Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones (2016)

The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth. (p.595)

This book is marketed as a biography but it is much, much more than that. It is more like an encyclopedic summary of all the books and thinkers which influenced Marx, of all the books and pamphlets which Marx wrote, of all the books and pamphlets written against him, of his defences and replies to them – in short, it is the biography of a whole climate of thought.

Stedman proceeds in straightforward chronological order, starting with the family background of Karl (as Jones refers to him throughout), his Jewish roots (Karl’s Jewish father adopted Christianity and Karl himself was raised a Christian), his time at school, his student years, his engagement to Jenny von Westphalen, marriage and children.

There’s a vivid description of how, exiled in London’s Soho, Karl got their maid pregnant. The entire household- Marx himself, his wife, his pregnant maid and a horse of five or so small children – was living in just two small filthy rooms. Karl’s adult life was plagued by poverty and ill health which Stedman lists and explains in the relevant parts of the story.

But for the purposes of this book, Karl’s actual life is just background, lightweight, details.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion is really about Karl’s intellectual odyssey, the intellectual development of one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

A book of summaries

The characteristic mode of the text is not the anecdote or letter or diary: Jones isn’t much interested in Karl’s psychology. It is the précis or summary of major philosophical, economic or political texts. Countless times Jones mentions the book Karl is writing, or a book which influenced him, only to give us a 1-, 2- or 3-page summary – for example, the two pages devoted to summarising Feuerbach’s interpretation of Hegel, or Proudhon’s book on property – before Jones goes on to explain how Karl reacted to this new input, how it influenced (or not) his own intellectual development.

Since Marx sits at the intersection of three distinct intellectual disciplines – politics, philosophy and economics – a decent grasp of all three is required to really understand him.

This book goes a long way to summarising both the intellectual background of the three disciplines, as they existed and developed before Marx – and then how he took and developed ideas from the various traditions, rewiring them, transmuting them, making them his own.

For example, there is a longish passage of 30 or so pages, starting around page 100, which goes into great detail about the influence of the German philosopher Hegel (died 1831) on Karl and his generation. This is no easy matter since Hegel wrote a series of ambitious philosophical texts which a) frequently contradict each other b) were very diversely interpreted by his followers.

I had to read this 30-page passage three times to begin to get even the shape of it clear in my mind (see the summary of Hegel, below).

Das Kapital

Similarly, around page 375 there begins a long section which explains the background to Karl’s most ambitious book, Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867).

To explain it, Jones goes back to the founders of economics, Adam Smith and David Ricardo to summarise the ideas of theirs which Karl took up, analysed and argued with.

Stedman looks in great detail at specific aspects of the economic theory of the day – at the theory of value, money, circulation, production, wages, and so on – showing how they had developed over the 80 years or so prior to Capital.

He then explains how these ideas changed and evolved in Karl’s own thinking over the 20 years or so, since he first crystallised the central themes of his thought in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the so-called Paris Manuscripts.

Jones shows how the shape of Capital was based on the schema for the unfinished Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, before showing how key terms and ideas developed through eight or so drafts. And he explains the real world constraints which hampered Karl – his own chronic illness, his acute poverty which sometimes meant he didn’t even have materials to write with, his problems with publishers – all of which led the final work to have the shape it does.

For all these reasons – which can be summarised as his difficulties in working through to his own satisfaction all the implications of his vast theory of economics, history and politics – Karl decided to make the work into a trilogy, at the last minute consigning some of the most problematic issues to the subsequent volumes. He then told Engels and his closest collaborators that he was working on these ideas and all would be explained in the subsequent volumes. But they were never published during his lifetime and when, after his death, Engels came to look at his drafts and notes, he was horrified at the lack of progress Karl had made.

Having explained in great detail the intellectual and practical origins of Capital, Jones then proceeds to critique it, highlighting what was new in Marx’s economic thought, what was new in Karl’s own intellectual development, and pointing out its many shortcomings, namely the failure to properly work out a theory of value, and the decision to drop the teleological schema adopted from Hegel, in favour of a more scientific approach (explained below).

