before we start with the books, should we talk about marx or marxism?
we have to talk about both. In particular, we need to talk about Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Marxism. Marxism was a construction, it became an ism. Marx became a figure or a trope within that. Engels was a crucial determinant, in my opinion, in why and when that happened. this whole trio is particularly interesting because they have all been done multiple times. we’re looking at classic reception studies here. these are not timeless ideas and timeless people. Marxism is after Marx. It was invented by Engels, but it has its own history. There is a constant process of untangling Marx and Engels within their own personal historical contexts, for what remains of them is largely their writings. there is a constant process of going through that historical context and seeing how it relates to what became Marxism, which has been reinvented several times.
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engels does not always have a signature: more often the books are attributed to marx.
well, it does and it doesn’t. he was smart enough to erase himself. although if you look at his career as a young man before he met marx, he was much more famous and had published much more than marx. Engels was a well-known, if not well-known, journalist in both English and German before they merged in late 1844. Engels’s masterpiece in those years was The Condition of the Working Class in England, a book written in German. for a German audience. which came out in 1845. i have done a lot of work on engels and my opinion is that he went downhill after joining marx. he adopted this second persona of fiddler/fellow/brother-in-law. But in the late 1870s, while Marx was in decline, Engels took it upon himself to present Marx as a major intellectual and political figure and a great thinker, equal to Hegel and, as he said in his graveside address, to darwin. engels was an ad manager for this.
“Marxism is after Marx.”
They only officially collaborated on three works in their entire career. Iconically, they appear together as “Marx and Engels.” for ‘Marxism’ to work, you have to adopt the unique personality. the three works they wrote together were the communist manifesto, which i think is more engels than marx, it’s more like journalism than engels. which was posted anonymously. they published a kind of flysheet, a telegraphic version that they actually signed. they also collaborated on the manuscripts that have come to be known, fictitiously, as the German ideology. the title is a 1920s editorial fabrication, but there’s no question they were in the same room writing together. however, their first collaboration was a book that hardly anyone reads now called, satirically, the holy family. it is a controversial attack on the political philosophers of the time. that’s for ‘engels and marx’, because engels was better known. but if you look at the translated and selected editions of his works, you’ll find them now listed as “marx and engels”.
why would engels take the back seat?
He introduced himself as a junior partner. He worked for the family business until he retired at the age of 49, in 1869. The family business was a multinational cotton-spinning trading company based in Germany and Manchester. he had things to do and the family supported him, although he was not a very good employee. he also participated as a political organizer or would-be political organizer. i think he genuinely adored marx as a great intellect. And it is true that Marx was an intellectual giant and much more interesting than Engels. As an advertising manager, Engels provided simplified and popular versions of Marx’s great ideas. In some cases, he advised people to read such works by Engels himself rather than the more difficult works of Marx. In a sense, Engels created Marx as a difficult thinker and someone who was said to be the equal of Hegel and Darwin.
“I have worked a lot on Engels and my opinion is that he went downhill after sticking to Marx.”
How politically active were Marx and Engels?
Marx and Engels were dedicated political actors in their time, the 1840s. This wasn’t just about ideas. They got into a lot of trouble and fled or were expelled from Germany, Belgium, and France. they were participants as newspaper journalists in the revolutions of 1848-9, which were quite widespread and very violent.
In the 1840s, you couldn’t have direct policy in non-constitutional regimes. there was supposed to be no politics, no public sphere, no civil society apart from the church. both grew up and had to face situations of authoritarian repression. you weren’t supposed to comment on public life as there was none: you were meant to go to church and shut up. Even in supposedly more liberal places like Belgium and France, there was a lot of authoritarianism.
both came to their atheism very early, which made them obvious objects of hate. in a sense, they were close to what we call terrorists today: they were not received in polite society; his ideas were considered dangerous; they had to live in exile. britain was not particularly friendly: they only spoke german to each other and nobody cared. the saving grace of these authoritarian regimes was that, from a bureaucratic point of view, they were not particularly well organized to put people in jail and not let them out. Marx and Engels were widely spied on, and an important source for their activities and domestic life in the 1840s and 1850s are the archives of the Prussian State Police.
