Marx

Terrell Carver

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509518210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Karl Marx was the first theorist of global capitalism and remains perhaps its most trenchant critic. This clear and innovative book, from one of the leading contemporary experts on Marx's thought, gives us a fresh overview of his ideas by framing them within concepts that remain topical and alive today, from class struggle and progress to democracy and exploitation.

Taking Marx's work in his pamphleteering, journalism, speeches, correspondence and published books as central to a renewed understanding of the man and his politics, this book brings both his life experience and our contemporary political engagements vividly to life. It shows us the many ways that a nineteenth-century thinker has been made into the 'Marx' we know today, beginning with his own self-presentations before moving on to the successive different "Marxes" that were later constructed: an icon of communist revolution, a demonic figure in the Cold War, a 'humanist' philosopher, and a spectre haunting Occupy Wall Street.

Carver's accessible and lively book unpacks the historical, intellectual and political difficulties that make Marx sometimes difficult to read and understand, while also highlighting the distinct areas where his challenging writings speak directly to the twenty-first-century world. It will be essential reading for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and anyone interested in the contemporary legacy of his revolutionary ideas.

1
Making Marx ‘Marx’¹

The context through which readers – academic and otherwise – have come to know Marx as ‘Marx’ was not discovered posthumously by assiduous biographers working through an archive. It was constructed by Marx himself in the first instance, and by others during his lifetime, and then posthumously after a gap of about thirty years. This context – biographical and bibliographical – has a profound effect now on who anyone thinks Marx is, when anyone reads about who he ‘was’. Suffice to say that Marx's biographers and bibliographers – subsequent to himself in this role – have had much more influence over what we now know about him than he did himself, even when he was trying to create a reputation. Or rather, what he told us about himself at different stages of his life has been assimilated in various selective ways to reinforce what the more-or-less authorized biographers – since the First World War – think we should know about his ‘life and thought’.²

And of course, as Marx was living the life, thinking the ‘thought’ and writing the works, an ‘everyday’ or lived-experience context of uncertainty and contingency was in place. Marx did not already know he was Marx the ‘great man’ and ‘great thinker’ in the later sense. Even when he was presenting himself to readers, and reviewing his life to date, he was forward-looking and action-oriented in relation to his presumed audience, rather than backward-looking over something already ‘done’ and therefore ‘to be known’, which is the biographer's-eye view. These accounts are couched in a genre that is neither the contingent everyday, since readers are presented with a life-story that has ended, nor the publicity-minded autobiographical and political, as Marx's self-characterizations certainly were.

This chapter reviews what we think we know about Marx in the light of the above perspectival analysis. But somewhat unusually it starts from how he presented his life himself, while he was living it. We then see the disjunction between his ‘everyday’ view of himself and the ‘Marxes’ that have been constructed by biographers. The development of global access to Marx's writings also makes Marx in any number of versions – including authentic and imagined images – more visible than ever,³ but in a variety of often inconsistent ‘great man’ and ‘great thinker’ guises. These Marxes will be discussed in detail here, with due regard to biographical ‘basics’ along the way, so that we get some sense of his life and times as we see what he and others made of it. That way what we read about Marx and by Marx, and concurrently what we might think about politics in the present, can get into dialogue in a well-informed way in subsequent conceptual chapters.

Marx's ‘Selfie’: No. 1⁴

Marx's very first autobiographical characterization is seldom noted by biographers and commentators, yet it marks an interesting point in his early activities when, at the age of twenty-nine, he reviews himself to date and presents himself to an intended public. While the biographical facts recounted below are – since the mid twentieth century anyway – perhaps fairly familiar to many readers,⁵ my focus on Marx's own view of them gives them rather a different significance. They are neither minor stepping stones on the way to works of greater significance, nor references to philosophical masterpieces rather carelessly cast aside but lurking in an archive. Instead these autobiographical reference points are alluded to by him as markers in the career of a budding writer/activist advertising himself – and his forthcoming (and first sole-authored) short book – as a politico-intellectual project of European import.

Born in Trier in the Rhineland (then Rhenish Prussia) in 1818 Marx had a classical German ‘gymnasium’ education leading to training in law (and also to some disgraceful ‘studenty’ episodes) at Bonn University and then (more temperately) at the University of Berlin, the Prussian royal capital. Marx was generally pursuing what in twentieth-century terms became recognizably a liberal agenda imbued with Enlightenment values, namely advocacy of popular sovereignty and competitive elections, representative and responsible government, and equality before the law under an independent judiciary. Or rather, anyone pursuing this agenda did so within strict state censorship and under the hostile political climate of anti-constitutional monarchical authoritarianism and a similarly situated religious establishment. Undoubtedly this liberalism and republicanism reflected values held by at least a few in Trier, where Marx's father, Heinrich, and his father's friend and Marx's future father-in-law, Ludwig von Westphalen – both professional men – were themselves under some suspicion and surveillance for possible subversive tendencies.⁶

However, these are rights and liberties that were (to an extent) established in constitutional regimes only post First World War, and are therefore rather poorly characterized in the earlier context of the 1820s and 1830s by even Marx's earliest biographers. This was because the utter, grinding hostility of authority-figures and the ruling ‘establishment’ to at least some popular participation in representative institutions had largely faded by the turn of the twentieth century. But in the days of the Vormärz (i.e. before the western and central European revolutionary events of spring 1848) these rights and liberties were perceived as much, much more radical than they were fifty years later, even if put in mild-mannered reformist terms at the time. In Marx's early days liberalism was far from respectable and was indeed seditious and treasonable. To the established religio-political regimes it was the slippery slope to the extremisms and terrorisms of the successive and very proximate French revolutions of just a few decades earlier. Indeed the Napoleonic occupation of the Rhineland and the introduction of republican principles and values was utterly disavowed and suppressed by the restored Prussian regime post-1815, even if ‘those days’ of republican institutions were quietly revered by some as – in living memory – a progressive and ‘enlightened’ introduction of modernity.

Marx declined to follow his father into the law and took up philosophy instead, reading both classical authors and the works of the late G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), then renowned in central Europe as the foremost and quintessentially German of modern philosophers. At the age of 23 Marx submitted a doctoral thesis on classical Greek philosophy by post to the University of Jena, which he had never attended, and he subsequently abandoned any hopes of an academic position, owing to governmental hostility to revolutionary radicalism and potentially treasonous actions. At that crucial point he took up political journalism, writing muck-raking reportage for a middle-class Rhineland newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung,⁷ during a brief period (1842–3) when the censorship in Prussia was relatively relaxed. His contributions included articles on agricultural poverty locally; angry editorials on press freedom, divorce law and similar civil issues; and ad hominem critiques directed at politically oriented ‘schools of thought’ that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1: Making Marx ‘Marx’
• 2: Class Struggle and Class Compromise
• 3: History and Progress
• 4: Democracy and Communism/Socialism
• 5: Capitalism and Revolution
• 6: Exploitation and Alienation
• Afterword
• A Note on Complete Works and Canon-Formation
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement