Round birthdays of notable figures are readily taken as occasions for biographies. The 200th birthday of Karl Marx in 2018 was no exception. Gareth Stedman Jones’s Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion had already appeared in 2016, followed in the spring of 2018 by the expanded edition of Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, originally published in Swedish in 2015. In April 2018, shortly before Marx’s birthday on May 5, I was able to join the festivities by publishing the first volume of the German edition of Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society, which appeared in English translation in July 2019.[1]
Biography as a genre is often situated somewhere between historiography and literature, involving an artistic or creative element that sets it apart from other historical studies. Many biographies tend to concern themselves with the flow of the narrative rather than striving for historical accuracy. Rather than focusing on a precise inventory of what is known for certain about the person depicted, and what for more or less good reasons can only be assumed about them, these biographies “emotionally attune” themselves to the situation, and, more often than not, to their subjects’ imagined inner conflicts. Every year a slew of biographies of diverse individuals appear, which amount to nothing more than a mixture of already well-known facts, often circulated but unattested anecdotes, vulgar psychology, and the biographers’ own particular views of the world. Even more notable biographies frequently fail to distinguish between what can be reasonably concluded from the sources, what is a more or less well-founded assumption, and what is simply vague speculation. Where several biographies of a person are available, the more recent ones repeat much of what was said already in the older ones, so that few biographers concern themselves with whether these older claims they draw upon are also sufficiently ascertained—an ideal path toward the creation of legends.
Among the fairly recent biographies of Marx, the group of questionable works includes, in particular, the one published by Francis Wheen in 1999. Many reviews praised how in Wheen’s account the private Marx, “Karl Marx the man,” took center stage. That is true. Except that many of the private anecdotes are fictitious, or else rely on an extensive embellishment of the few facts that have been established. Wheen’s procedure should be sufficiently elucidated by the following brief example. When on May 10, 1838, Marx’s father, Heinrich Marx, died in Trier, his son Karl was in Berlin. He did not attend the funeral. Wheen notes: “Karl did not attend the funeral. The journey from Berlin would be too long, he explained, and he had more important things to do.”[2] On the basis of the formulation “he explained,” an impartial reader will assume that this is an original statement by Marx. But Wheen does not specify a source—and there isn’t one. Wheen’s justification for Marx’s absence at the funeral, a justification that makes the young Marx appear an indifferent son, is fictitious. A quick look at the traffic conditions of the time shows that it would have been impossible for Marx to attend the funeral. There was no rail connection between Trier and Berlin. The stagecoach, carrying both people and mail, took from five to seven days but did not run daily. Between the sending of a letter with news of the death and the son’s arrival, twelve to fourteen days would have passed. In the early summer in Trier, however, it was impossible to preserve the body for that long. Accordingly, the burial had to take place a few days after death. Unfortunately this is not the only invention in Wheen’s biography, rendering the book useless as a serious source for studying Marx’s life.
I.
In Germany in particular, even serious biographies of politically important figures continue to have a hard time of it with many leftists. They are suspected of favoring an individualizing conception of history as advocated in the nineteenth century by, among others, the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who devised the famous phrase that history is made by great men. Biographies of leftist theorists are considered entirely suspect: What could possibly be gained from a preoccupation with a biographical account, if what is ultimately at stake is an engagement with the theory?
Until the end of the Cold War the political appreciation that many biographies offered of Marx as a person depended on whether his theory was highly valued or considered worthless. Those critically opposed to Marx’s theory were often already highly suspicious of Marx the person. He was said to have been domineering, taking advantage of his family and friends. Conversely, many Marxists presented him as noble and good, and whenever there was a conflict, he was of course always right.
The situation these days is not quite as awkward. Hero worship and hagiography are out, and personal debasements have become subtler. But Marx’s life is still used to support judgments about his theory. This is particularly evident in Jonathan Sperber’s and Stedman Jones’s biographies. In both cases, the titles themselves already indicate how things are going to unfold: Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) and Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016).