This extended account of Capital goes on for about 60 pages (pp. 375 – 430) and I found it very difficult.

At the centre seemed to be the problem of ‘value’, which I didn’t realise gave economists so much trouble (pp. 396-400). What is something worth? The cost of its raw ingredient? Plus the cost of the labour? What about the capital cost of machinery involved? Or the buildings where it’s made and the overheads involved? Or, conversely, is a product only worth what someone will pay for it? And if that’s measured in money, what if the value of money goes up and down (as exchange rates do every day)?

Karl not only wanted to prove that the capitalist exploits the ‘surplus labour’ of the worker (which turns out to be harder than it sounds) but link this up with his historical theory that this new system of production and distribution (capitalism) which was spreading so fast around the world, would eventually create the economic conditions for its own collapse.

Linking these two ideas proved impossible. Karl asserts that it will happen but he nowhere proves it. And this inability, and his knowledge that he couldn’t do it, explains why Karl was never able to complete volumes two and three of Capital, and why they were never published in his lifetime. (His close ally and subsidiser, Friedrich Engels the Manchester factory owner, oversaw their publication in 1885 and 1894, respectively.)

Contemporary history

So if we take Karl’s biography, and then the strands of text investigating the origins and development of philosophy, economics, and radical political theory as four key strands in the text, there remains a very important fifth one – which is Jones’s account of the contemporary history of Karl’s time, especially as it resulted from and affected the radical thinkers and theoreticians of the day.

If we take Karl’s adult life to span from 1836 (when he turned 18) to 1883 (when he died) he lived through the most turbulent years of the Victorian era, in terms of the domestic political affairs of the European nations, and of a number of key international wars – but Jones only deals in detail with the ones which affected his political thought.

Thus, some of the major historical events of the era are mentioned only briefly because they aren’t politically important. The biggest example for me was the Crimean War, quite a big deal at the time, but it didn’t much affect the political, economic or philosophical theory of Karl and his partners and opponents in Europe’s many radical movements.

Similarly, Jones makes passing reference to the American Civil War and to the Indian Mutiny, and these are described in some of Karl’s voluminous political journalism, but they don’t affect his political theory.

By contrast, Jones describes at length the key events which did affect the way political theorists thought about European societies, the development of radical politics and the chances of a real working class revolution:

1815 – Napoleon is defeated and the Congress of Vienna restores all the old kings to the countries they’d been removed from. But Napoleon’s armies had spread republican thought and the new idea that people should think about themselves not as subjects of particular dynasties, but as ‘nations’ joined by common languages, customs and traditions who ‘deserved’ to rule themselves. These seeds sprouted after the 1848 revolutions, into a movement Jones describes as ‘transnational republicanism’.

1830 – Revolution in France removes King Charles X, the Bourbon monarch, replacing him with his cousin Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans. The Poles rise up seeking an independent nation (only to be crushed by Russia which rules them). A new kingdom of Belgium is established, independent of the Netherlands which had ruled it.

1848 – Revolution in France topples Louis Philippe and establishes a republic. After various constitutional manoeuvres, an election for president is held which, to everyone’s surprise, is won by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the famous emperor. Four years later, he has enough support in the country (especially the countryside and the Catholic Church) to overthrow the republic and declare himself emperor, inaugurating the Second Empire period of French history (1852 to 1870).

1870 – The Franco-Prussian War, in which the Prussians thrash the French then besiege Paris. After peace is signed with France the Prussians withdraw, but a radicalised National Guard seizes control of the capital and, in a very confused sequence of events, radicals declare the city under control of the revolutionary government which comes to be called ‘the Commune’. The conservative French government, based in Versailles, sends loyal troops to Paris who fight their way street by street through the city from the west towards the working class heartlands in the east, massacring so-called communards along the way. Karl writes an essay defending the Commune and declaring it a herald of a new era of working class power.