“Their first collaboration was a book that hardly anyone reads now called, satirically, the Holy Family. it is a controversial attack on the political philosophers of the time. ”
policy could only be done in coded form at the time. philosophy, being an academic and obscure subject, was the only way you could do it. hegel was popular because he was ambiguous and he was german. you could get away with this kind of writing because he was disguised as philosophy. but it was a codified form of politics and many of the texts derived from this activity. Later, in the 1860s and 1870s, it became possible, even in Germany and some other places, to publish, under censorship, works that seem more political to us. The International Workers’ Association, which they helped found in the early 1860s, was itself a persecuted and outlawed organization, so all these people had to be very careful. Marx himself extremely despised philosophers as philosophers because he believed they were doing practical politics. he wanted to cross the line and get into practical politics and labor agitation. but he couldn’t agitate the workers: they locked him up for it, or maybe they beat him. his newspaper was banned and he was put out of business. Much of his life was lived on the generosity of Engels from the family business.
I have put the five books I have chosen in chronological order of publication because this will guide you through what the writers who generated material in English have found on Marxism, Engels and Marx. I’ll say a little about each one in the writer’s political context and how that works in terms of the kinds of ideas Marxism is supposed to have had.
so your first choice of books is isaiah berlin’s karl marx (1939), which was berlin’s first book. is a brief intellectual biography. Berlin was a Russian Jewish émigré and later an eminent historian of ideas at Oxford University.
when berlin wrote this book, it was not established. The book proposal came from the home university library, based in London, which published popular books on a variety of intellectual topics. Several people in Oxford turned down the offer to write this, which is not surprising because they didn’t know anything about Marx, and if they did, they didn’t much care or were hostile. this is in the 1930s, when there was a lot of communism, but it was mostly working class. there are intellectual sympathizers, but not many in oxford, which was very conservative. i don’t think people in oxford were in any particular campaign or felt threatened by marxism: stalinism was not well known and people were more worried about fascism in germany.
“marx was a liberal thinker. there is not as much difference between marx or indeed marxism and liberalism as many people think. ”
berlin, as a writer, is quite secularized in outlook. he grew up speaking Russian and German. An important point here is that his view of Marx is quite fresh and independent of the general Marxism that exists both on the Continent and in Britain. It’s not completely isolated from that, but what strikes me about the book, which was published in 1939, is that it touches the ground of conventional, biographical, intellectual, and critical approaches to Marxism and the kind of popular Marxism that the communists British and anti-British communists would have recognized, but he doesn’t spend much time there. I think it’s because Berlin didn’t find these ideas very intellectually interesting.
what interested berlin is marx as 48er: that is, protagonist and participant in the great revolutions of 1848-9, which are an explosion of liberalism allied with nationalism. to be nationalist, in this period, was to be anti-dynastic and pro-constitutional, and not exclusive. it is a happy time when liberalism and nationalism go hand in hand, and we are all going to be wonderful democratic nations with our ethnic, linguistic and popular characteristics. this is happening all over central europe.
what berlin does is bring a central european perspective. i see it occupying a political-intellectual-cultural axis somewhere between riga and vienna. this is now a lost world of central europe, a restless multiculturalism that is deeply influenced by germanic culture and secularized jewish contributions to that, and many different religious and nationalist contributions along the way, versus the unconstitutional, authoritarian, dynastic church . supported regimes, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. The revolutions of 1848 may have started in Paris, but they spread to Vienna. marx and engels came as far as vienna during those revolutions. berlin brings this perspective to marx, and finds the marx of the manifesto, the marx who was a central european actor, albeit based in london. he sees marx as a secularized german intellectual. he is not very interested in the jewish origins of marx.
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berlin is famous for its liberalism. Do you think he is turning Marx into a liberal thinker in this book, removing the more radical elements in the way he describes it?