In the introduction to his book, Sperber leaves no doubt that Marx has nothing more to tell us today. Sperber opposes the contemporary relevance of Marx’s theories, a relevance recognized to some extent even by conservatives—for example, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore—since the financial crisis of 2008–9. Sperber poses the ironic question of “how a mortal human being, and not a wizard—Karl Marx, and not Gandalf the Grey—could successfully look 150 or 160 years into the future.”[3] Some reviewers commented that it is quite strange to publish an extensive biography of a person whose work the author considers irrelevant. However, the very formulation of the question is more than questionable: whether Marx’s analyses are relevant today is not a question of clairvoyance, but of whether Marx has analyzed and provided insight into the fundamental capitalist structures that continue to dominate the current economy and are therefore still important today.
Stedman Jones’s verdict, on the other hand, is not as radically unfavorable as Sperber’s: Marx is granted a certain “greatness,” but mostly “illusion.” For both authors, the basic argument is that Marx’s theories were so strongly tied to the discourse and experiences of his time that there’s not much left to be learned from him about the problems of the present. For Sperber, Marx’s economic theory is reducible to capitalism of the early nineteenth century, while for Stedman Jones, Marx’s political ideas are rooted in the “pre-March” era before the European revolutions of 1848 and therefore are completely outdated.
Both authors give the impression that the message they strive to communicate was already clear from the outset and that their biographies are merely intended to give this message greater plausibility. Given the extent of their criticism of Marx’s analyses in Capital, however, it is astounding how little they delve deeply into this unfinished work. Both authors rely on the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)—in publication since 1975, and comprising collected works, letters, manuscripts, excerpts in their original form (which was not the case with previous editions) and in their different versions (which was also uncommon)—yet the enormous potential of this edition is used only to a very limited extent, both as far as Marx’s additional texts on Capital are concerned, edited here for the first time, and in terms of the information provided in the editorial apparatus. Even the debates on Marx’s Capital over the last forty years have been assimilated only to a very small extent. One can argue about how deeply a biography should engage with the most important work of the depicted person. But if the biographers don’t recoil from making such negative judgments about the work, then it seems necessary to ask on what basis these judgments are actually made. Liedman, who sees Capital more positively than Sperber and Stedman Jones, bases his assessments not only on a much more detailed treatment of Marx’s critique of political economy, but also takes note of at least some of the more recent debates.
II.
The genre of biography is neither self-evident nor simply given. Especially in the last thirty or forty years we have witnessed important discussions about the actual possibilities and limitations of biographical writing (which are discussed extensively in the appendix to the first volume of my book). The more recent Marx biographies, however, pay no regard to these debates. Sperber subdivides his account into three large parts—“Shaping,” “Struggle,” and “Legacy”—which he also understands chronologically: “Shaping” is supposed to portray Marx’s youth and maturation (1818–1847), “Struggle” deals with the conflicts of the mature Marx (1848–1871), while “Legacy” depicts Marx’s old age (1871–1883) and raises the question of what remains. Based on the bildungsroman, the idea that a person is first influenced, then has their character formed and, once this process is concluded, they begin to influence their environment, was the basis of many nineteenth-century biographies, and was generalized by Wilhelm Dilthey at the beginning of the twentieth century. Marx’s life clearly doesn’t align with these simple ideas. The period of his “shaping” did not end in 1848; he continued learning until well into his old age. The influence of Eurocentric and historically deterministic theories, which can be traced back to the 1840s and 1850s, lessened in the 1860s, and was completely surpassed by the 1870s. On the other hand, Marx’s “struggle” did not begin in 1848, but at the latest in 1842 when he began writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, nor did it end in 1871. Far more plausible than Sperber’s construction, it seems to me, is to consider the “person” as an effect of a continuing process of constitution that avoids the schematic division into a first phase, in which external influences on the person predominate, and a second phase, in which the person actively shapes the external world. Therefore, I make no attempt in my biography to construct periods of Marx’s life. This also applies to the division of the biography into several volumes, which results from purely practical aspects but explicitly does not claim to portray periods of Marx’s life.
Stedman Jones emphasizes how strongly the present distorted image of Marx has been shaped by the Marxist production of an embellished icon—a process that began with German social democracy at the end of the nineteenth century. In opposition to this, Stedman Jones purports to return to the original Marx of the nineteenth century— which he also makes clear terminologically by consistently referring to “Karl” instead of “Marx.” It’s a matter of course that a biography must take note of how strongly the image of the person depicted was influenced by reception history (which, in Marx’s case, is comprised not only of “Marxism”). However, Stedman Jones’s notion that the reception history—and with it the horizon, which has become historical, of our own questioning—could easily be abandoned is highly questionable. Hans-Georg Gadamer convincingly criticized such views sixty years ago.
