Nearly a quarter of a century after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the specter of Karl Marx continues to haunt our presses and blog
posts. Supporters and opponents present Marxism as a modern ideology and a
coherent body of thought. Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, argues that although Marx did
intend to bring about a future different from his present, the German thinker
was essentially a creature of that present. Drawing on the complete edition of
the writings and Engels known by a German acronym as MEGA, a source that only became available after the end of the Cold
War, Sperber maintains that Marx wrote in reaction to the events of his own
day, that his thinking shifted over the decades, and that in basic assumptions
Marx looked backward, in particular to the French Revolution.
This new biography is impressive for its detail and insight.
Among other virtues, it provides an excellent portrait of Marx as a human
being. Irascible, sarcastic, and prone to personal attacks on those with whom
he disagreed, he was also a doting parent to his legitimate children and
devoted husband (despite fathering
an unacknowledged and neglected illegitimate son with the family servant).
Dedicated to the cause of revolution, he was no bohemian, but struggled to
maintain a bourgeois way of life for
his family through economic hardship.
Sperber's two most valuable contributions, in my view, consist
in the discussion of the role of the French Revolution in Marx's thought and in
the description of the tension between Marx's Hegelianism and positivism. Until
the 1851 coup d'etat of Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte finished off hopes that the 1848 revolutionary movement would
be a more successful and thorough repetition of 1789, Marx pinned his hopes on
just such a recapitulation of history. Revolution in France would spark a
continental revolutionary movement that would create unified republics in his
native Germany and elsewhere, explode into another revolutionary war against
reactionary Russia, and establish the rule of Jacobin terrorists. This new
upheaval, though, would not lead to another Napoleon, though, but move onward
to communism.
After the new Bonaparte seized power as Napoleon III,
though, Marx moved away from his faith in the French Revolution as a strict
model. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, coining his famous phrase that historical
events occur first as tragedy and second as farce, Marx attacked French
radicals for seeing 1848 as another 1789. Sperber points out that lashing out
against those who held positions that had been his own was Marx's usual way of
changing his mind. Despite his abandonment of the French Revolution as the
pattern for the future, though, throughout his life Marx continued to conceive
of the coming uprising in terms of two stages, a liberal seizure of power
followed by Jacobin radicalism. Thus, even after his rejection of the French
Revolution as model for the future, Marx continued to look backward at the
seminal event of the eighteenth century.
Originally an aspiring academic in Hegelian Germany, Marx
saw history as progressing according to an internal logic. He famously believed
that he had found Hegel standing on his head, since the master portrayed events
as the working out of ideas, and put the older philosopher on his feet, by
casting material relations among people within events as the driving forces of
history's internal logic. Still, Marx's
theories came from deductive reasoning about the movement of history, not from
inductive considerations of empirical observations. Sperber finds that Marx
became more of a positivist later in his life and gave greater emphasis to
economic facts and details. As a materialist, Marx was also drawn to the
increasing scientism of his century. This positivism rested uneasily with
Hegelian abstraction.
In particular, the tension between Marx's Hegelianism and
his positivism affected his attitude toward the theories of Charles Darwin.
While Marx was somewhat favorably impressed with Darwin, he was less enthusiastic
about Darwinian evolution than later generations of readers have believed.
Unlike many in his own time, Marx understood that Darwin offered no promise of
progress: species change through adaptations to an environment. The species do
not necessarily become higher or more complex. The revolutionary thinker tried
to reconcile his own ideas of progressive historical stages with evolution by
turning to obscure revisions of Darwinian thought. Only after Marx's death did
Engels create the image of Marx as an uninhibited admirer of Darwin and as the
equivalent for social thought of the founder of evolution.
Much of what we now know as Marxism began as the
reformulation and codification of Marx's thought by his friend, collaborator,
and supporter, Friedrich Engels. When a
mass labor movement took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, its leaders
took over Engels's ordering and interpretation of Marx's vast body of work.
These leaders then shaped Marxism as an ideology and a political movement.
In the last sentence, Sperber remarks that "Marx's
passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising and intransigent nature has been
the feature of his life that has had the deepest and most resonant appeal, and
has generated the sharpest rebukes and opposition, down to the present
day" (p.560). While Marx's oppositional personality did help to make him a
symbol of resistance, I think those attracted to doctrines associated with him
and those who have rejected those doctrines have been moved by more than the
symbolism of character. Throughout his life, Marx sought to uncover a secret
code that would be the key to understanding all economic and social relations.
The idea that such a universal code is attainable and that it can be found in
Marx's ruminations motivated Engels and subsequent adherents and interpreters.
Related to this effort at discovering the theoretical key to human history, Marx
attempted to reduce human interactions and relations to identifiable systems
that could be replaced by other systems. Having found the secret of history,
one could replace the messy reality of market transactions and pursuit of
multiple group and individual interests with the ideal system of harmony and
productivity. This commitment to an alternative realm, I think, is the reason
that Leszek Kolakowski began his Main
Currents of Marxism by deriving modern Marxist thought from ancient
gnosticism. This pursuit of an another world has made Marx's work an appealing
starting point for utopians. The goal of total change has also meant, though,
that the tendency toward totalitarianism has been inherent to his legacy.
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