Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde
Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny, a
left-wing journalist and her father’s secretary, in 1869. ‘The cross she
is wearing,’ Jonathan Sperber writes, ‘was not a sign of religious
affiliation but the symbol of the Polish uprising of 1863.’
In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a
backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on
conditions quite different from any that prevail today:
The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it.
Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he
actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and
events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes
that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable,
even irrelevant. Claiming that Marx was in some way “intellectually
responsible” for twentieth-century communism will appear thoroughly
misguided; but so will the defense of Marx as a radical democrat, since
both views “project back onto the nineteenth century controversies of
later times.”
Certainly Marx understood crucial features of
capitalism; but they were “those of the capitalism that existed in the
early decades of the nineteenth century,” rather than the very different
capitalism that exists at the start of the twenty-first century. Again,
while he looked ahead to a new kind of human society that would come
into being after capitalism had collapsed, Marx had no settled
conception of what such a society would be like. Turning to him for a
vision of our future, for Sperber, is as misconceived as blaming him for
our past.
Using as one of his chief sources the newly available
edition of the writings of Marx and Engels, commonly known by its German
acronym the MEGA, Sperber constructs a picture of
Marx’s politics that is instructively different from the one preserved
in standard accounts. The positions Marx adopted were rarely dictated by
any preexisting theoretical commitments regarding capitalism or
communism. More often, they reflected his attitudes toward the ruling
European powers and their conflicts, and the intrigues and rivalries in
which he was involved as a political activist.
At times Marx’s hostility to Europe’s reactionary regimes led him to
bizarre extremes. An ardent opponent of Russian autocracy who campaigned
for a revolutionary war against Russia in 1848–1849, he was dismayed by
Britain’s indecisive handling of the Crimean War. Denouncing the
opposition to the war of leading British radicals, Marx went on to claim
that Britain’s faltering foreign policies were due to the fact that the
prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was a paid agent of the Russian tsar,
one of a succession of traitors occupying positions of power in Britain
for over a century—an accusation he reiterated over several years in a
succession of newspaper articles reprinted by his daughter Eleanor as The Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century.
Similarly, his struggle with his Russian rival Mikhail Bakunin for control of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA)
reflected Marx’s hatred of the Prussian monarchy and his suspicion that
Bakunin was a pan-Slavist with secret links to the tsar more than his
hostility to Bakunin’s authoritarian brand of anarchism. It was such
nineteenth-century passions and animosities rather than ideological
collisions of the kind that are familiar from the cold war era that
shaped Marx’s life in politics.
Sperber’s subtly revisionist view
extends to what have been commonly held to be Marx’s definitive
ideological commitments. Today as throughout the twentieth century Marx
is inseparable from the idea of communism, but he was not always wedded
to it. Writing in the Rhineland News in 1842 in his very first
piece after taking over as editor, Marx launched a sharp polemic against
Germany’s leading newspaper, the Augsburg General News, for
publishing articles advocating communism. He did not base his assault on
any arguments about communism’s impracticality: it was the very idea
that he attacked. Lamenting that “our once blossoming commercial cities
are no longer flourishing,” he declared that the spread of Communist
ideas would “defeat our intelligence, conquer our sentiments,” an
insidious process with no obvious remedy. In contrast, any attempt to
realize communism could easily be cut short by force of arms: “practical
attempts [to introduce communism], even attempts en masse, can be
answered with cannons.” As Sperber writes, “The man who would write the Communist Manifesto just five years later was advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising!”
Nor
was this an isolated anomaly. In a speech to the Cologne Democratic
Society in August 1848, Marx rejected revolutionary dictatorship by a
single class as “nonsense”—an opinion so strikingly at odds with the
views Marx had expressed only six months earlier in the Communist Manifesto
that later Marxist-Leninist editors of his speeches mistakenly refused
to accept its authenticity—and over twenty years later, at the outbreak
of the Franco-Prussian War, Marx also dismissed any notion of a Paris
Commune as “nonsense.”
Marx the anti-Communist is
an unfamiliar figure; but there were undoubtedly times when he shared
the view of the liberals of his day and later, in which communism
(assuming anything like it could be achieved) would be detrimental to
human progress. This is only one example of a more general truth.