This skimpy summary cannot do justice to the depth and clarity with which Jones describes, explains and evaluates these historical events, then traces their impact not only on Karl but on other leading left-wing thinkers of the time, for example, Feuerbach in the earlier, philosophical, period of the century; Proudhon, Karl’s main antagonist in the 1850s and 60s; and then the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, in the 1870s.

I particularly benefited from Jones’s detailed account of the series of events in France, Belgium, in Switzerland and in the various states of Germany, during the revolutionary year of 1848, what they were trying to achieve, the euphoria among radicals which they prompted, their eventual defeat, and then the slow counter-reaction which led, unexpectedly, to the economic boom years of the 1850s in which working class radicalism almost disappeared – failures and setbacks which Karl and his comrades found so hard to accept.

The 1850s and 1860s

I found Jones’s depiction of the 1850s and 1860s particularly interesting.

It’s so easy to look back and make generalisations about ‘the Victorian era’, but the long 19th century had phases and decades every bit as distinctive as those of the 20th century. Thus the 1850s were characterised by:

a) The ebbing of the revolutionary hopes of 1848. Many radicals had thought this was it, the triumph of ‘the people’, ‘the proletariat’ etc, but 1849 ushered in a counter-revolution where liberal-aristocratic coalitions secured their hold on power. Radicalism everywhere was comprehensively defeated.
b) However, the 1850s also saw the dynamic spread of capitalist technology and economic relations around the world at a breath-taking pace. Railways, in particular, were built all across Europe, in the new republics of South America, and across the vast United States. Factory production spread like wildfire.

This was the backdrop to the 1860s when a new generation of radical and working class leaders came on the scene.

Jones shows how Karl and his generation had based their dreams of a radical, utopian transformation of society on the French Revolution of 1789, and in particular on the key year of 1792, when the Jacobin extremists had come to power. These hopes, and much of the rhetoric of 1792, had been revived by the stirring events across Europe of 1848, and especially the way they happened all across Europe, as if a new era really was starting.

But Jones explains how, during the 1850s, capitalism transformed the world (railways, the telegraph, steamships) so that by the 1860s political radicalism took an entirely new shape. In a word this was trade unions. Established first in Britain, where they enjoyed greater freedom than anywhere else on the continent, the coming together of working men in every type of trade, and their solidarity (i.e. supporting brother workers in other factories or trades when they went out on strike), began to establish a completely new political force in all European countries.

Jones describes in detail Marx’s surprisingly central role in the establishment of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, created in the aftermath of another failed rising by Polish nationalists in 1863. The IWA held congresses across Europe designed to hammer out a common platform for working men across the continent. At its peak the IWA is estimated to have had 5 million members. Initially an obscure member, Marx manoeuvred his way into writing the fundamental documents of the new organisation, namely the Address to the Working Classes.

Early Marx (1840s) and later Marx (1860s and 70s) differ in a host of ways, but this is one of them: early Marx worked in the context of a relatively small clique of intellectuals who thought the revolution would be precipitated by the acuteness of their intellectual critique; from the 1860s Marx was involved in a really international organisation of the working class, with much larger numbers, much more complicated organisations, which had to adopt strategies suited to the changing political realities in the key countries where revolution was hoped for (Britain, France, Germany).

Jones shows how this difference is mirrored in the shift in Karl’s thinking from the dominance of the abstract German philosopher Hegel in the 1840s, to a more modern interest in science and materialism in the 1860s. This may be the moment to explain a bit more about Hegel.

The influence of Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 to 1831) was a key figure in the strand of philosophy known as German Idealism. He is sometimes credited with creating the biggest, most all-encompassing system of any philosopher.