At any rate, the formation of the cipher “Marx” is not the only result of reception history that’s relevant to a biography of Marx. The same is true of “Hegelian Philosophy,” “Romanticism,” “Materialism,” and so on, concepts that also cannot simply be assumed as given and deployed unreflectively. What this means can be seen in the widespread characterization of Hegel as a representative of “German Idealism.” In Hegel’s lifetime, such an understanding of the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel himself was far from common. It was put forward only in the second half of the nineteenth century in German writing on the history of philosophy, and then adopted in other countries.[4] As late as the 1840s, contemporary encyclopedias would customarily emphasize that, unlike Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schelling are not actually “Idealists.” Although Marx already speaks of “German Idealism” in The Holy Family, as well as in the posthumously published The German Ideology, this term is not used as a category of the history of philosophy, but rather as a polemical description. Hegel’s “Idealism” shouldn’t be used lightly as something self-evident.
When composing a biography, we have to consider not only various diachronic lines, which extend to the present time, but also synchronic ones. That one should place the depicted figure in their own time is nothing new; many biographies include the phrase “His/ her life and his/her times” already in their title. More often than not, however, the times and people important to the person portrayed are only considered from the perspective of the depicted individual. When it comes to Bruno Bauer, for instance, many Marx biographies take more or less the position formulated by Marx and Engels in The Holy Family or The German Ideology. However, it then remains completely incomprehensible how Bauer could have been Marx’s closest personal friend and political companion for five years. In order to understand this, Bauer must be regarded as a theoretically as well as politically radicalized Hegelian theologian, and thus considered completely independently of Marx and his later critique of him. The situation is quite similar with a number of others, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ferdinand Lassalle, or Mikhail Bakunin. Their political ideas deserve to be taken more seriously than has been customary, at least among many Marxists. Conversely, Marx’s critique of them deserves closer scrutiny, for it was not always adequate, either on a personal or a factual level.
Another synchronic line aims less at people than at the respective field of discourses. If biographies focus solely on the person and their work, then it remains unclear what in their work was actually new at the time and what was not. We then judge the work solely from our contemporary perspective. Yet in order to be able to judge whether the depicted figure has merely produced a new result within the already existing discursive field or whether they also shifted its boundaries, one must first reconstruct the field of what was “sayable” at the time.
III.
Completely contrary to the views of prevailing economic doctrines, the financial crisis of 2008–09 showed that the capitalist economy is highly unstable and prone to crises. The fact that during the subsequent economic recovery social inequality in many countries increased rather than diminished made it clear that even under the most favorable conditions capitalism is a social machine for further enrichment of the wealthy, while the rest of the population must content itself with slight improvements to their situation. And only those who ignore all the facts can disregard signs of the accelerating climate change that threatens humanity, and that ultimately results from capitalist-driven economic growth. It is therefore far from surprising that in such a situation interest in Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism has increased significantly worldwide. This is not an abstract interest in the history of ideas, but a concrete political interest. However, it has also been clear for some time now that many Marxisms have too often transformed Marx’s project of a critique of political economy into a shallow worldview. A politically productive appropriation of Marx’s theory must therefore also partly put to the test the Marxist certainty about what this theory allegedly states, and must not stop at the contradictions and ambivalences that one finds in Marx himself.
In taking this critical demand seriously, such an examination must begin with the structure of Marx’s texts themselves. While many earlier editions—above all the manuscripts not published by Marx himself—reveal extensive interventions by their respective publishers, with MEGA we received for the very first time a faithful and complete edition of all the texts of Marx and Engels. The additional question of quality in translations arises. While Capital has been translated into many languages, most of these translations have been found to contain significant inaccuracies and errors. In this respect, it is a good sign for the current discussion of Marxian theory that in the last six or seven years we saw several new translations of Capital partly consulting the additional material from MEGA: in Brazil new translations of all three volumes of Capital appeared; in Italy the first volume of Capital with additional texts from MEGA was published in two volumes; Slovenia and Greece saw new translations of the first volume; and new translations have also been published in Persian and in Arabic. For now, two different translations of all three volumes of Capital are available in English. The publication of Marx’s original 1864–65 manuscript of the third volume, translated by Ben Fowkes and published by Fred Moseley, presents a significant contribution to this debate. However, the two English translations of the first volume of Capital (referring to different German texts) exhibit a series of inaccuracies and errors. It’s therefore very important to the English-language discussion that Princeton University Press will publish a new English edition of the first volume, translated by Paul Reitter.