Despite his own aspirations and the efforts of generations of his
disciples from Engels onward, Marx’s ideas never formed a unified
system. One reason for this was the disjointed character of Marx’s
working life. Though we think of Marx as a theorist ensconced in the
library of the British Museum, theorizing was only one of his avocations
and rarely his primary activity:
Usually Marx’s theoretical pursuits had to be crammed in beside far more time-consuming activities: émigré politics, journalism, the IWMA, evading creditors, and the serious or fatal illnesses that plagued his children and his wife, and, after the onset of his skin disease in 1863, Marx himself. All too often Marx’s theoretical labors were interrupted for months at a time or reserved for odd hours late at night.
But
if the conditions of Marx’s life were hardly congenial to the
continuous labor required for system-building, the eclectic quality of
his thinking presented a greater obstacle. That he borrowed ideas from
many sources is a scholarly commonplace. Where Sperber adds to the
standard account of Marx’s eclecticism is in probing the conflict
between his continuing adherence to Hegel’s belief that history has a
built-in logic of development and the commitment to science that Marx
acquired from the positivist movement.
In pointing to the
formative intellectual role of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century
Sperber shows himself to be a surefooted guide to the world of ideas in
which Marx moved. Partly no doubt because it now seems in some respects
embarrassingly reactionary, positivism has been neglected by
intellectual historians. Yet it produced an enormously influential body
of ideas. Originating with the French socialist Henri de Saint-Simon
(1760–1825) but most fully developed by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), one
of the founders of sociology, positivism promoted a vision of the future
that remains pervasive and powerful today. Asserting that science was
the model for any kind of genuine knowledge, Comte looked forward to a
time when traditional religions had disappeared, the social classes of
the past had been superseded, and industrialism (a term coined by
Saint-Simon) reorganized on a rational and harmonious basis—a
transformation that would occur in a series of evolutionary stages
similar to those that scientists found in the natural world.
Sperber
tells us that Marx described Comte’s philosophical system as
“positivist shit”; but there were many parallels between Marx’s view of
society and history and those of the positivists:
For all the distance Marx kept from these [positivist] doctrines, his own image of progress through distinct stages of historical development and a twofold division of human history into an earlier, irrational era and a later, industrial and scientific one, contained distinctly positivist elements.
Astutely, Sperber perceives fundamental
similarities between Marx’s account of human development and that of
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who (rather than Darwin) invented the
expression “survival of the fittest” and used it to defend laissez-faire
capitalism. Influenced by Comte, Spencer divided human societies into
two types, “the ‘militant’ and the ‘industrial,’ with the former
designating the entire pre-industrial, pre-scientific past, and the
latter marking a new epoch in the history of the world.”
Spencer’s
new world was an idealized version of early Victorian capitalism, while
Marx’s was supposed to come about only once capitalism had been
overthrown; but the two thinkers were at one in expecting “a new
scientific era, one fundamentally different from the human past.” As
Sperber concludes: “Today, a visitor to Highgate Cemetery in North
London can see the graves of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer standing face
to face—for all the intellectual differences between the two men, not
an entirely inappropriate juxtaposition.”
It was
not only his view of history as an evolutionary process culminating in a
scientific civilization that Marx derived from the positivists. He also
absorbed something of their theories of racial types. The fact that
Marx took such theories seriously may seem surprising; but one must
remember that many leading nineteenth-century thinkers—not least Herbert
Spencer—were devotees of phrenology, and positivists had long believed
that in order to be fully scientific, social thought must ultimately be
based in physiology.
Comte had identified race (along with climate) as one of the physical determinants of social life, and Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
(1853–1855), a widely influential defense of innate racial hierarchies,
was partly inspired by Comte’s philosophy. Marx reacted to Gobineau’s
book with scorn, and showed no trace of any belief in racial superiority
in his relations with his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, who was of African
descent. (His chief objection to the marriage was that Lafargue lacked a
reliable income.) At the same time Marx was not immune to the racist
stereotypes of his day. His description of the German-Jewish socialist
Ferdinand Lassalle, which Sperber describes as “an ugly outburst, even
by the standards of the nineteenth century,” illustrates this influence:
It is now completely clear to me, that, as proven by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, he [Lassalle] stems from the Negroes who joined the march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side did not mate with a nigger). Now this combination of Jewry and Germanism with the negroid basic substance must bring forth a peculiar product. The pushiness of this lad is also nigger-like.