Hegel conceived of all history as the expression of a ‘World Spirit’ which was continually evolving onwards and upwards. There were half a dozen key moments in history when the nature of its expression changed:

when the Roman world changed from being a republic into an empire, a seismic shift which coincided with the advent of Christianity and the end of the pagan world
the Middle Ages with their feudal social system of king, knights, serfs, the Church
the Reformation (which, importantly for all these German thinkers was, of course, a German invention) introduced a new, more personalised version of Christianity
the Enlightenment, the term given to a century or so of intellectuals promoting the triumph of Human Reason (during the 18th century)
the French Revolution, which threw up all kinds of ideas about politics and human nature and could be interpreted as a catastrophe or a beacon of hope, depending on personal preference

Having a good sense of these decisive moments of European history is important because the subsequent generation of German philosophers returned to them again and again, to reinterpret them according to their changing philosophical schemes.

Jones gives us detailed summaries of the changing interpretations of history generated by German thinkers, and followers of Hegel such as Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach.

All these German thinkers took from Hegel the idea that the ‘World Spirit’ (or ‘Humanity’ or ‘Man’ or whatever abstract term they each preferred) has a teleology, i.e. it is moving purposefully towards a knowable end. Hegel himself thought the World Spirit had reached a natural climax in the establishment of the royalist Prussian state of his day, after the defeat of Napoleon.

However, his young devotees experienced for themselves the growing repression of this ‘ideal’ Prussian state and disagreed. They thought the World Spirit had a bit more evolving to do and that this would probably involve the overthrow of the Prussian state and the reactionary forms of Christianity which bolstered it.

And so the young generation of philosophers, the ‘Young Hegelians’ as they came to be known, almost all students of Hegel who had attended his lectures and been completely dominated by the beauty and power of his huge system, argued and debated fiercely about what the World Spirit was, where it was heading, how it expressed itself, what the different eras of history marked out by Hegel really meant, and so on.

Bruno Bauer and the gospels

For a spell from 1839 to the early 1840s, Bruno Bauer made the running and was the most notorious of the Young Hegelians. He published studies of the four gospels which set out to prove that the ‘incidents’ described in them are utterly fictional and were invented by the authors to express the advent of a new kind of ‘religious consciousness’.

On one level this was a contribution to the newish factual study of Christianity and its core documents, an area where Germany led the field for much of the century. On a social level, Bauer’s books served as an attack on the conservative, reactionary and very religious post-war regime in Prussia (with the result that Bauer and the other Young Hegelians were initially banned from working in the state’s universities, and eventually had prices put on their heads and were forced to flee Germany).

And on a third level, Bauer’s secular interpretation of the gospels was part of the ongoing exploration, adaptation and extension of the Hegelian legacy of ‘History conceived as the progress of Spirit’ which dominated this generation of German thinkers.

Karl, initially as excited as the others in the group by this radical thinking, became frustrated that Bauer insisted on limiting his interpretation to Christianity. Karl and others wanted to extend the insights to all of society.

Feuerbach and alienation

It was at this point that Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) enters the scene. Feuerbach took a sociological view of Christianity. He argued that in the polis or city state of the ancient world, individuals had had a direct relationship with each other, an ‘I and Thou’ relationship.

Christianity had swept that away by encouraging people to turn away from ‘society’ and concentrate all their efforts on God. They became alienated from each other. Feuerbach developed the idea that in each of the historical eras of Hegel’s timeline, Man had alienated part of his intellectual life into fetishes – inanimate wooden objects (on the analogy of African religious fetishes which, we deduce, must have been known about in Young Hegelian circles).

According to Feuerbach men had created God but had then given him their powers, in fact given him a dream of total power. They had alienated to him their own agency. They preferred to worship things instead of having a healthy relationship with their fellow citizens.

Feuerbach expressed this theory of alienation in The Essence of Christianity (1841) and Karl was profoundly taken with it.

Karl applied Feuerbach’s concept of alienation to economic theory, where he tried to prove not just the fairly common sense idea that workers in factories are ‘alienated’ from their work and their produce in a way that handicraft workers in cottages were not – in not having control about what they make, how many, in what timeframe, or for whom.

But the more philosophical idea that workers in the capitalist system alienated to the commodity the power and agency which should be theirs. Capitalism sets up the product of the working class as a fetish which is more important – and more valuable – than the downtrodden workers that made it.

Das Kapital 20 years later was to take the paradoxical nature of ‘the commodity’ as the starting point for its investigation of capitalism as an economic and social system.

At a more meta level, the entire system of capitalism alienates the sense of control and agency which humans ought to have over their own lives. People are beaten down and think, ‘There’s nothing I can do’ to end poverty, change the system, end abuses – ‘That’s just the way it is’. People under capitalism are emasculated, dehumanised.

This is just one example of the way Karl took an idea developed by a Young Hegelian (Feuerbach) itself derived from the historical worldview developed by Hegel, and incorporated it into his own theory of capitalist development.

(Feuerbach angrily disagreed with the way Karl had applied an idea developed solely to explain the phenomenon of religion, into a broader critique of capitalism as an economic practice and a social system.)

Materialism in the 1860s

So much for the powerful Hegelian influence on the young Karl Marx and his entire generation of German intellectuals.

But Jones shows that the 1860s were culturally, politically and philosophically very different from the Hegelian 1840s. Specifically, the younger generation of radicals knew nothing and cared less about Hegel. For them the ‘new thing’ was the flowering of scientific thought which had accompanied and helped the boom of capitalist technology in the 1850s.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was published in 1859, which provided a completely materialist explanation of the evolution of all life on earth, including humans, and he was to apply his theories to human beings in the Descent of Man (1870). Various other discoveries in the fields of chemistry and physics meant that a new scientific and materialistic approach to the world, to life, to the intellectual realm, completely eclipsed the ideas of a World Spirit which Hegel had first formulated fifty years earlier.

Even Karl’s best buddy, Engels, was writing to warn him in the mid-1860s that the intellectual world had moved on. Nobody read Hegel any more (p.400). Their worldview needed to be updated.

Jones thinks this realisation influenced the final version of Capital. He shows how, in the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (1858) which Capital is based on, and in the successive drafts of Capital which Marx made through the 1860s, Karl had expended considerable effort trying to incorporate his fundamentally Hegelian view that History evolves through set phases of human development and self-awareness into the actual historical epochs described in the history books.

However, in the final version of Capital, the philosophical theory underpinning the idea of an inexorable progression is largely left out (Jones shows how, in private, Marx’s version of Hegelianism had evolved into a rather eccentric notion that history moved in a series of widening spirals; good idea to drop that bit, Karl).

Instead, in Capital, the different types of society and the social relations between the classes are stated and analysed as static categories. This was more in tune with the times, more scientific, more like an analysis of chemical compounds or the formulae of physics: but it was done at the cost of losing a fully theorised explanation of why history is inevitable and why the pressures building up within capitalism itself must bring about its collapse.

The failure of inevitability

This, if I understand Jones, is the crux of Marx’s failure.

Marx never abandoned his roots in Hegelian philosophy, a philosophy with a truly global perspective, which saw the human race evolving through set phases or eras.

It is clear that when attempting to organise his material (for the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, 1858) Karl’s first resort was Hegel. (p.389)

Karl had adapted Hegel’s schema to his communist beliefs, to come up with the idea that the owners of modern means of production and finance (the capitalists) would continue to grind the workers (the proletariat) into the dirt, crushing all peripheral artisans and small producers along the way, until the number of the proletariat was so overwhelming, and the number of the super-rich bourgeoisie had become so small, that almost by a law of physics, the workers would realise their strength, rise up, abolish the bourgeoisie and inaugurate a new era devoid of class conflict.

The history of the human race, which had hitherto been a history of class conflict, would come to an end in a new classless utopia of the ‘free association’ of people who worked as and when they wanted, to fulfil only their needs and not to produce the unnecessary tat required by commodity capitalism, ‘plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart’ (Inaugural Address to the IWMA, quoted p.470).

