File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0006, message 120


Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 01:54:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Karl Marx


The Nation
July 10, 2000
The Devil in Mr. Marx 
by ANDY MERRIFIELD 

KARL MARX:
A Life.
By Francis Wheen.
Norton. 431 pp. $27.95.

 

  
At a quarter to 3 in the afternoon on March 14, 1883,
one of the world's brainiest men, Karl Marx, ceased to
think. He passed away peacefully in his favorite
armchair. Three days later, a few miles up the road,
the man was buried, a citizenless émigré, in London's
Highgate Cemetery. At the graveside, eleven mourners
paid homage to the "Old Moor." They listened to Marx's
longtime comrade and benefactor, Friedrich
Engels--"The General"--remember his dear departed
friend: "An immeasurable loss has been sustained both
by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and
by historical science, in the death of this man. The
gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty
spirit will soon enough make itself felt." His name,
Engels predicted, "will endure through the ages, and
so also will his work!"

One hundred and seventeen years down the line,
Highgate Cemetery continues to receive a steady stream
of Marx well-wishers, of all ages and nationalities,
the curious and the converted, and fresh flowers and
moving inscriptions, in almost every language under
the sun, regularly adorn the revolutionary's
gravestone. Towering overhead, indomitably, is the man
himself, or rather a gigantic bronze bust of him, with
its menacing eyes staring out into the distance,
perhaps even frowning at his conservative rival
Herbert Spencer, whose remains lie across the path.
This overwhelming iconic image of Marx is the one that
most popularly endures today: the Marx of statues and
flags, of dogma and gulags, of party hacks and holy
orthodoxy; a vision of Marxism that invariably looks
down upon (and frequently through) real mortals,
people who exist in the messy, profane world below.

In a new biography, British journalist, broadcaster
and gadfly Francis Wheen argues that Marx actually
occupied this profane ground himself and strives to
recover Marx the man--carbuncles and all--as opposed
to Marx the myth, from posterity. What unfolds is a
tale of an intricate and vulnerable figure, a Prussian
refugee who, in Wheen's words, "became a middle-class
English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of
his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British
Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host
who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted
family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply
earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and
jokes." Wheen reveals a feisty yet frail patriarch, a
peripatetic vagabond who spent more than thirty years
traipsing from one crummy apartment to another,
avoiding debts, pawning what little he had, shrugging
off illness.

In Wheen's eyes, Marx's own Marxism seems more like a
Groucho Marxism, avoiding any club that would have him
as a member: "I, at least, am not a Marxist," Karl is
once reputed to have told a French socialist. Karl
Marx, the book, enters the intellectual and political
fray at a time when the bearded prophet has been
making something of a minor comeback. For the past few
seasons, a spate of studies and sympathetic
commentaries has hit the bookstores and circulated
over the airwaves. (Marx was elected "Thinker of the
Millennium" in a recent British Internet poll.) An
unlikely 1997 issue of The New Yorker likewise feted
"The Return of Karl Marx," heralding him as "the next
thinker," wrong about communism but right about the
problems of capitalism. Wheen's line is less shallow
and rejects such reappropriation. His Marx is no
Marx-lite, no mere "student of capitalism"; instead,
Wheen gives us Marx the "revolutionist," someone who
can still make history--even if, like his own life, it
would be done under circumstances not of his choosing.
And what a life--maybe not "wonderful" like
Wittgenstein's, but certainly full.

* * *

The man who famously urged us to change the world, not
just interpret it, was born in the Rhineland town of
Trier in 1818. A precocious schoolboy raised in a
fairly well-to-do household (father Heinrich, Jewish
and a lawyer), young Karl soon fled the nest, and,
rather than earn capital, he embarked on career
studying and trying to overthrow it, much to the
chagrin of his dear mother (Henriette). We follow
Wheen through the well-trodden ground of Marx's stormy
rites of passage. At 17 he studied law at Bonn
University, blithely ignoring his father's advice
about clean living: Marx Jr. frequently burned the
midnight oil, imbibed cheap ale, puffed away on foul
cigars and once got thrown in the clink for noisy,
late-night reveling. No wonder Heinrich was relieved
when his son transferred to the University of Berlin,
where he switched to philosophy, discovered
Romanticism, idealism and French socialism, and also
fell in love with an aristocratic beauty, Jenny von
Westphalen, daughter of a Trier baron and a distant
relative of the British Earl of Argyll. Karl and the
future Mrs. Marx initially kept their affair secret;
neither's parents were amused when "the twenty-two
year old princess" and "the bourgeois Jewish scallywag
four years her junior" formally announced their
engagement in 1836.