Sperber
comments that this passage demonstrates Marx’s “non-racial
understanding of Jews. The ‘combination of Jewry and Germanism’ that
Marx saw in Lassalle was cultural and political,” not biological. As
Sperber goes on to show, however, Marx also referred to racial types in
ways that suggested these types were grounded in biological lineages.
Eulogizing the work of the French ethnographer and geologist Pierre
Trémaux (1818–1895), whose book Origin and Transformation of Man and Other Beings
he read in 1866, Marx praised Trémaux’s theory of the role of geology
in animal and human evolution as being “much more important and much
richer than Darwin” for providing a “natural basis” for nationality and
showing that “the common Negro type is only the degenerate form of a
much higher one.” With these observations, Sperber comments,
Marx seemed to be moving in the direction of a biological or geological explanation of differences in nationality—in any event, one connecting nationality to descent, explained in terms of natural science…another example of the influence on Marx of positivist ideas about the intellectual priority of the natural sciences.
Marx’s admiration for Darwin is well known. A common legend has it that Marx offered to dedicate Capital
to Darwin. Sperber describes this as “a myth that has been repeatedly
refuted but seems virtually ineradicable,” since it was Edward Aveling,
the lover of Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who unsuccessfully approached
Darwin for permission to dedicate a popular volume he had written on
evolution. But there can be no doubt that Marx welcomed Darwin’s work,
seeing it (as Sperber puts it) as “another intellectual blow struck in
favor of materialism and atheism.”
Less well known are Marx’s deep
differences with Darwin. If Marx viewed Trémaux’s work as “a very
important improvement on Darwin,” it was because “progress, which in
Darwin is purely accidental, is here necessary on the basis of the
periods of development of the body of the earth.” Virtually every
follower of Darwin at the time believed he had given a scientific
demonstration of progress in nature; but though Darwin himself sometimes
wavered on the point, that was never his fundamental view. Darwin’s
theory of natural selection says nothing about any kind of betterment—as
Darwin once noted, when judged from their own standpoint bees are an
improvement on human beings—and it is testimony to Marx’s penetrating
intelligence that, unlike the great majority of those who promoted the
idea of evolution, he understood this absence of the idea of progress in
Darwinism. Yet he was just as emotionally incapable as they were of
accepting the contingent world that Darwin had uncovered.
As
the late Leszek Kołakowski used to put it in conversation, “Marx was a
German philosopher.” Marx’s interpretation of history derived not from
science but from Hegel’s metaphysical account of the unfolding of spirit
(Geist) in the world. Asserting the material basis of the realm
of ideas, Marx famously turned Hegel’s philosophy on its head; but in
the course of this reversal Hegel’s belief that history is essentially a
process of rational evolution reappeared as Marx’s conception of a
succession of progressive revolutionary transformations. This process
might not be strictly inevitable; relapse into barbarism was a permanent
possibility. But the full development of human powers was still for
Marx the end point of history. What Marx and so many others wanted from
the theory of evolution was an underpinning for their belief in progress
toward a better world; but Darwin’s achievement was in showing how
evolution operated without reference to any direction or end state.
Refusing to accept Darwin’s discovery, Marx turned instead to Trémaux’s
far-fetched and now deservedly forgotten theories.
Situating Marx
fully in the nineteenth century for the first time, Sperber’s new life
is likely to be definitive for many years to come. Written in prose that
is lucid and graceful, the book is packed with biographical insights
and memorable vignettes, skillfully woven together with a convincing
picture of nineteenth-century Europe and probing commentary on Marx’s
ideas. Marx’s relations with his parents and his Jewish heritage, his
student years, his seven-year courtship and marriage to the daughter of a
not very successful Prussian government official, and the long life of
genteel poverty and bohemian disorder that ensued are vividly portrayed.
Sperber
describes Marx’s several careers—in which, Sperber comments, he had
more success as a radical journalist who founded a newspaper than in his
efforts at organizing the working class—and he carefully analyzes his
shifting intellectual and political attitudes. There can be no doubt
that Sperber succeeds in presenting Marx as a complex and changeable
figure immersed in a world far removed from our own. Whether this means
that Marx’s thought is altogether irrelevant to the conflicts and
controversies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is another
matter.
Neither the claim that Marx’s ideas were partly
responsible for the crimes of communism nor the belief that Marx grasped
aspects of capitalism that continue to be important today can be
dismissed as easily as Sperber would like. Marx may have never intended
anything resembling the totalitarian state that was created in the
Soviet Union—indeed such a state might well have been literally
inconceivable for him. Even so, the regime that emerged in Soviet Russia
was a result of attempting to realize a recognizably Marxian vision.