This is the vision expounded in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 and, although buried or elided, it also underlay Capital and all Karl’s his later writings.

However, the opposite happened.

During the 1850s and more so into the 1860s, the working class, organised into new centralised trade unions, was able to negotiate better conditions and better pay in scores of industries, in all the industrialised countries.

Their economic power was even translated into political power when Disraeli, in Britain, extended the franchise with the Representation of the People Act of 1867, which doubled the number of voters from 1 million to 2 million (out of 7 million adult males in England and Wales). Disraeli’s intent was purely cynical, to steal the thunder of his arch-enemy Gladstone and also in the hope that the newly enfranchised upper working classes would vote for him. 18 years late a further reform act increased the electorate to 5.5 million.

The political parties of the time underwent alignments completely contrary to Karl’s predictions. When there was an economic slump in the 1850s Karl hoped that the good old Chartist movement which had so dominated the 1840s would be revived. Instead, in 1859 the anti-Corn Law campaigners Cobden and Bright joined with Whigs, Peelites (a wing of the Tory party) and rebellious Irish MPs to form the Liberal Party, soon to be led by William Gladstone.

In other words, the working classes proved reluctant to carry out the role allotted to them by Karl’s economic Hegelianism, a role whereby they submitted to greater and greater immiseration before rising up to overthrow the bourgeoisie, end the history of class conflict and usher in a new phase of history whereby human consciousness ceased to be alienated from itself.

Instead, the working classes allied itself with the bourgeoisie to create reformist parties, parties concerned with here-and-now policies like reducing the working day to 8 hours, establishing weekends and holidays free from work, extending the franchise and so on.

As Jones puts it, the working class didn’t want to overthrow the political system – it wanted more say in it. Thus the British working classes were slowly and steadily co-opted into capitalist society, allowed to vote and, eventually, allowed to create the Labour Party. Although some of its intellectuals and some of its members thought the Labour Party was a revolutionary organisation, in fact it overwhelmingly represented the interests of the assimilationist trade unionists – better pay, better job conditions and so on – policies which were, from a revolutionary perspective, conservative in impact, because they underpinned and cemented in place bourgeois exploitation.

The Labour Party has never wanted to overthrow capitalism, it just wants a better deal for the working classes.

Much the same went for the International Workingmen’s Association. This was the scene of dramatic arguments about the direction radical political thinking should take between the followers of Marx, those of Proudhon and those of the Russian anarchist Bakunin. All these arguments tended to raise the spectre of apocalyptic and violent social revolutions – but in practice the IWMA sought the much more modest aim to extend the benefits of the well-established and well-organised British trade unions to the more backward continent.

The fundamental aim of the IWMA, as it was conceived by the English Trade Society leaders, was to bring the benefits of British social legislation (limitation of working hours, restriction of juvenile employment) and the achievements of the new ‘amalgamated’ model of trade unionism to the other nations of Europe and the world. (p.458)

In fact the main achievement of the IWMA was to spread across Europe a new language of social democracy, spreading English terms like ‘strike’, ‘meeting’, ‘trade union’ and ‘solidarity’ to more repressive societies like France and Germany (p.462).

Jones shows how, contrary to the teachings of 20th century ‘Marxism’ with its belief in the central role of ‘the Party’ spearheading a violent insurrection, during the 1860s Karl actually put his hopes in the work of organised international labour to consolidate class identity and activity. Hence the large amount of time he devoted to his administrative work and writings for the IWMA.

Bakunin and the end of the IWMA

Bakunin’s influence within the IWMA grew and so did the theoretical and practical divide between what came to be seen as the ‘Marxists’ and the ‘anarchists’.

Central was the way that Karl never lost his essentially Hegelian belief in the primacy of the state. In his view the state under capitalism had evolved to a high level of centralised bureaucracy and power – just as the bourgeoisie had taken the means of production to unprecedented levels. Both would be overthrown by the proletariat who would then use this state machinery to create a better society.

