A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  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