Marx did not hold to any single understanding of the new society he
expected to emerge from the ruins of capitalism. As Sperber notes, “Late
in his life, Marx replaced one utopian vision of the total abolition of
alienated, divided labor with another, that of a humanity devoted to
artistic and scholarly pursuits.” Yet Marx did believe that a different
and incomparably better world could come into being once capitalism had
been destroyed, basing his belief in the possibility of such a world on
an incoherent mishmash of idealist philosophy, dubious evolutionary
speculation, and a positivistic view of history.
Lenin followed in
Marx’s footsteps in producing a new version of this faith. There is no
reason to withdraw the claim, advanced by Kołakowski and others, that
the deadly mix of metaphysical certainty and pseudoscience that Lenin
imbibed from Marx had a vital part in producing Communist
totalitarianism. Pursuing an unrealizable vision of a harmonious future
after capitalism had collapsed, Marx’s Leninist followers created a
repressive and inhuman society that itself collapsed, whereas
capitalism—despite all its problems—continues to expand.
While
Marx cannot escape being implicated in some of the last century’s worst
crimes, it is also true that he illuminates some of our current
dilemmas. Sperber finds nothing remarkable in the celebrated passage in
the Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels declared:
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The idea that
this “assertion of ceaseless, kaleidoscopic change” anticipates the
condition of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century
capitalism, Sperber suggests, comes from a mistranslation of the
original German, which could be more accurately rendered as:
Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate, everything sacred is deconsecrated and men are finally compelled to regard their position in life and their mutual relations with sober eyes.
But while Sperber’s version is
decidedly less elegant (as he admits), I can see no real difference in
meaning between the two. However translated, the passage points to a
central feature of capitalism—its inherent tendency to revolutionize
society—that most economists and politicians of Marx’s time and later
ignored or seriously underestimated.
The programs of “free market
conservatives,” who aim to dismantle regulatory restraints on the
workings of market forces while conserving or restoring traditional
patterns of family life and social order, depend on the assumption that
the impact of the market can be confined to the economy. Observing that
free markets destroy and create forms of social life as they make and
unmake products and industries, Marx showed that this assumption is
badly mistaken. Contrary to what he expected, nationalism and religion
have not faded away and there is no sign of their doing so in the
foreseeable future; but when he perceived how capitalism was undermining
bourgeois life, he grasped a vital truth.
This is not to say that
Marx can offer any way out of our present economic difficulties. There
is far more insight into the tendency of capitalism to suffer recurrent
crises in the writings of John Maynard Keynes or a critical disciple of
Keynes such as Hyman Minsky than in anything that Marx wrote. In its
distance from any existing or realistically imaginable condition of
society, “the communist idea” that has been resurrected by thinkers such
as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek is on a par with fantasies of the free
market that have been revived on the right. The ideology promoted by
the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek and his followers, in which capitalism
is the winner in a competition for survival among economic systems, has
much in common with the ersatz version of evolution propagated by
Herbert Spencer more than a century ago. Reciting long-exploded
fallacies, these neo-Marxian and neoliberal theories serve only to
illustrate the persisting power of ideas that promise a magical
deliverance from human conflict.
The renewed popularity of Marx is
an accident of history. If World War I had not occurred and caused the
collapse of tsarism, if the Whites had prevailed in the Russian Civil
War as Lenin at times feared they would and the Bolshevik leader had not
been able to seize and retain his hold on power, or if any one of
innumerable events had not happened as they did, Marx would now be a
name most educated people struggled to remember. As it is we are left
with Marx’s errors and confusions. Marx understood the anarchic vitality
of capitalism earlier and better than probably anyone else. But the
vision of the future he imbibed from positivism, and shared with the
other Victorian prophet he faces in Highgate Cemetery, in which
industrial societies stand on the brink of a scientific civilization in
which the religions and conflicts of the past will fade way, is
rationally groundless—a myth that, like the idea that Marx wanted to
dedicate his major work to Darwin, has been exploded many times but
seems to be ineradicable.
No doubt the belief that humankind is
evolving toward a more harmonious condition affords comfort to many; but
we would be better prepared to deal with our conflicts if we could put
Marx’s view of history behind us, along with his nineteenth-century
faith in the possibility of a society different from any that has ever
existed.