Bakunin radically disagreed. He also had been a young devotee of Hegel but had moved in a completely different position, coming to believe that everyone had the right to live as they wanted to, untrammelled or controlled by any external forces. In practice, people needed to co-operate to produce the necessities of life so he advocated small communes or co-operatives which lived in loose federations. But he categorically rejected the idea of ‘the state’, any state, be it bourgeois or proletarian.

Thus Bakunin and his followers opposed tooth and nail Karl’s view of the proletariat seizing control of the state and then using the state to guide society towards greater fairness.

Bakunin thought this would lead to a dictatorship worse than the current bourgeois state, which at least granted some men the vote, in which laws some could be changed, in which organised strikes had impact. Bakunin thought that in a communist dictatorship nothing would change and everyone would be oppressed.

Jones describes in detail the sequence of IWMA congresses in which the disagreements of the two parties (and others as well, it was always a very fractious body) led to Karl’s drastic suggestion that the organisation’s HQ be moved to New York! And then to its formal dissolution in the early 1870s (even the date of its closure varies depending on whether you follow the Marxist account or the Bakuninite account, since the anarchists went on to hold a few more congresses after Karl’s bloc had left).

The creation of ‘Marxism’ in the 1880s

Arguably the juiciest, because the most relevant to today, part of the book is the final 40 or so pages where Jones shows how the long evolution of Karl’s thought (beginning in rarefied Hegelianism, struggling in the 1850s to produce a really coherent synthesis of radical economics, all too often ignoring the moderate wishes of the actual working classes in favour of abstract theorising, his failure to produce the knock-out masterpiece which would really bring in converts, and the failure of the proletariat revolution he had been predicting since the early 1840s) how this long evolution unexpectedly underwent a revival in a new ‘scientific’ guise, in the 1880s and 90s.

There was a general cause and a specific cause.

The general cause was the advent of a prolonged depression which started in manufacturing in 1873 and spread to agriculture in the following years. Cheap grain from the American mid-west undercut British farmers, cheap goods from around the world began to blow back into the pioneer of the industrial revolution, for the first time undercutting British manufacture. In different ways (due to their radically different political and economic policies) the depression also impacted the other leading industrial nations, France and Germany.

In this climate, a generation which knew nothing of Hegel and the doctrinal disputes of the 1830s, for whom the revolutions of 1848 were distant history, and had grown up in societies with well-established trade unions, looked for a theory or critique which explained why this depression had come about, and why it proved so difficult to budge – why, in other words, the global capitalist system seemed to have a logic of its own which no government, of whatever stripe, could budge.

Enter Karl. Or, more precisely, enter his lifelong friend and propagandist, Friedrich Engels. They had been closely collaborating since they met in the 1840s, with Engels generally deferring to Karl’s greater intellectual achievement (although, as Jones points out, it was Engels, with his personal experience of factory conditions in Manchester and with deep research of the classic The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, who prompted Karl to begin to put an economical base to his philosophy.)

The specific cause was a pamphlet written by Engels in 1878. Eugen Karl Dühring was a German professor who, despite being a materialist, was also a positivist, who wrote books expounding his optimistic view of the evolution of man towards higher states of consciousness. In political terms, he believed in the ultimate harmony of bourgeoisie and proletariat who could be brought together in a national patriotic union.

As such, Dühring was a strong critic of Marx and – here’s the point – his views were taken up by a number of the leading radical party in Germany, the Social Democrats. As with previous ideological enemies (such as Proudhon and his followers, or Bakunin), once again Karl and Engels decided that Dühring needed to be refuted.

Now Karl, in his final decade, after the end of his work with the now defunct International Working Men’s Association, had, theory, returned to his intellectual research and reassured Engels and all his friends that he was hard at work on volumes II and III of Capital. In reality, as Jones shows, he made very little headway in solving the conceptual problems which had troubled him in the early 1860s. In fact, in the last five or six years of his life Karl became increasingly secretive about his work, not even telling Engels and upon his death it became clear why.