What significance for the new discussion of Marxian theory can be attributed to a biography of Marx then? That one can attempt through the detour of a biography to demonstrate the limitations of Marxian theory by emphasizing the extent to which Marxian thinking is confined to nineteenth-century conceptions has already been shown by Sperber and Stedman Jones in their respective books. However, it’s a banality to note that the thinking of a man who was born in 1818 and died in 1883 was rooted in the nineteenth century. Where else should it have been rooted? The much more exciting question is how close we are today to the social, economic, and political upheavals that occurred in the nineteenth century: the onset of industrial capitalism and the emergence of the class of wage laborers; the replacement of cabinet politics with a more rigorous parliamentarianism, as well as the concomitant expansion of voting rights and public debate on politics; the increasing importance of mass media, which began long before radio and television, when the first nineteenth-century mass-circulated newspapers became dailies. The basic structures of modern societies emerged, or at least began to make their way, in the nineteenth century, first in Europe and then in many other parts of the world. These are the developments that concern Marxian analyses.
The problems Marx dealt with can hardly be charged with irrelevance. However, their relevance alone cannot lead one to conclude that the Marxian analyses are all true: they have to be discussed rigorously. Marxian investigations are still too strongly situated on a purely theoretical level; Marx comes into view only as a theoretician, and his texts are read more or less as timeless treatises without considering their historical context. His investigations, however, consistently display a dual character: they are not merely analyses of fundamental economic or political relations, sometimes of a very high level of abstraction; they are always also direct interventions in political conflicts and debates, with which today’s readers are no longer familiar. Here a biography can significantly contribute to understanding the context of these works by elucidating these conflicts and Marx’s involvement in them.
In addition, a proper reception of Marx’s work requires an examination of the very different kinds of texts that Marx left behind. This requires not abstract claims to completeness but rather relating the different kinds of texts to one another with respect to their content. If one wants to learn something about the economic analyses of the “mature” Marx, consulting the Grundrisse and Capital manuscripts is not enough. One has to include the newspaper articles on economic issues that were written at the same time, as well as the numerous notebooks in which Marx deals with theoretical economic literature and with empirical crises, such as the crisis of 1857–58 or that of 1866. And finally, the letters are also of great importance, in which economic and political developments were repeatedly discussed. Proper assessment of all these documents requires biographical information.
IV.
Contrary to all Marxist attempts at systematization and the constructions of “dialectical” and “historical materialism”—terms that Marx never once used—Marx’s work is by no means a theory coherent in itself or even complete. This work has not remained merely a torso, but a series of torsos. Looking at the development of Marx’s work as a whole, one sees beginnings, breaks, new beginnings accompanied by smaller or larger conceptual shifts, and new breaks. Even Marx’s dissertation of 1841 was supposed to be the prelude to a series of studies on post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy (with fully informed references to post-Hegelian philosophy). Further studies, however, were never written. The early critique of the economy contained in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, first published in the 1930s and primarily known for their discussion of alienation, was intended to open a series of critiques (of politics, law, and morality) which were never written. The 1845–46 manuscripts of The German Ideology also weren’t published until the 1930s, but then quickly received the nimbus of a purported founding document of “historical materialism.” However, Marx and Engels never undertook the planned revision of these manuscripts, and their status as founding documents can now be doubted with good reason. In 1859, Marx wanted to expound his critique of political economy in six books (on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, international trade, and the world market), but only the first part of the first book, titled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and dealing with the commodity and money, was published in 1859. In the preface to the first volume of Capital, published in 1867, Marx announced three more volumes of Capital, which he was unable to complete in the sixteen years until his death—not least because, in the 1870s, he considerably expanded the scope of his investigation, which also implied a new conception of Capital. [5]
If one wants to understand how these many torsos came about, what the causes of the many breaks and the new considerations and aspects were, which later made immediate continuation impossible, then one cannot bypass Marx’s biography: one has to take note of the political developments of the time, consider the conflicts in which Marx was involved, as well as his scientific and political education, which can often only be reconstructed from excerpts and letters.
