Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

"There’s always a question of how one should read Marx. Reading Marx’s Capital is, I think, not terribly useful for most people. There are chapters of it that I absolutely love, but those chapters tend to be toward the end. And there’s an awful lot that is wrong. There’s an awful lot that’s confused. There’s a lot that’s repetitive. There’s an awful lot that is incomprehensible unless you are a mid-19th century German, who started out as a Hegelian philosopher and then became convinced that the real road to change was not through figuring out how to think correctly, but rather through political action, to bring about in Germany something like the French Revolution. You need to have Marx’s understanding that political revolution wouldn’t work without understanding how the economy is put together, because political freedom, the freedom to vote, without an economy that allows for high levels of productivity and also a fairly egalitarian distribution of the products of the economy is worth very little—and the economy by itself would not produce the equal distribution of income required. If you have that experience, then Capital is written for you because you are tracking Karl Marx’s career to such a degree that it makes sense. Otherwise, you’re better reading someone about Marx than reading Marx. And Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life is an absolutely wonderful book because it takes him very seriously and also points out that what he was worried about are things that still, in large part, afflict our economic system today—such as the question of how to manage it for general and fairly equally divided prosperity. But he had to analyze it in the context of his particular time, with his particular concerns. In some ways Marx turned Malthus on his head. Malthus thought that the market economy, left unaided—that is without being reinforced by patriarchy, orthodox religion and monarchy—would not produce a good society because individual worker productivity would be low because we’d be so short of natural resources. A scarcity of natural resources would mean that the marginal worker was not very productive and so couldn’t bargain for much in the market economy. And so, the lives of the working class—the bulk of humanity—would remain nasty, brutish and short. Marx thought that was not a problem. Marx thought human ingenuity, together with technological advance were such that resource scarcity would not be an important thing. So far Karl Marx has won that argument, although global warming may teach us differently in the future. So why then, Marx asked, was it that real wages were so low that even someone like John Stuart Mill could ask why this market economy hadn’t produced anything of value for the working class? Marx thought the problem was that produced means of production—people’s past labor crystallized in the form of buildings, machines and production processes—wasn’t a complement to current labor, but rather a competitor with it. Bosses could store up crystallized past labor in the form of capital. And, then, the fact that they owned all this past labor in the form of capital meant that they did not require the services of that many living workers in order to produce what they produced, and so as time passed, and as society grew richer, and as productivity increased and science advanced, it would, nevertheless, be the case that the forest of outstretched arms looking for work would get thicker and thicker, while each of the individual arms would get thinner and thinner. “Marx stands at the origin of a great deal of what is still live in modern economics” Now, why couldn’t property be evenly distributed? Well, property couldn’t be evenly distributed because of the natural dynamic workings of the market economy—simple chance. You could start out with an equal distribution of property, what Marx would call a ‘petit bourgeois’ distribution. But some people would be lucky, others unlucky. The lucky would get richer and the unlucky poorer. Because the lucky are richer and have more capital at their disposal, they’d be more productive. The fact that they’re more productive will mean they grow even richer and that the distribution of wealth and, eventually, of income will ‘Brownian motion’ itself away into a very inegalitarian, very concentrated distribution. In that case, you then need the government to do something about it and, in Marx’s view, what you need the government to do is to nationalize everything important and form a free society of associated producers, in which people democratically decide on what should be produced, rather than have a dictatorship of the plutocracy. Marx was trying to understand why it was that the market economy was not producing a good outcome on its own. He was trying to figure out how it could possibly be that society was structured in this particular way. That was his lifetime’s work and it was a very 19th century life—hence the title of the book. Condorcet and the earlier classical economists thought there had been a monopoly of property in the hands of the landlord class, those who claimed to own the land because their ancestors had conquered Gaul under the banner of Clovis, king of the Franks back in the 400s. They thought that if you simply moved away from this kind of feudal or semi-feudal concentration of landed property in the hands of a few it would not be a great concern. And, indeed, Smith does not think that income and wealth inequality is a great concern. You can find passages in Smith, especially in The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he says that everyone who turns 70 and has made a great success of life, and is now rich, wants to sit out in the sun in the park and reflect upon how pleasant life is. But you can sit outside in the park when you’re 20 and reflect on how pleasant life is. To have spent hour after hour after hour in the counting house piling up more and more gold that you will never spend on anything that makes you truly happy—that is a psychological deformation that the upwardly mobile rich suffer from. And, while it’s a good thing for society that these people suffer from this deformation because it makes the economy more productive and prosperous, it’s actually a bad thing for them. They should be much more Stoic and Epicurean . But, instead, the rich work for the rest of us, making a more prosperous economy and, yet, get very little in terms of lifetime happiness out of it. It’s only when you get to Marx and John Stuart Mill that people begin saying, ‘Wait a minute. We do have this society and it’s very productive, much more productive than it was. We have all these wonderful technologies, but why the hell are people still living in the East End of London in the same way they were in the mid-18th century?’ Marx is a German scholastic Hegelian philosopher trying to be an economist even though his natural metier is that of a journalist. However, he decides, I think correctly, that the key to understanding the world of the industrial revolution he was living through was the economy. Hence he decides what he really needs to become is a technical, theoretical economist. And so he spends the years from 1855 to the end of his life trying to nail down the economic argument, but never manages to do so even to his own satisfaction, let alone to the satisfaction of others. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He thought that there was no solution short of socialism. And he had reasons why. He thought you couldn’t simply have the government impose somewhat more progressive taxes to redistribute income and wealth more evenly. Why not? Because money talks. And money talking would control the government. The rich would always have enough influence over the government to prevent it from enforcing an acceptable distribution of income and wealth through the economy. Anyway, this is an absolutely wonderful book. I wish I’d read it 15 or 20 years ago. It greatly increases my sense of how he reached his positions and why he was so certain that he was right. Also, the book shows that, although he may not have come up with all the answers, he was certainly in there trying to develop them and he certainly came up with points of tension and worries that still worry us today. Marx stands at the origin of a great deal of what is still live in modern economics. The question of what kind of income and wealth distribution a market economy heads for is definitely a major concern today. Marx was one of the very first to produce a theory of the business cycle. I think it’s a wrong theory, but it is a theory. Before Marx, Ricardo and Say denied there was a real problem, although Say changed his mind later on in life. Malthus thought that there was a problem, but got confused and thought it was tied up with the Malthusian problem of resource scarcity."

"I’m very conflicted about 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 the very early Marx, and the ancestral Marx: there is virtually a biography of Marx’s father and of all his relations written within this book. He does provide insights and turn things around and upside down by providing this background. In the normal run of biography, people race through the basic early facts about Marx’s parents, sometimes including a little bit of a family tree tracing back his early 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, given that he really came to atheism quite early, and was already for Hegelian pantheism. He knew a lot about doctrinal Christianity, but couldn’t care less, and showed a lot of contempt for Jewish studies, Jewishness, and any sort of religious connection. He was interested in anti-Semitic discourse as part of a larger discourse about capitalism, rather than as a multicultural inclusive liberal discourse about how we get on with religions in a society. He thought that religion was just a total drag on the intellect from beginning to end. The sooner people got out from under it the better. If you don’t think people should worship money, you’re not going to think that people should worship God, either. Marx was really clear on that. Sperber goes into a great deal of background on Marx’s family. He turns Marx’s engagement to Jenny von Westphalen around, in terms of property relations. Everybody had previously seen this as Marx himself marrying the local beauty who was not Jewish and who had aristocratic connections and was more wealthy. But Sperber turns that upside down. In a very Jane Austen-ish way, he shows that Jenny, who was older than Marx, was perhaps on the shelf, and that the Marxes had more money than people realised, owned vineyards and so on, and so, in some ways, this was a very good deal for her. Sperber did a wonderful job overturning the simple story that Marx married into a wealthy family for the money. I think he is out of his depth in the philosophical politics and the philosophical ideas as they come up as Marx develops. That isn’t his strength. He is strong on the 48ers with whom Marx was involved — not famous revolutionaries, they only became famous when some of them were persecuted and charged. A few of them were put on trial in Cologne after the revolution. Marx’s only brush with large-scale publicity arose in that era and a tiny bit later in 1870. He 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 it’s like after they are in exile, I think Sperber is very good. But that, again, is only a small-scale characterisation, looking at people who were neither great political thinkers nor activists, and reconstructing them from the archives, people who would otherwise be footnotes in the normal biographies of Marx. Sperber makes these people interesting. The book is certainly worth reading for this. As an add-on, I’d like to mention a book that isn’t published yet, but which I’ve read in proof, by Gareth Stedman Jones ( Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion ) who was at Cambridge and is now at Queen Mary, University of London. We can look forward to that — another major biography of Marx that will be published soon [now published]. You can’t be an educated person and know anything about world history without knowing something about this famous ideology."