Sociologist Göran Therborn attacks the growing division in the world from another direction in his 2013 book, The Killing Fields of Inequality. He points out that the growing inequality cannot be measured only by widening gaps in income and wealth. Differences in health and lifespan – and people’s opportunities in general to develop in an adequate manner – are also appearing. Therborn perceives a particular existential inequality that concerns rights, dignity, respect, and degrees of freedom, for example. It turns out that this inequality, in all its aspects, is now rapidly accelerating even in Europe, especially in the Nordic countries.8
Therborn himself has a background in Marxism and, by all appearances, now considers himself a post-Marxist – that is, remaining in the tradition but free from all ties to previous groups. Indeed, one of his later books, from 2008, is titled From Marxism to Post-Marxism?9
In the face of another fateful question of the age – the environmental crisis in general and the climate crisis in particular – Marx’s name sometimes comes up. This may seem surprising: the empire that had its ideological origins in Marx – the Soviet Union – caused unparalleled environmental destruction. But those who go directly to Marx without detouring through Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev find that he certainly cared about the environment. Material production for him was an interaction between nature and humanity that had been eliminated as a result of capitalism. The person who has most emphasized this (and to some extent overemphasized it) is American sociologist John Bellamy Foster, above all in his 2000 book Marx’s Ecology.10 Foster’s perspective turns up in Naomi Klein’s 2014 grand general scrutiny of the relationship between capitalism and climate, This Changes Everything.11
Marx is also present in discussions about the new class society that developed in the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century. British economist Guy Standing perceived a new social class in the world of that era. He published a widely discussed book about it in 2011: The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. He considers people of today who are living in an incessantly uncertain financial situation as belonging to the precariat. He perceives three different layers: workers who, through deindustrialization, have lost their jobs and have no prospect for employment; refugees from the world’s hotbeds of crisis who have been forced out into the margins of society; and, finally, well-educated people who are reduced to temporary, equally uncertain, positions that are interspersed with periods of unemployment. This is a diversity that is perhaps entirely too large for the term to be manageable. But there is an important unifying link here that has to do with the labour market and the conditions of employment. More and more people are relegated to a diffuse borderland between temporary jobs and no jobs at all. The relative security that the workers’ movement fought for is becoming more and more restricted, and the social safety net is growing thinner or being torn to shreds in recurring crises.12
It is natural that the crisis that crossed the world in 2008 and 2009 aroused a new interest in Marx, and for Capital in particular. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said with pleasure that not only the Soviet Empire, but Karl Marx too would thereby lose all relevance they had had so far. It is fitting that the Soviet Union was sent to the past once and for all after 1991, but not Marx. And why not Marx?
To approach the question, we must first take a step back. The societal change that characterized Marx’s work more than any other was industrialization, and with it the development of a workers’ movement. Today, those developments appear distant and close at the same time. In countries where mass production once began, we have entered into a post-industrial society. The nineteenth-century sweatshops that Marx had in mind are now found chiefly in countries such as China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In Europe and the United States, other class divisions than those of the 1800s and 1900s are getting wider and deeper.
A large number of economists who portray the reality of the early twenty-first century as the best – indeed, the only natural – one are doing everything they can to convince ordinary people that they belong to the great capitalist community of interest. ‘It’s everyone’s money that’s at stake,’ they chant. Their own theory is built on the notion of an eternal equilibrium in a world of restless change. We could call it a new kind of more prosaic Platonism. Something eternal exists beyond the chaotic diversity that the senses (and the charts) bear witness to.
What could be more natural in a situation like this than to summon Karl Marx back from the shadows? No social theory is more dynamic than his. No one speaks more clearly about widening class divisions than he does.
It is impossible to read the introductory, stylistically razor-sharp and rhetorically perfect first pages of the Communist Manifesto without recognizing the society that is ours. The bourgeoisie ‘has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation’.
Are we not again living in that society? Have we not come back to the reality of the 1840s, even if more globalized and technologically more advanced? The free flow of commodities is the norm that forces other norms to shrink into insignificance.
Marx can, sometimes, come almost painfully close to describing our current world. Today, a brutal economism dominates many minds to the extent that it has become invisible for them. It is often called neoliberalism, after the school that Milton Friedman became the symbol of in the 1970s. But the name does not matter. The important thing is that many of Friedman’s ideas have become everyday life; the market dominates every detail, and even states and municipalities are run like businesses.
Friedman’s spiritual forefathers – the representatives of the Manchester School – lived in Marx’s time, with John Bright and Richard Cobden leading the way. For them too, free trade would solve all problems. Marx harboured a reluctant admiration for the Manchester liberals, seeing them as heralds for a development that had to precede the society he himself was fighting for. At the same time, he attacked them heatedly when they claimed to represent the whole of the people – the workers as well – against the aristocracy.
