Book Reviews - Clear-eyed prophet. The basic ideas of Karl Marx have been
ruthlessly parodied and vulgarised. But his critique of capitalism, argues
Tariq Ali, has never been more relevant in our debased times.
NEW STATESMAN
Monday 20th September 1999
Karl Marx
Francis Wheen
Fourth Estate, 432pp, £20
ISBN 1857026373
France, in the last
half of the 19th century, was the country most favoured as an exile by
fractious German poets and philosophers. In 1844, two of their finest,
Heine and Marx, were both at their desks in Paris. Heine was working on a
poem, "Germany", in which he sees the Kaiser in a dream and they have a
conversation. The poem is a savage, prescient and vivid lampoon of the
Prussian ruling class: "And now it's the Prussian eagle! It grips /My body
and pecks at my liver,/It gobbles the liver from out my breast,/I wail and
moan and quiver."
Marx, who admired
Heine greatly, did not wail and moan like his friend; he tried to
understand. In that same year, he was working on a set of essays which were
discovered, edited and published almost a century later in Moscow by the
great Soviet scholar David Ryazanov. He was subsequently arrested on
Stalin's orders and executed, one of the numerous independent-minded
Marxist victims of the cockroach moustache.
Ryazanov's own
biography of Marx was the best of a genre which degenerated rapidly into
hagiography. There have been far too many of these and most of them are
worthless. For over 50 years, the basic ideas of Marx, ruthlessly
vulgarised, were taught as a secular catechism to millions of children in
dozens of languages in Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea and eastern
Europe.
Most of these ideas
were presented in manuals written by hack academics, supervised by
ideological committees, to ensure the extermination of critical reason.
Marxism was transformed into a secular religion for the citizenry and so
lost much of its pungency and meaning. Marx, who saw himself as a
latter-day Prometheus implanting fire in the mind of the proletariat, would
have found this religious colouring given to his work extremely offensive.
It is barely worth
mentioning that the hateographies are worse. Most of these are compendiums
of slander and ignorance, concocted by unworthy opponents who have little
idea of the dynamic in Marx's thought. In these he is always the devil who
fathered Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. The cold war years did not encourage
objectivity on either side.
What, then, do they
know of Marx who only Marxism know? Not very much is the assumption of this
new biography, which comes as a pleasant and timely surprise. Francis
Wheen's Marx is a thinker of deep and genuine passion, whose ideas shaped
this century. It was a life replete with personal tragedies and
intellectual triumphs. He was possessed of a reckless and deep-rooted scorn
for the meanness of everyday bourgeois life and a great love for the
classics of European literature, which he drew on heavily for his own work.
Wheen's suggestion that the structure of Kapital was inspired by Tristram
Shandy rather than Hegel may or may not be true. It is certainly original.
What is extremely
refreshing about this book, what gives it a certain integrity, is that
Wheen comes to his subject without any dogmatic preconceptions. As the book
proceeds and as one realises that the author has read more and more of
Marx, one senses the surprise and excitement. We are informed that Marx,
even if he had been nothing else, would have been remembered as the
greatest journalist produced by the 19th century. His vivid lampoons of
numerous enemies - his choleric and polemical temper - entertain his latest
biographer as much as they did his close friends at the time. The result is
a lively and well-written book, one that will appeal to any intelligent
reader seeking refuge from the trivia that dominate the TV screens and
airwaves of contemporary Britain and the US.
Marx was a thinker
ahead of his time; as Wheen reminds the reader, the current state of global
capitalism would not have surprised him in the least. His world view was a
synthesis of German philosophy, English economics and French politics. Of
these three, the last was the most significant, with its cycles of
revolutions and counter-revolutions. But the real originality of Marx and
Engels lay in their insistence on the historic potential of the new class
that had been created by capitalism and would become its grave-diggers. The
economics and philosophy essentially underpinned this view of history,
politics and class struggle. Historical materialism was never intended
simply as a method to understand the past. It was a weapon to change the
present and ensure a different future.
Marx's ideas would
be an empty shell without the theory of proletarian revolution. In these
twilit times of neo-liberal triumphs on a global scale and the collapse of
revolutionary hope everywhere, Marx's political theories have been
consigned to the dustbin or put on a backburner marked Utopia; but hasty
verdicts might turn out to be premature as capitalism gets worse, not
better.
Social democratic
reformism, which gave the system a human face for much of this century,
has, in the wake of 1989, also collapsed, reminding us of the extent to
which the New Deal in the USA and reforms in western Europe were a response
to the Russian revolution.
So the middle of the
next century might be a more suitable time for more definitive judgements
on the politics of Karl Marx. That he refuses to leave the stage, and is
hailed by many on the right as an astute historian of capitalism, is a sign
of the times. The enduring interest in Marx and his ideas reminds one of
Nietzsche's comment on the fate of Schopenhauer: "What he taught is put
aside,/What he lived, that will abide/Behold a man!/Subject he was to none."
The merit of this
work is that it links together what Marx taught and how he lived; and in
these bad times one can ask for nothing more. Far-sighted though he was in
the sphere of political economy, in the sphere of personal relations he
remained wedded to his time, more noticeably so than Engels, his closest
friend and comrade. The voluminous correspondence between the two men
reveals casual prejudices, Marx even referring to the "mulatto blood" of
his own son-in-law, Paul Lafargue.
Marx and Engels
often berated the German Social Democratic Party for its lack of militancy,
but where a layer of the SDP was genuinely advanced was in the realm of
sexuality. In 1895 Eduard Bernstein defended Oscar Wilde in the party
newspaper. In January 1898, August Bebel became the first member of the
Reichstag to introduce a resolution in favour of homosexual law reform.
Others, such as
Hirschfeld and Ulrich, had earlier produced numerous pamphlets in defence
of homosexuality.
One of these was
sent by Engels to Marx, who responded thus: "Here are the most unnatural
revelations. The pederasts are beginning to count themselves and find that
they make up a power in the state. Only the organisation is lacking, but
according to this it already exists in secret. And since they count such
significant men, in all the old and even the new parties, from Rosing to
Schweitzer, they cannot fail to succeed. Guerre aux cons, paix aux
trous-de-cul will be the call now. It is only luck that we are personally
too old to have to fear that on the victory of this party we'll have to pay
the victors bodily tribute. But the young generation! Moreover, only in
Germany is it possible for such a fellow to appear, transform filthiness
into a theory, and solicit."
It's a pity Wheen
neglected to include this riveting exchange in this otherwise admirable
biography. It might have drawn his old Private Eye comrades, Richard
Ingrams and Auberon Waugh, much closer to Marxism.
Tariq Ali is a writer and broadcaster
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