KARL MARX
Greatness and Illusion
Gareth Stedman Jones
The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press
750 pages; $35
“If anything is certain,” Karl Marx once declared, “it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” This remark, though often quoted, is rarely understood with the depth it demands. The 20th-century intellectuals and party ideologues who proudly called themselves Marxists typically had a clear sense of their doctrine: Marxism as they conceived it was a theory of society that pulled away the mystifying veil of capitalism to reveal the economic exploitation at its core. It promised a bracing and universal concept of human history that portrayed class conflict as the final engine of change. More than this, it served as the modern name for an ancient but enduring dream: To put an end to unfreedom.
It was this notion of Marxism that the historian Isaiah Berlin ascribed to its founder when he wrote of Marx that “his intellectual system was a closed one, everything that entered was made to conform to a pre-established pattern.” This is doubtless true of the so-called “dialectical materialism” that became doctrinal orthodoxy in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Suspicious of all heretics even to the point of airbrushing their faces from history, Eastern-bloc Communist leaders had little patience for the niceties of philosophical speculation. For them Marxism was not an interpretation of society but an objective science. But Marx the man was rather more improvisatory in his thinking than the official ideologies that later borrowed his name.
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, by the British historian Gareth Stedman Jones, has many virtues, among them a graceful style of narration. Mr Stedman Jones has a keen grasp of intellectual history, and skilfully conveys the various themes in philosophy and economics from which Marx forged his own ideas.
Mr Stedman Jones’s Marx is a man who was responsive to the world and capable of changing his mind, sometimes in dramatic ways. Eager that we distinguish between the individual and the ideology, Jones calls his subject “Karl,” a whimsical device that rescues him from “Marxism”.
Mr Stedman Jones is not always sympathetic to his subject. He faults Karl for “political myopia” in his understanding of 1848, and his impatience shows when Karl reconceives specific struggles of history as a grand battle between proletarians and bourgeoisie. Still, he recognises that even a responsibly historical portrait of Marx cannot condemn his ideas wholly to the past. “Karl was not just the product of the culture into which he was born,” Mr Stedman Jones insists; he was also “determined to impress himself upon the world.” A generation ago scholars still felt burdened with the question of whether Marx himself was somehow responsible for Stalin’s crimes. If this question has now lost its urgency, the debate over globalisation has brought new questions to the fore. Did Marx allow for variations in time and space? Can he be redeemed from his own universalist hubris?
In his early writings and well through the 1860s, Marx propounded a theory of history that extolled the heroic achievements of the bourgeoisie as the collective agent of global change. Before the proletariat could develop into a mature class and become truly conscious of its revolutionary task, he reasoned, it was first necessary for capitalism thoroughly to modernise the world. All remnants of feudalism would dissolve; local custom and tradition would be swept aside, and industrial production would surge, condensing the two remaining classes into radically opposed groups in anticipation of capitalism’s final crisis.
This theory implied a certain inevitability to the gathering processes of historical change. It also left little room for the possibility of independent revolution in less developed regions around the globe, in the east or in the outer reaches of Europe’s empires. Marx’s universalism found its classic expression in The Communist Manifesto, which declared that all nations must submit “on pain of extinction” to the forces of bourgeois modernity. And in the first volume of Capital, completed in 1867, he still reserved special disdain for what he called “ancient Asiatic” forms of production, condemning them as symptoms of a despotism that must be swept aside.
After 1870, however, Marx relaxed these strictures, in part because the failure of the Paris Commune left him dismayed at the prospects for a Communist revolution in the West. This change of perspective brought a new openness to the possibility of revolution in Russia and the non-European world. In 1881, Marx answered a query from Vera Zasulich, a Russian noblewoman and revolutionary living in exile in Geneva. Pressed to explain his views on the Russian village commune, Marx agonised over his response — his letter went through no fewer than four drafts. Though still insisting that the isolation of the village commune was a weakness, he granted that the historical inevitability he had once discerned in the process of industrialisation was “expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe.”
Just a year before his death and gravely ill, Marx wrote with Engels a short preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto. It entertained the prospect that the common ownership system in the Russian village might serve as “the starting point for a communist development.” Three and a half decades later, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and by the late 1920s the government commenced its brutal collectivisation of agriculture. Like all intellectual legacies, Marx’s work remains open to new interpretation. But it seems clear that the man himself would never have accepted the inhumanity undertaken in his name.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