Marx was a liberal thinker. there is not as much difference between marx or indeed marxism and liberalism as many people think. this is because if you are against unconstitutional authoritarian regimes, you are a liberal. that’s what the french revolution was about, and that’s what the revolutions of 1848 were about: it was about bringing constitutionalism and popular sovereignty, and responsible, representative government, to parts of europe where the rulers and the church were fanatically engaged in maintain your own domain. . this only loosened up, rather slowly, in the 1850s and 1860s.
Marx was totally in favor of popular sovereignty and representative and responsible government. His angle was to keep pushing the economic front and insist that governments take responsibility for the economic well-being of citizens. essentially, he was a social democrat. but to pursue that kind of agenda, you had to be a radical terrorist revolutionary and be prepared to pick up a gun. that’s what this burst of revolutions was about. he didn’t really come to russia until around 1905.
Marx’s split from his liberalism is something that is projected in his ideas, and particularly in his politics, much later. Now, in the course of doing this kind of politics, Marx wanted to push the liberals into the economic realm. that is exactly what the social democrats are doing now, and that is the discussion that various political parties had with george osborne. It’s not much different, frankly.
Let’s turn to his second book on Marx, David McLellan’s Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973).
this is taking a big leap. berlin made the study of marx intellectually respectable because he was an oxford academic and went on to bigger things. his book is still in print in its fifth edition. Thus, Marx was noted in the Anglophone sphere, but above all in a rather crude version. The only other book of the period that came close to Berlin’s sophistication in taking Marx seriously as a thinker, and incorporating politics to some degree, was Sidney Hook’s. He was a “fellow traveler” based in New York. he wrote in the american context, as a contemporary of berlin.
mclellan was a berlin student at oxford. At the time, which was in the early to mid-1960s, Marx was quite acceptable as an academic subject. You could go through the history of British university teaching in philosophy and politics and see when and where Marx shows up, but there wouldn’t be much before 1960. By then things had settled down enough to make him respectable.
mclellan set out to write a contextual study of the early days of marx. it is interesting from an intellectual and philosophical point of view. it does not have the central european perspective of 1948 that berlin had. he has been the beneficiary of what happened to engels and marxism in the 1930s. in the 1920s, a project developed between the bolsheviks and the german communist party to collect marx’s archive and published works. 1932 is the magic date there, since the so-called German ideology and the so-called economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 were published. It was difficult to circulate them in the 1930s with people worried about the period before the second world war, Stalinism and everything else that was happening. the material doesn’t really begin to circulate until the late 1940s, and then largely in French, where it is treated seriously, and early manuscripts in particular were collected.
‘alienation’ caught people’s attention as an obviously philosophical concept, and they ignored the fact that in so-called german ideology, marx is very dismissive about it, and actually pretty much dismisses the term, used that way, after the 1840 these people are academic and professional philosophers interested in philosophical concepts; You’re not going to find much philosophy in the writings on commodity fetishism (although it’s there), and you certainly aren’t going to find much in the theory of value as it emerges later, which is really the end point Marx was aiming for. beginning to arrive, albeit in what appears to be a philosophical way.
“As an advertising manager, Engels provided simplified and popular versions of Marx’s great ideas.”
essentially mclellan investigates this as a philosophy, in a philosophical way, and is not as strong on what there is about the early reception of economic ideas by marx and engels. Therefore, he will not find much about alienation in Engels’s 1844 “Sketch of a Critique of Political Economy,” which Marx published, and was one of the pieces that Marx most excited about. But Marx had to come into contact with political economy and he did so through the Hegelian philosophers. he had many philosophical battles to fight. mclellan’s dissertation was on young hegelians and marx. McLellan developed his own publishing industry on this point: he published a book a year for ten years, exploiting this vein. the next book was marx before marxism. he puts a marker that there is a marx there before marxism, and that you can date marxism later. most of my career has been involved in exploring that, which is why i’ve been so interested in engels.