In the course of tracing these concerns, it quickly becomes clear that the prevailing image of Marx, which focuses on him as a critical scientist, requires a considerable expansion. Marx wasn’t merely a scientist, he was also a journalist who intervened in politics and a revolutionary activist who formed alliances, took part in building various organizations, and had to fight out political conflicts not only with his opponents but sometimes with his comrades. And last but not least, Marx was also a private scholar who devoted himself to diverse scientific studies in various fields of knowledge. These different sides of Marx’s life were by no means separate. Marx’s scientific insights were not an end in themselves; they were geared toward praxis that would change society and influenced both his journalistic work and his political engagement. On the other hand, the journalistic and political activities not only disrupted his scholarly work but also confronted Marx with new topics and problems, thus leading to the postponement of his research and, sometimes, to fundamentally new concepts. Marx’s texts are the result of continuous learning processes that proceeded on different and by no means linear levels. He did not always make better sense of everything over time; he would sometimes reach a deadlock.
The development of Marx’s work was marked by a multitude of contingencies. By no means was everything necessarily reducible to the main work of Capital. Had Marx not been forced to leave Paris in 1849, and had he not gone to London, he could not have written Capital. Capital as we know it today could only have been written in London—the center of British capitalism that dominated the world market at the time, where economic issues were continuously discussed in newspapers and in parliament, where reports on economic crises, the policy of the Bank of England, the situation in the factories, etc., were debated, and where the world’s largest library of economic literature was accessible to Marx at the British Museum. However, the economic research that he began in the 1850s did not dominate his scientific activities to the extent usually and repeatedly assumed. To be sure, Marx never wrote the planned book on the state. But the engagement with a critique of politics and the state is found not only in the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) and in The Civil War in France (1871), but also in a large number of Marx’s newspaper articles, which, granted, focused on current political topics, but always went beyond them in dealing with more fundamental questions. In addition to these two main strands—politics and political economy—the letters and excerpts also tackle, with various degrees of intensity, other topics, such as different problems of history, ethnology, linguistics, mathematics, the natural sciences, and—avant la lettre—ecological questions.[6]
This multidimensional character of Marx’s work is accompanied by a complex developmental history. For decades we witnessed two opposing conceptions of the development of his work. On the one hand, there is the “continuity hypothesis,” which posits an essentially continuous development of Marx’s work since the 1844 Parisian manuscripts, or even, as is sometimes claimed, since the 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—a development in which the central theoretical concepts supposedly undergo no fundamental change but are merely extended and specified. On the other hand, there is the “break hypothesis,” positing a fundamental cut, which is usually dated to the Theses on Feuerbach and the German Ideology of 1845–46. Neither of these theses seems to me to reflect the complexity of Marx’s development. Marx’s educational processes led to a multitude of breaks and fundamental conceptual changes, so that the idea of a continuous development and improvement of an original conception (developed already by the rather young Marx) is completely untenable. However, at different times, these breaks took place in very different areas of Marx’s research. These remarkably diverse conceptual changes cannot be summarized in one or two major breaks, such that one could reduce the development of Marx’s work to two or three major phases. The actual development is much more complicated. What Marx once stated as his own life motto is also well suited as a motto for the exploration of Marx’s biography and the development of his works: De omnibus dubitandum (“everything must be doubted”).
Translated by Simon Hajdini.
Notes
[1] Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016); Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, trans. Jeffrey N. Skinner (London: Verso, 2018); Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
[2] Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 29–30.
[3] Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (London and New York: Liveright, 2013), xiii.
[4] Walter Jaeschke, “Genealogie des Deutschen Idealismus,” in Materialismus und Spiritualismus: Philosophie und Wissenschaften nach 1848, ed. Andreas Arndt and Walter Jaeschke, (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), 219–234.
[5] See Michael Heinrich, “Capital after MEGA: Discontinuities, Interruptions, and New Beginnings,” in Crisis and Critique 3, no. 3 (2016): 92–138.
[6] See Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).