Marx wrote much about Cobden and Bright and their followers, especially in his articles in the New York Daily Tribune.
The Marx of the twenty-first century must brace himself against the reality that has been created since the 1980s.
Today, Marx may be discussed and often cited, but he has only a fraction of the influence he – apparently, at least – had fifty or a hundred years ago. In a way, this is paradoxical. His vision of society would seem to appear less pertinent then than it does now. The Soviet Union, which was supposed to be following in his footsteps, was characterized by many things, from censorship, forced labour camps, and rule by the bosses to schools and universities for everyone and guaranteed support for a non-modernistic culture – indeed, a ‘philistine sentimentalism’, to use the words of the Manifesto. In the other Europe, where Marx is also found in the family tree, certain politicians could talk about democratic socialism, and there – despite many shortcomings and injustices – moderate social security prevailed for most. The economy blossomed, preparing the ground for reforms that made life more tolerable for ordinary folk. Of course, there were still class divisions, but not as precipitous as a hundred years earlier.
Marx’s analysis of his time thus makes better sense today than it did fifty years ago. Its accuracy applies, above all, to the way capitalism works.
But Marx had not counted on capitalism’s ability to constantly renew itself and develop new productive forces. Today, capitalism appears more dominant than ever. In the only large country where Marx still has a place of honour – China – he has to put up with constantly being drenched in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’. Communism has become the ‘Sunday best’, tight as a straitjacket. Everyday life is marked by a race for market shares, as ruthless as it is successful. Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is being brilliantly confirmed. But for him, it would h
ave been inconceivable that a country that quotes him would drive capitalism to its utmost extremes.
It is in this paradoxical situation that entering deep into the study of Marx becomes important.
Going this deep requires that, from the beginning, we settle accounts with a range of fallacies about Marx circulating in the general public and making a reasonable understanding of his life and work more difficult. These fallacies, large and small, will turn up in their natural contexts further on in the text. Here, it is only a question of relieving the reader, from the beginning, of unnecessary ballast.
Misconceptions and Exaggerations
Several of the most common assertions about Marx are quite simply false. The claim that he wanted to dedicate the first volume of Capital to Darwin belongs here. He never dreamed of it. On the other hand, he did send a printed copy to the great biologist, who thanked him for the kindness but at the very most read the first few pages.
Another fallacy is that Marx said that religion is opium for the people. He never said that; he said it is an opium of the people. There is a big difference. Religion is not something that the malicious powers that be dispense to the people. It is the people themselves who seek relief and comfort in religion.13
Other common ideas about him can be questioned with good reason. One of the most widespread is that he was a determinist. Societal development would inexorably progress from one stage to another. Socialism would follow capitalism with the necessity of natural law.
This idea arises more naturally, as the Marxism that came after him often expressed itself this way. What is more, there are phrases in the works of Marx himself that are easily interpreted in this direction. But research over the last few decades – the research that could be conducted on his core texts in the condition he left them – has shown that he spoke more of tendencies than an inevitable development. According to him, there were far too many uncertain factors. He himself spoke of the power of accidental circumstances.
Sometimes, he is painted as a hypocrite for trying – often in vain – to live like a Victorian bourgeois. But he was not ashamed of that. He didn’t follow any ascetic attitude to life, but indulged everyone – himself included – in the advantages that were still only possible for a small minority.
The Marx found beyond the clichés is a living figure occupying a time as full of revolutionary news and social change as our own. This is the man, and the world he lives in, that we will now encounter.
But this book is not the first about Marx – only the latest in a nearly endless succession. What function will this particular book fulfil, then? To attempt an answer to this question, we have to cast a glance over the vast literature that exists. The main stress, of course, lies on the biographies – the books that in one way or another claim to deal with the complete Marx, his life and his works.
The Diversity of the Books
Eleanor Marx, his youngest daughter, was the first person who intended to write a biography of Karl Marx. But, apart from a few early articles, there were only incomplete notes, for reasons we will come back to. The notes are of great value as eyewitness accounts by a person who was intimately familiar.14
The earliest full-scale biography is by Franz Mehring, and was published in 1918. Mehring’s book is solid; in addition, its particular strength lies in its historical proximity – Mehring knew Friedrich Engels personally. But his book, by today’s standards, has its inevitable limitations in that relatively few of Marx’s written works were yet known in 1918.15
The shadow of actually existing socialism falls over the literature that came out during the more than seventy years of the Soviet Union’s history. Marx is either held up as the first great inspiration, or he is spared responsibility for what happened. The succession of more or less official biographies in the Soviet Union and the GDR had to be brought into harmony with the current regime. This did not prevent knowledgeable, well-balanced accounts from coming out in such an environment. Heinrich Gemkow’s 1967 work, Karl Marx: eine Biographie should be held up in particular here.16
In Western Europe and the United States, many good biographies came out alongside bitter propaganda efforts. Some of them attempted to directly counteract both the devout tributes and the demonization of Marx. One example is Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale’s 1975 work Marx Without Myth. The American author Allen Wood concentrated on Marx’s works, and dealt with the biographical details in only a few pages in his 1981 book Karl Marx.