Karl's other burning passion then was Hegel, the great
idealist thinker, who'd held a chair at Berlin years
before the fledgling socialist arrived. Young Marx
even wrote a charming ditty in Hegel's honor: "He
understands what he thinks, freely invents what he
feels. Thus, each may for himself suck wisdom's
nourishing nectar." Marx's lifelong debt to Hegel was
the dialectic, the method and thought system he'd
later appropriate for himself in Capital, grasping all
contradictions and paradoxes, fluxes and flows, theses
and antitheses, life and the mind, as some sort of
coherent whole. With Hegel, everything was in the
mind, in the idea, which reached its absolute state in
the self-critical, self-conscious human being, free
from unhappy consciousness and bad faith. Although
Marx eventually turned Hegel right side up, viewing
the idea as "nothing but the material world reflected
in the mind of man, and translated into forms of
thought," in Berlin he became the brightest and
booziest member of a rowdy crew called the "Young
Hegelians."

That was until his father's death, a deeply painful
blow. Despite the ups and downs, Karl always loved his
father and kept a small daguerreotype of Heinrich in a
breast pocket. (It accompanied him to the grave.)
Oddly, Wheen avoids engaging with the complexity of
the Karl/Heinrich relationship, being content to mock
the apparently insensitive progeny smoking and
drinking away his inheritance and breezing through a
thesis on the classical Greek philosophers Democritus
and Epicurus.

As a relatively free agent who recognized that his
inquisitive, expansive mind would never be accepted in
the stuffy German academy, Karl wrote brilliant
polemics instead, for Rheinische Zeitung, a Cologne
newspaper. He railed against press censorship under
King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, denounced new wood-theft
legislation, flirted with communism. He also raised a
few friends' eyebrows, who marveled at the young man's
erudition: "Dr Marx," Wheen quotes one saying, "will
give medieval religion and philosophy their coup de
grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical
seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine
Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel
fused into one person--I say fused, not
juxtaposed--and you have Dr Marx." But said doctor was
too clever for his own good: The Prussian government
soon closed down the subversive newspaper and gave the
newly wed Marx his marching orders.

* * *

Paris beckoned anyway. For the honeymooning Marxes,
the French capital set the tone of their future
destiny: domestic chaos, personal turmoil, economic
uncertainty. Somehow, though, Marx managed to write.
Perversely, he even seemed to write better, the more
dire the situation. He rolled off the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), already knowing
firsthand what "estrangement" means, and how money
becomes a supreme alienating power. Next came the
Theses on Feuerbach (1845), The German Ideology (1846)
and the Communist Manifesto (1848), invoking
revolutionary practice and class struggle. By then, he
and Engels had bonded and found big trouble together,
especially from Prussian, French and Belgian
authorities, who bid Marx good riddance from the
European mainland. In 1849, with nowhere else to run,
the Marx entourage finally ended up in teeming
Victorian London. And yet, as Wheen makes graphic,
London would be no home away from home. "Never," Marx
joked, with typical gallows humor, "has anyone written
about money in general amidst such a total lack of
money in particular." By all accounts, too, Marx's
"encounters with the natives were almost always
disastrous, especially if he had a few drinks inside
him." "One night," Wheen notes,

he set off with Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht for
a drunken jaunt up the Tottenham Court Road, intending
to have at least one glass of beer in every pub
between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road...by the time
they reached the last port of call he was ready for a
rumpus. A group of Oddfellows, enjoying a quiet
dinner, found themselves accosted by this drunken trio
and taunted about the feebleness of English culture.
No country but Germany, Marx declared, could have
produced such masters as Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and
Haydn; snobbish, cant-ridden England was fit only for
philistines. This was too much even for the
mild-mannered Oddfellows. 'Damned foreigners!' one
growled, while several others clenched their fists.
Choosing the better part of valour, the German
roisterers fled outside. 
Marx was considerably more tolerant toward London's
many young street urchins and ragamuffins, and he
would often pause to stroke their hair and slip a
halfpenny into their little hands. Still, says Wheen,
Marx's pub experience "taught him that British adults
do not take kindly to strangers with alien accents."
It's bizarre that Wheen should then cast his Marx in
such Oxbridge tonality, such plummy Brideshead
English. American audiences might find this
frightfully quaint, if not jolly perplexing ("chivvy,"
"squiffy," "theorising like billy-o," "gamey stew,"
"bachelors' bender in gay Paree"). Wheen seems to have
quaffed a few too many postprandial ports himself, and
he projects his own Evelyn Waugh tendencies onto a
distinctly Germanic subject. It's Garrick Club banter
that quickly wears thin.