Mclellan himself was very interested in liberation theology, which was largely Catholic, mostly Latin American and French. besides being interested in philosophy, he is very interested in religion and politics done in and through religion. In terms of communicating the existence of a different Marx to a very large audience, this is a remarkable achievement. Marx suddenly became much more complex and interesting, and much less formulaic.
alienation is central here. could you explain that term?
alienation is a very complicated and controversial notion. comes from the German idealist philosophical tradition. it is essentially about projection, that is, the thesis or trope derives from the idea that we have various ideas and project them onto entities that are not ourselves. The origin of this was, among other things, in the essence of Feuerbach’s Christianity, where he argued that the specifically human characteristics of love, forgiveness and redemption are projected onto alien entities such as gods or spirits. this idea was not entirely invented with them, but is taken up in an attack on orthodox doctrinal theology, particularly any kind of theology. It was read as an atheist work and Feuerbach was expelled from the universities. he never worked properly after that, being unorthodox.
“they [marx and engels] were close to what we call terrorists today. ”
There are several different terms for “alienation” in German and they relate to this idea of projecting human qualities onto abstract entities. what marx did was to borrow this and suggest that our human relations of production, consumption, distribution, exchange, where we essentially make the goods and services of life in a human community for the benefit of others, are projected onto alien entities like the money. and the market, which come to have a life of their own and become idols in the literal sense. we bow down and worship them, and think that material objects like coins, paper bills, etc., actually have social relations with each other in a kind of parallel universe. we let these human creations control us.
here is a thesis not only about otherness, but about the inversion of material objects with human powers, and then, because of this inversion, we let them control us. that, in a nutshell, is what alienation is all about. Marx develops more refined and specific concepts to do this, and then dismisses the idea of alienation because it is vague and unspecific and less connected to the political economy literature and concepts that he was actually attacking in detailed terms. That, in my opinion, is the reason why the term tends to disappear from Marx’s later writings.
you can see why this concept hooks people. the idea that we are persecuted and dominated by things in which we project human qualities is, in essence, a horror story.
yes. there’s a lot of that in the capital. If you go through the metaphors, I’ve actually made a list of them, it’s full of hidden references. you have vampires, werewolves, necromancy, turntables (which are material objects that come to life), metempsychosis, the whore of babylon, and on and on. I developed this idea in the 1980s and published it in the Times Higher Education Supplement and elsewhere. the idea is that he didn’t just use them as colorful metaphors. argue that you, as a rational, atheist, science-minded reader, do not accept these fairy tales, so why should you accept the idea that the market rules your life when it is so clearly a human construct? Of course, if you believe in werewolves, then you seek them out and are afraid. Marx transfers that argument, saying that if you are concerned with market relations and spend your time calling insurance companies (and the like) you should see yourself as a victim of this type of entity, which ultimately it is social and something we should be. able to control.
It seems that you are defending alienation as a useful concept and you are quite clear about its meaning.
This is the alienation version of commodity fetishism. alienation was useful in bringing together religious people and philosophers, and providing an introduction to what became known as “the humanist marx”. david mclellan did not invent the humanist marx, but he popularized it among an anglophone audience by writing a book every year. they came out as paperback originals. this was a great intellectual and industrial phenomenon. his marx looks very different from the marx that emerged in the 1920s and from the 1870s, when he was dressed as an empirical scientist, not a confused humanist thinker at all. he was, in that earlier version, a thinker who believed in the iron laws of history that were independent of human will. that in itself is a construct largely because of engels i think and his interest in physical science and scientific determinism and positivism of the 1860s and 1870s. that was politically valuable to a lot of people but it raises issues about human agency and the issue that if the story moves forward on its own, why bother doing anything? it generates very authoritative interpretations of Marxist scientists who tell you what is what and what to believe. alienation was a breath of fresh air; but you have to realize how stale the air was between 1879 and 1959 to see what a revolution it was.
his next book, karl marx’s theory of history (1978), is by g.a. Cohen, who is recognized as a brilliant reconstructor of Marx. Is that a fair way of looking at it?
yes. I totally hated this book. this is another oxford phenomenon. there is a definite connection with isaiah berlin, again. Berlin had a great deal of respect, an undue respect in my opinion, for British logical positivism: he engaged in a technical type of philosophy that was not in his tradition. Cohen was part of the Oxford political philosophy milieu and a protégé of Berlin, although his logical positivist philosophical training was foreign to what Berlin knew, and that may have been part of the attraction.
