Book review
Rescuing Marx from ignorant "modernisers"
Karl Marx by Francis Wheen (Fourth Estate; London, £20)
Reviewed by Geoff Ryan
Rather surprisingly Francis Wheen has done the socialist movement a tremendous service by writing this biography of Karl Marx. Surprisingly, because earlier this year Wheen made use of his regular Guardian column to attack those who opposed NATO’s war against Serbia.
According to Wheen ‘It is time to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man’. In this he certainly succeeds. The Karl Marx that emerges from the pages of Wheen’s book is a ‘figure of flesh and blood’. He is neither the ‘demonic begetter of all evil’ nor a ‘secular God’ but a real human being, with many of the vices, foibles and virtues of real human beings.
He exhibits many of the prejudices of nineteenth century men of middle class origins, especially towards women and non-European peoples. He is not beyond boasting of the aristocratic origins of his wife Jenny. He struggles against poverty and frequent illness, both of which, to varying extents, are sometimes self-imposed. He wants his daughters to enjoy the trappings of middle class women of the time and, therefore, often lives beyond his means. His illnesses are often a way of avoiding concentrating on a task, a product at times of self-doubt.
At the same time Marx can also be extremely arrogant and argumentative and often devotes large amounts of time to writing vast tracts denouncing political opponents, most of whom have long since disappeared into obscurity.
However, although Wheen claims his purpose is to show ‘Karl Marx the man’ he goes way beyond this aim. He rescues Marx’s ideas from both virulent anti-Marxists, who seek to demonize him, and those who misuse Marx in order to justify their own crimes. Wheen totally rejects claims that Marx’s ideas inevitably led to Stalinism. ‘Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag; but there is, alas, a ready supply of fools’.
Wheen also takes issue with those who have tried to portray Marx as anti-Semitic, a self-hating Jew. He insists that, although Marx frequently used anti-Semitic epithets against his political opponents, many of his remarks have been taken out of context. In fact Marx insisted on equal rights for Jews though he was hostile to Judaism. But this was at one with Marx’s hostility to all religions, not an example of anti-Semitism.
However, Wheen insists, it is necessary to understand exactly what Marx meant by the much quoted, but frequently misunderstood, assertion that ‘religion is the opium of the people’. Marx’s attitude, in fact, is much more subtle and shows the importance of dialectics in his thought.
"Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, in response to grinding poverty, imperialist domination and corruption of local ruling classes, especially those who falsely claim to be ‘socialist’ is eloquent testimony to the relevance today of Marx’s ideas.
The strength of Wheen’s book is that he rescues Marx’s ideas by insisting that they are still relevant today.
"Today’s pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like to mention the buzz-word "globalisation" at every opportunity - without realising that Marx was already on the case in 1848.
"The globe-straddling dominance of McDonald’s and MTV would not have surprised him in the least. The shift in financial power from the Atlantic to the Pacific - thanks to the Asian Tiger economies and the silicon boom towns of west-coast America - was predicted by Marx more than a century before Bill Gates was born."
Although Marx’s work is often dismissed as ‘crude dogma’ Wheen insists this is usually by people - such as Tony Blair - who show no sign of ever having read him. As Wheen shows, Marx actually had ‘a ceaselessly inquisitive, subtle and undogmatic mind’.
Marx recognised the tremendous achievements of capitalism. His analysis of the nature of capitalism drew on the writings of classical bourgeois economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx ‘used their own words and logic to expose the shortcomings of their own theories’ - in particular their belief that private property was ‘a primordial human condition’. Marx showed that ‘there was nothing fixed or immutable about it’.
Wheen defends Marx against detractors by arguing that his economic predictions can be subjected to scientific examination.
Marx predicted ‘we would see periodic recessions, an ever-growing dependence on technology and the growth of huge, quasi-monopolistic corporations spreading their sticky tentacles all over the world in search of new markets to exploit’. As Wheen says ‘If none of this had happened, we might be forced to agree that the old boy was talking poppycock’. However, he continues, ‘The boom-bust cycles of Western economies in the twentieth century, like the globe-girdling dominance of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, suggest otherwise’.
Wheen also takes issue with those who claim that Marx predicted the ‘progressive immiseration’ of the proletariat. He argues, quite correctly, that Marx actually predicted a relative - not an absolute - decline in wages under capitalism. This, as Wheen says, ‘is self-evidently true...however many microwave ovens the workers can afford’. Moreover, Marx was not solely concerned with material impoverishment: ‘such intangibles as "alienation" and "moral degradation" also form part of Marx’s analysis. The history of the twentieth century provides striking confirmation of this.
While Wheen is right to insist on Marx’s prediction of relative impoverishment he also shows, unconsciously, a weakness in his analysis. Capitalism cannot be reduced to the advanced capitalist states of the west.
With one or two exceptions, the states of Africa, Asia and Latin America are also capitalist states. In those states there has not simply been a relative but an absolute pauperisation.
Marx lived too early to see the rise of imperialism. His analysis, therefore, tended to be Euro-centric. Marx, of course, did write about colonialism and protested about the brutal treatment of the colonial peoples.
But he also believed that capitalism was progressive, and that the suffering of the colonial peoples was a necessary stage in the development of capitalism. Hence Marx believed that British domination of India was historically progressive.
However, Marx believed that capitalist rule in India would be ended either by the British working class overthrowing capitalism in the imperialist heartland or by the Indian masses themselves developing sufficient political consciousness to overthrow foreign capitalist domination.
Francis Wheen has unfortunately opted for an approach diametrically opposed to that of Marx. Rather than advocating that the oppressed people of Kosova would be liberated either by the Serbian working class establishing a socialist society or by themselves defeating Serbian oppression, Wheen supported imperialist intervention which aimed at preventing Kosovan independence. It is certainly tempting to conclude that Wheen’s failure to criticise the weaknesses in Marx’s economic theories, particularly the lack of a concept of imperialism, led Francis Wheen to such a wrong position.