Another American, Jerrold Siegel, went in the opposite direction. In his book from 1978, Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life he tried above all to capture Marx the man. It is an interesting personal portrait that nevertheless does not seem fully convincing. In his 1973 work Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, British author David McLellan strives to find a balance between the man and his works. It is an equally serious and ambitious biography that provides much important information. Marx’s works are treated conscientiously, but closer textual analyses are often set behind a swarm of lengthy citations.
One lucid, easily accessible – but also cursory – work is German author Werner Blumenberg’s 1962 book Marx in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, an English translation of which came out in 1972.
‘Analytical Marxism’ represents a special kind of interpretation of Marx. It aims at understanding and criticizing Marx’s works with the tools of modern analytical philosophy. Norwegian author Jon Elster is the only one of the central representatives of the school who has written something that could resemble a biography of Marx: his 1986 work An Introduction to Karl Marx. It is a handy little book in which Marx’s life is dealt with in a few pages, and the author keeps his works at arm’s length, certain of what is valuable and what is worthless in it. Elster’s book has the usual virtues of analytical philosophy – order and clarity – but also its shortcoming, an attitude of looking down at the object of study from on high.17
Back in the 1960s, the most comprehensive work about Marx’s early development came out, in which Engels’s childhood and youth were also dealt with: French author Auguste Cornu’s Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels: leur vie et leur œuvre (1955–1970). Despite its four volumes, the work does not cover more than the time up until 1846, when Marx was twenty-eight and Engels twenty-six. It is written in the orthodox tradition but abounding in a wealth of detail, and it stays close to the sources. Anyone seeking the most certain information about Marx’s background and earlier development can turn with confidence to Heinz Monz’s 1973 book Karl Marx: Grundlagen der Entwicklung zu Leben und Werk.
After the Soviet epoch, the biographies changed their character. There is no longer a politically sanctioned tradition of interpretation to concur with or to repudiate. The relationship to Marx has also become more direct. British author Francis Wheen’s 1999 contribution to the genre, Karl Marx: A Biography, is marked by a certain infectious rashness and enjoyed international success. Wheen wallows in both the comical and the tragic details of Marx’s life, but only by way of exception does he go deeper into the reason Marx still arouses interest: his ideas and his works.
Less easygoing is American author Jonathan Sperber, who in his extensive 2013 biography Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-century Life prefers to paint its grey on grey. While most are astounded over the hunger for learning that pushed Marx further, as they are over the singular, colourful, and highly tragic in his life story, Sperber does not let himself be impressed. He absent-mindedly devotes half a page at the end of his account to Marx’s literary appetite, which was aimed at everything from Aeschylus to Balzac. The metre-high stacks of excerpts that Marx produced under an intense life of readership elicit only a comment from him that it was terribly untidy in Marx’s workroom with all those disorganized notes.18
Sperber’s dour image of Marx may well be contrasted with the glowing colours in a biography a few years older – that of the famous French economist, author, and political adviser Jacques Attali’s light and elegant 2005 work, Karl Marx – l’esprit du monde. At
tali’s chief merit is that he does justice to the many facets of Marx in an enjoyable way. But despite everything, even this is a book that deals more with his life than with his works. Descriptions form a beautifully shimmering diversity, but do not really create any idea of why this old German would still be topical.
Anyone who wants a genuinely penetrating introduction to Marx’s works has reason to turn to a somewhat older book that nevertheless comes out in constantly new, reworked, and expanded editions: Michael Heinrich’s 1991 work, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert (The Science of Value). The entire great project of Capital is in focus there. In this way, it joins a hard-to-grasp and rapidly growing specialized literature, which will here be presented in its given context. But Heinrich’s actually follows Marx’s development in its entirety, and can therefore also be seen as an intellectual biography that places great demands on its reader, but also yields bountiful rewards.
The once-vigorous Italian literature on Marx and Marxism has more or less run dry since the Italian Communist Party passed into being a general party of the left. There are exceptions, however. Philosopher Stefano Petrucciani wrote a handy 2009 biography simply titled Marx.19 Since then, he has gone further with a more inspired 2012 study titled A lezione da Marx (Taking Lessons from Marx),20 in which he discusses how we can approach Marx’s texts today.21
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