Brief Thoughts about New Karl Marx Biography

For a man who once wrote that “History does not consist of individuals,” Karl Marx’s life has received quite a bit of attention. From Communist governments which have sought to exult his memory to the extent that the Soviet Union concealed Engel’s death bed confession that Marx had fathered a son with his housekeeper, to Capitalist apologists who have equated Marx’s domineering personal tendencies with the totalitarianism of latter communist regimes, the biography of Marx has served as blank slate for the projection of preconceived notions of communism, driven primarily by events that occurred long after Marx’s death.

Jonathan Sperber’s biography, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, seeks to return Marx’s biography to the context in which his life occurred, namely nineteenth century Europe. What emerges from this effort is a portrait of a man whose ideas were shaped by events and ideas quite foreign from the world of 20^th and 21^st centuries when most of the debates about the theory and application of them have occurred.

In particular, two concepts, very important to the 18^th century Prussia Marx was born in, but increasingly less important as the decades past, form a basis for much of Marx’s thought: namely a focus on the French Revolution as a model for future revolutions and the dialectical ideas of Hegel. In this regard, many of the concerns and sensibilities of Marx were anachronisms in his own time. One of the most interesting parts of the biography is an extended examination of Marx’s relationship with scientifically based positivist philosophy, which came to eclipse Marx’s preferred dialectical philosophy during his own lifetime.

All of this is not to say that the portrait of Marx in Sperber’s biography is not without relevance today. In particular, Marx’s participation in and the lessons he learned from the major revolutionary events of his era offer an interesting perspective about how to understand the upheavals of the last few years from the Occupy Wall-Street Movement to the Arab Spring.

Additionally, Speber shows, Marx did not always fight against these changes and to a large extent embraced them near the end of his life. In one particularly interesting passage, a quote from the Communist Manifesto describing poverty in distinctly dialectical terms is juxtaposed with another quote from sixteen years after the manifesto was published in which the poverty is described in far more scientific, positivist, language.  Sperber concludes, “Dialectics were gone. In its place was a scientific definition of malnutrition, complete with the requisite number of grains of nitrogen, and the results of survey research.”

Ultimately, this biography is a reminder of the failure of relying on personal history to assess ideas. Throughout Marx’s life, many of the positions he took had nothing to do with his wider theories, which themselves were in a constant state of evolution. Indeed, many of the positions he took were dictated by personal conflicts and animosities. Marx himself acknowledged this deficiency when he famously said “Je ne suis pas Marxiste” (I am not a Marxist), in reference to the brand of his though that had taken hold in France.  The true importance of Marx is not in his life or personal qualities, as interesting as they may be, but instead in the line of thinking he introduced.