Jerry, as he liked to be called, worked on a project for quite some time, in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, of putting Marx to the tests of logical positivism. He took highly selective and rather isolated passages of Marx out of context as texts and subjected them to propositional analysis. he asked: are they constructed as propositions that would have truth conditions, and what are these truth conditions? he took them as propositions about history that could be subject to historical tests and therefore true or false.
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“much of what marx did has similarities to what we do today in political writing, which also involves a lot of parody and satire. ”
I thought this was completely misconceived as a way to read Marx, although you can see it as an intellectual project, if you believe in the tenets of logical positivism. that was not my baggage, and it seemed reductionist and arid, as well as decontextualizing. they were never written by marx to be treated this way and if you’re going to do that sort of thing with these propositions then in my opinion it would be fairer to everyone if you took marx out of the picture. If you look at the political contexts within which Marx wrote those texts and made those statements, it was completely different than this kind of scientific propositional proof. I could never see that there was any historical case in which Marx could have meant writing in this way, although, in a sense, it derives from Engels’s positivism. If you project Engels’s positivism like Engels himself did, back to Marx, then it starts to look a bit more like Cohen’s project.
my understanding of cohen’s background was that he grew up in the communist party of canada and would have absorbed a form of engels marxism which would have been positivist and scientifically minded. biographically it fits. Cohen took certain sections of Marx’s writings, isolated them, and said that he was going to find the “theory of history,” assuming there is such a thing, and that again, as a project, goes back to Engels. Engels invented the phrase “the materialist interpretation of history” or “the materialist conception of history” in 1859 when he was first popularizing Marx to what was supposed to be a mass audience. Very few people read Engels’ book review of Marx, which he planted in the press in 1859, but it dates back to August of that year, and that’s where the phrase occurs. Marx speaks of a ‘perspective’ or a ‘conception’, but he never actually specifies them.
I found Cohen’s exercise to be depoliticizing (unless you think scientific Marxism is a viable policy, which I never thought), and I felt it was doomed. My take on historical research is that it is interpretive rather than a kind of empirical test of whether things are true or false or not. Cohen’s approach involved a very elaborate reconstruction surrounded by a very reductionist philosophy and would never work: and that is the conclusion he actually came to. that didn’t surprise me.
He calls it “a defense” of a Marxist theory of history, that sounds like a criticism.
it ended that way. I guess Jerry always thought she would defend him on the basis of empirical evidence. that would always fail. now it reminds me of strauss’s life of jesus – this goes back to the 1830s when david friedrich strauss, as a committed christian, decided to revisit the gospel accounts and find the historical jesus. Using a philological and historical methodology, he thought that he could go through the accounts and filter out the actual facts, and then show that these facts were true, and then we would have an objective basis for Christianity that would be a useful addition to the faith. . famously, the strauss projects did not work out. the deeper he went, the more the gospels were revealed to be superimposed fictions written in a style that does not lend itself to historical proof, since there is nothing historical about them independently of themselves and other biblical writings that they copy. so strauss left a very disillusioned and pantheistic man. a lot of people hated his book. but he had set out to defend something on the basis of scientific, historical and philological criteria and failed. maybe the cohen project is a bit like that. Cohen went on to investigate other topics that have a less obvious and less direct relationship to Marx, Marxist texts, and Marxist writing: a more social democratic project that investigates the concepts and practices of equality, equalization, and justice within a social democratic framework.
Let’s move on to your next book choice, Young Karl Marx (2007). this is a book by david leopold, once again focused on early marx, the marx he was writing about alienation and young hegelians.