Indeed, Wheen diligently lists Marx's foibles--of
which there were many--and is well able to describe
what Marx said, what Marx did; but he never manages to
prize open Marx's inner world, does not attempt to
explore what Marx felt or infer what he might have
thought. (I know this is an admirable biographical
restraint in some circumstances--more modern, fully
documented lives--but Wheen surely owes it to us to
try here.) Since we don't approach Marx's emotional
life, we also never glimpse him in any psychological
depth. (Even Jenny, his lifelong partner and stalwart
confidante, appears more as scenery than as major cast
member.) Karl Marx pales alongside Jerrold Seigel's
Marx's Fate, which captures the man's darker powers
with greater texture and with more intellectual
finesse, and Yvonne Kapp's bio of Marx's youngest
daughter, Eleanor Marx, which beautifully lays bare
the intimacies of the Marx household and the drama of
their family romance.

True, Wheen succeeds in painting a Marx vividly human
in some ways. Yet he's far too preoccupied with
frivolity, with recounting Marx's alcoholic high
jinks, discoursing on his flatulence and boil-ridden
penis, having him come on more like Joe Gould, with
Capital his best-kept secret. Often Wheen portrays
tragedy as mere farce and is surprisingly
unsympathetic toward a man who had four children
predecease him. (The two survivors, Eleanor and Laura,
later killed themselves.)

* * *

Marx's personal pains far exceeded his political woes.
The death of Edgar, the Marxes' third-born, at the age
of 8 became Marx's greatest paternal suffering. He
never really got over it. For a few pages, Wheen is
untypically generous: "Edgar--the impish, round-faced
Colonel Musch--was the favourite. A sickly lad, whose
huge head seemed far too heavy for his feeble body, he
was nevertheless an inexhaustible source of drollery
and high spirits; Marx adored this cunning little
slyboots." At the boy's funeral, where he was put to
rest beside brother Guido and sister Franziska, a
distraught Karl buried his head in his hands and
howled, "You can't give my boy back to me!" A page and
a half on, Wheen is back to familiar tricks, happily
castigating Marx for grumbling that Jenny's uncle's
death at 90 "had delayed the redistribution of his
considerable wealth." We hear no more about how the
loss of Edgar may have affected his father's political
will and intellectual drives. Wheen makes light of
Marx's telling letter to Engels, dated April 12, 1855:

The house is naturally quite desolate and forlorn
since the death of the dear child who was its life and
soul. The way we miss him at every turn is quite
indescribable. I've been through all kinds of
misfortune in my time, but it's only now that I know
what real unhappiness is. I feel myself broken down.
It's a good thing that since the day of the burial
I've had such furious headaches that I can't think or
see or hear. In all the terrible agonies I've
experienced these days, the thought of you and your
friendship has always sustained me, and the hope that,
together, we may still do something sensible in the
world. 
Marx, of course, did do something sensible in the
years that followed, often with Engels, pioneering the
First International. He did a lot more alone, in the
British Museum, drafting his unfinished opus. Marx
didn't hand back his entrance ticket to humanity; he
plunged headlong into it, getting down to steady work
on a gigantic critique of bourgeois political economy.
And, like Balzac's mad, obsessive artist in The
Unknown Masterpiece, Marx relentlessly tinkered with
its form and content while Engels pleaded with him to
finish someday soon, to have at least one volume fit
for public scrutiny, to help arm the workers in their
bloody struggle. The many layers of paint Marx sets
down on his canvas, and the absurdities found in his
perfect painting, "reflect," Wheen says, "the madness
of the subject, not the author."

Karl Marx was a bestseller in Britain when it was
released last year. It's perhaps churlish to knock any
text that prompts people to read about Marx,
especially in an age when he's often treated, as Hegel
was in Marx's own day, as a "dead dog." The dog still
barks, though, and retains some bite. It's nice that
Wheen has taken the trouble to announce this to the
world. But the real story of Marx the man--the "total
man," the activist, thinker, husband, lover, father,
refugee, outsider, Jew, all rolled into one--we've yet
to see. Maybe this is the stuff of epic fiction, or
maybe, as Howard Zinn showed recently in a play, Marx
in Soho, it's better explored onstage. Maybe, in the
end, we should just let Marx speak for himself, find a
way to let his own voice ring out, have people read
his best books again; read them not just as dusty
Dickensian tales of hard times but as stories about
modern times as well, about realistic hopes and
visions of an open-ended culture, forever changeable
and always up for grabs. Then we might recognize
Marx's story as our story, de te fabula narratur, as
he says: a tale about us, necessary for today,
indispensable for tomorrow.

------
Andy Merrifield, a Marx scholar, writes frequently
about urbanism and politics. His last book, The
Urbanization of Injustice (NYU), was edited with Erik
Swyngedouw. 

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