘chaotic’, and perhaps with good reason. But certain pages are brilliant all the same; there – as he so often does – Marx succeeds in throwing light on his theory with elegant aphoristic incisiveness. In particular, he provides in glimpses a vision of the working life of the future found nowhere else in his oeuvre. Generally speaking, the Grundrisse opens up a broader perspective than the first volume of Capital.
In contrast to Stedman Jones, I am profoundly concerned with the last few decades of intensive research concerning the Grundrisse and in particular Capital. It is striking how names such as Hans-Georg Backhaus, Michael Heinrich, and Andrew Kliman are conspicuous by their absence in Stedman Jones’s work. As a result, he does not succeed in providing an up-to-date reading of Capital.
The notion that Marx was unproductive after 1870 has a long history, one familiar from many previous biographies. But newer studies have painted a very different picture. At the end of his life, Marx was of course physically much weaker but as restlessly active as ever, deepening and broadening his already voluminous reading. Most of it stopped at detailed, often extremely interesting excerpts. But he also authored a number of manuscripts, some of which attained lasting significance. The Critique of the Gotha Programme belongs here, of course, but so too does the text that formed the basis for Engels’s widely read book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The drafts of his responses to Vera Zasulich are another item of great importance. Teodor Shanin, a specialist in this period of Marx’s output, even distinguishes a ‘late Marx’, to sit alongside the established ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx. In this biography, I follow my subject all the way to the end.
My own background in the history of philosophy and science is of some relevance. I have analysed Marx with regard to the thinking of his time, and this line of inquiry has unearthed previously unnoticed facts regarding his relationship to the natural sciences. In a comprehensive study of Engels, published in Swedish in 1977 and in an abbreviated translation in German in 1986 (Das Spiel der Gegensätze) – but unfortunately not in English – I could map out in detail the surprising origins of the curious doctrine (which often had fateful consequences) called dialectical materialism, which culminated in a ‘dialectics of nature’. I can now supplement this picture and highlight all kinds of previously unnoticed facets.
It has been possible to bring a greater understanding to the tension in Capital between, on the one hand, a dialectic with roots in Hegel and, on the other, a struggle for exactitude inspired by the era’s triumphs in physics and chemistry.
In summary, Stedman Jones provides an ambitious and detailed picture of Marx’s political achievements, albeit one marked by his own ideological preferences. Yet, it is remarkable that he completely ignores important works such as Wolfgang Schieder’s Karl Marx als Politiker. The thinker, empirical researcher, and author who takes shape in Jones’s biography is an unsatisfying portrayal, the features of which rely on research that has long been overplayed. This is fatal, since it is in these capacities that Marx can actually inspire us today. The political game has changed numerous times over the last hundred and fifty years. The tools Marx developed for his analysis of society and history are still sharp but lie unused far too often, despite the fact we live in a period of striking similarity to Marx’s own.
With this biography, I have attempted to explain not only who Marx was in his time, but why he remains a vital source of inspiration today. Whether the endeavour has been a success is a matter for the reader to decide.
1
The Great Project
When I was young, it was my good fortune to make the acquaintance of an old German Jew who was dying, here in London, from the effects of long hardship and privation, of overwork and poverty. I did what I could to save, to prolong his life. I got him sent to Algeria, to the south of France, and got the most brilliant young physician on Harley Street to look after him. But it was too late. In the short time I knew him, he taught me more than all other teachers, dead or living. He saw more clearly than any other man the disease that was killing the world. His name was Karl Marx.
The man who spoke these words was named E. Ray Lankester. He was one of Great Britain’s foremost biologists at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of the few present at Marx’s funeral.1
But this book is not about Dr Lankester. It is about Marx.
Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. By the autumn of 1850, half of his life had passed. He was truly a man of the 1800s, rooted in his century. Today he belongs to the distant past, yet his name constantly crops up.
The collapse of the Soviet Empire at first appeared to bury him in its rubble, in the oblivion that surrounds the hopelessly obsolete.
Marx was only the first in a series of repugnant figures who now, fortunately, had been consigned to the history books: everything that had been realized in the Soviet Union and China had been designed first in Marx’s imagination.
This is a notion that is still widely prevalent. But it soon turned out that Marx had an active afterlife, independent of the disintegration of empires. More than a few regretted his demise.
The most influential of these was Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, who played an important role in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. In 1993, he published Specters of Marx, in which he conceded that Marx was indeed dead, but nevertheless haunted a world of growing injustices like a ghost.2
Another French philosopher, Étienne Balibar, also published an ingenious little book in which he asserted that Marx’s thought was extremely relevant to today’s world, while the philosophy trumpeted from the Soviet Union had no actual connection with Marx.3
A few years later, around the turn of the century, Marx became topical in a more spectacular fashion. The New Yorker named him the most important thinker of the coming century,4 and in a vote organized by the BBC, he came out top among philosophers as the greatest thinker of the last millennium.5 In his last book, How to Change the World (2011), the great Austro-British historian Eric Hobsbawm spoke about a meeting with George Soros, the famous investor. Soros asked him about his position on Marx; anxious to avoid a quarrel, Hobsbawm responded evasively, whereupon Soros replied: ‘That man discovered something about capitalism 150 years ago that we need to take advantage of.’6
These anecdotes may seem trivial. Someone who is a celebrity, a public figure people readily refer to, does not need to be influential in a serious sense. It is more telling that Marx is constantly part of the discussion of the fateful questions of our time. When French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in 2013 with his voluminous Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Marx’s name dominated the flood of commentary the book gave rise to. Traditional economists ascribed to Piketty all the sins for which they routinely blame Marx, and enthusiasts took the promise in the book’s punning title quite literally: a new Capital for the twenty-first century. In fact, the distance between Piketty and Marx is quite large. Piketty is not interested in the duel between labour and capital; his focus is on finance capital. The similarity lies in the long historical perspective, as well as in the attention paid to the growing – and in the long run catastrophic – division between the few who hold more and more power through their riches, and the many who are thereby rendered powerless. Piketty himself is eager to emphasize Marx’s significance. Marx’s thesis on the unending accumulation of capital is as fundamental for economic analysis in the twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth, Piketty says.7
A World to Win Page 1