What is interesting here is the methodological angle. this is part of my opinion that there is no timeless “young marx”. i’m interested in the methodology, and we’re back in oxford again. my dphil is also from oxford: i knew berlin and worked on the third edition of his biography of marx; i met mclellan, and i went to the jerry cohen papers in oxford. David Leopold is currently in Oxford. he is much younger: he was a student of cohen’s, but you would never know it by reading his book. Leopold’s is the first biographical/contextual account of Marx in any language that I know of that seriously addresses the political context of this highly philosophical politics of the late 1830s and 1840s. To do that, you have to go back to the 1930s. 1770 and the origins of liberal “thought” in Germany and resolve it as a political historian, rather than as a philosopher or someone interested in the history of ideas as such.
“in a very jane austen-ish way, it shows that jenny, who was older than marx, was maybe on the shelf, and that the marxes had more money than people thought.”
this was the first book to really revise works like marx’s “on the jewish question” which was an article published in 1844. it remains one of his most difficult texts and not what people think it is about. leopold solves that for me with a full contextual study, going back decades before and working out what exactly the jewish question was. I found that absolutely fascinating. this was not a simple question about antisemitism. Going back to the 1770s and possibly earlier, the question was, “how do you exist in a society that is pre-constitutional and Christian without being a believing, confessing, doctrinal Christian?”, is very recent in European history, even in British history. . history, for the religious proofs of marital status and for having defected from the full-fledged community. In the Rhineland, where Marx grew up, they lived under Napoleonic rule for a decade. there was enough Jewish emancipation. when the confederation of the rhine was absorbed into the kingdom of prussia, the prussians wanted to crack down and get the jews back into the ghetto, out of the universities, out of the professions. Marx’s father became a Lutheran. this kind of activity was going on. the Jewish question wasn’t just a question about Jews, it was a question about religion, beliefs, and social conformity, and how conformist to mainstream culture and religious tests you had to be to be a member of the community, and, also , which should allow some kind of exception.
so you are saying that leopold contextualized marx’s writing and thus revealed who marx’s targets were, what the arguments were playing against, which may have been implicit in the essay rather than explicit.
That’s right. being involved with the jewish question for the liberals around marx meant supporting their inclusion in the professions and supporting some kinds of exceptions, getting rid of extra taxes and anything else that was used as a restriction. so he could no longer require baptism as a prerequisite for a social role. it evolved, at that time, into a kind of liberal inclusion or multiculturalism with which we would be familiar. it just so happens that this was focused on the Jews. What Marx did was parody this and suggest, in a rather complicated way, that economics matters here and that liberal multiculturalists are not addressing the economic inequalities of society when they simply advocate liberal inclusion. I think what he’s saying, although not everyone agrees with this interpretation, is that you can flatter yourself on your liberalism in this way and ignore economic issues. then you may fail to realize how the bad aspects of capitalism are projected onto the Jews. Liberals say that Jews have a lot of business practices, that’s fine, because historically that’s what they’ve done; but the antisemitism of the time was set in motion because it portrayed Jews as clever moneylenders and merchants, etc. what marx is saying is that there is a very interesting politics of capitalism here: some people who are liberal or conservative apologists for capitalism don’t recognize themselves in the kind of activities they project onto jews. anti-Semites claim that Jews are “dirty” in carrying out these activities. what marx says is that if they are dirty, you are also dirty. “On the Jewish Question” is a very complex and difficult parody to read. leopold gives you a lot of context to help you understand it.
I’m interested in what you’re saying about the methodology here. you’re saying that cohen was doing the kind of philosophy about thinkers of the past that almost makes them our contemporaries and takes his words out of context; Leopold, however, is analyzing the context and working out what Marx must have meant in his time. that seems to be close to discovering the ‘real’ marx. but earlier you were suggesting that there is no such thing…
there are multiple marxes and they are all constructions. Leopold did not get on a tardis and dates back to the 1770s or 1840s. He is making contextual sense of this work and solving several puzzles we have about Marx. I am much more interested in this kind of historical account than I am in Cohen’s reductionism, taking a very limited number of sentences from a very limited number of texts. For those who are interested in that kind of project, that was what interested them, and Marx was that kind of thinker. I think it would have been fairer to say ‘these are philosophical propositions that I have extracted from someone’ so that others do not make the mistake of thinking that the historical biographical Marx was really like that. I find Leopold’s approach much more interesting and much more vivid. He also points out that much of what Marx was doing has similarities to what we do today in political writing, which also involves a lot of parody and satire. Reading Marx in context helps me think about our contemporary political problems much more than reading him out of context. political thought is much more like political contextualism than logical positivism.
for me, the sad thing about leopold’s book is that it stops at 1844, which is when some of marx’s most exciting ideas are set in motion. politics becomes more complex and ceases to be a matter of isolated writing of published manuscripts for a very small number of people. when you get to 1845 to 1848, marx and engels are involved in contexts that are physically outside of germany and are more involved with other people who are émigré and exiled germans, and less involved with things that are only current in berlin and some places around there . Essentially, after 1844, they broadened their horizons and became involved with more activists in different places and different kinds of people. I’m not sure if Leopold will go on and analyze that period, but I commend him for an excellent look at Marx up to the end of 1844, a period in which Engels hardly participated.
The last book he has chosen is Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (2013) by Jonathan Sperber.
I am very conflicted with this book. sperber is a historian of germany, and particularly of localities, and i think he is outstanding at that. he has done by far the best work on early marx and ancestral marx: there is virtually a biography of marx’s father and of all his written accounts of him in this book. he provides insights and turns things upside down by providing this background. In the normal course of biography, people go over the basic early facts about Marx’s parents, sometimes including a short family tree tracing his earliest ancestors, some of whom were rabbis in the early 18th century.
On the one hand, this is interesting, but on the other hand, it doesn’t prove much, since he really came to atheism quite early, and was already in favor of Hegelian pantheism. he knew a lot about doctrinal Christianity, but couldn’t care less, and had a lot of contempt for Jewish studies, Judaism, and any kind of religious connection. he was interested in anti-Semitic discourse as part of a larger discourse on capitalism, rather than as a multicultural inclusive liberal discourse on how we get along with religions in a society. he thought that religion was just a total drag on the intellect from start to finish. the sooner people got out from under it, the better. If you don’t think people should worship money, you won’t think people should worship God either. Marx was very clear on this.
Sperber goes into a lot of background on the Marx family. He turns Marx’s engagement to Jenny von Westphalen on its head, in terms of property relations. everyone had previously seen this as marx himself marrying the local beauty who was not jewish and who had aristocratic connections and was richer. but sperber turns that on its head. in a very jane austen-ish way, it shows that jenny, who was older than marx, was maybe on the shelf, and that the marxes had more money than people thought, they owned vineyards and stuff, and so on, somehow , this was a very good deal for her. Sperber did a wonderful job of overturning the simple story that Marx married into a rich family for the money.
I think he is out of his depth in the philosophical politics and philosophical ideas that arise as marx develops. that is not its strength. he is strong in the 48ers that marx was involved with, not famous revolutionaries, they only became famous when some of them were persecuted and accused. some of them were tried in colony after the revolution. Marx’s only brush with large-scale advertising came at this time and a little later in 1870. It was otherwise quite obscure. Sperber is very good at bringing the 1848ers to life, though some of it is a bit gossipy. in terms of activists arguing with each other and trying to intervene in various ways in various situations, what is it like after they’re in exile, I think sperber is very good. but that, again, is just characterization on a small scale, looking at people who were neither great political thinkers nor activists, and piecing them together from the archives, people who would otherwise be footnotes in normal biographies of marx. sperber makes these people interesting. this is definitely worth reading the book for.
as a side note i would like to mention a book that has not yet been published but which i have read as proof by gareth stedman jones (karl marx: grandeur and illusion) who was in cambridge and is now at queen mary university in London. we can look forward to that: another important biography of marx to be published soon [now published].
I can see that the academic study of marx and marxism is important, but why should someone outside of academia be interested in this? What is the true meaning of Marxism?
You can’t be an educated person and know something about world history without knowing something about this famous ideology.
See Also: Baby Books for Twins – Twiniversity