(Jones shows in his final chapter that this may have been because his thinking underwent a major revision in the late 1870s: after the successful defeat of the Commune, the 1870s saw the triumph of political counter-revolution across Europe, not least in the way the governments of Britain, France and Germany co-opted sections of the working class into the suffrage, into political parties, into trades unions and so on. Karl withdrew more and more from the vision of an abrupt and violent revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois society, writing at different times that the bourgeoisie might, instead, be subtly transformed from within by the pressure of the proletariat organised into trade unions. In fact, in his final years he became attracted to the idea – proposed by a series of scholars – that Europe’s ancient Celtic and Germanic societies had once been propertyless communes. This fed into the intriguing question of whether the primitive commune-like world of Russia‘s backward serfs [only ‘liberated’ in 1861] might skip the destructive phase of bourgeoisification, and go straight from primitive commune to sophisticated commune. Jones quotes Karl’s correspondence with some Russian radicals who wanted his opinion on this very question.)

But Karl’s inability to complete Capital and this late-in-life change of opinion about the viability of primitive communal society weren’t made public at the time or until long afterwards. Instead, on the assumption that Karl was busy with his important ‘revolutionary’ work, it fell to Engels to write a pamphlet refuting the worrying influence of this Professor Dühring.

And this book – sarcastically titled in German, Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft or Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science – which became known as the Anti-Dühring – turned out to be the most influential book written by either Karl or Friedrich. It deliberately set out to be a comprehensive summary of the development and content of Marxist theory. Friedrich called it an attempt ‘to produce an encyclopaedic survey of our conception of the philosophical, natural-science and historical problems.’

It was from this little summary that the new generation of radicals learned the meaning of what Friedrich now termed ‘scientific socialism’.

The book had three chapters. A few years later chapter one (the one which dealt in detail with Dühring’s beliefs) was dropped and chapters two and three were reprinted as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. A French edition appeared in 1880, a German edition in 1882.

The pamphlet thereafter became the most popular source for the understanding of ‘Marxism’ for the following twenty years. (p.560)

Engels placed Karl alongside Darwin as the founder of a new science. Karl’s importance rested on two ‘scientific’ discoveries, the materialist conception of history, which saw all human history as a sequence of class struggles, and the theory of ‘surplus value’ which he had revealed as the hidden motor of capitalism.

Engels pointed out how the bourgeoisie had destroyed feudal and artesan labour, the labour of small masters and apprentices, forcing all workers into factories where they had to work collaboratively, and where the ‘surplus value’ of their labour was stolen by the bourgeoisie.

But, reflecting the political and social changes of recent years, Engels then went on to claim that the new technologies pioneered by the bourgeoisie had to some extent been taken over by the state in Britain, Germany and France. In these countries the state had already taken over key industries such as the telegraph, the post office, some railways and so on.

In other words the proletariat only had to seize control of the state to find it had already accomplished half the work of nationalising industry: the workers would simply be completing a process Engels saw happening in modern society anyway.

It is in this little book that Engles concludes with a vision, not of the state being overthrown in a violent revolution like the Jacobin revolution of 1792, which had so dominated the imagination of radicals of his generation: instead the state, once in the hands of the proletariat, would die out or wither away.

These arguments were taken up by August Bebel, the foremost leader of the German Social Democratic party. They were included in the 1891 constitution of the Party, the so-called ‘Erfurt programme’ of 1891.

Karl had died, worn out by years of illness and also the severe illnesses of his (now adult) children, in 1883. In his graveside oration Engels again compared Karl to Darwin for his ‘scientific’ discoveries which explained all of human history, the growth of capitalism, and ‘scientifically proved’ how capitalism was crippled by its own internal contradictions and would soon pass away, giving way to the free association of free and happy men and women.

It was this view, essentially drafted and curated by Engels, of Karl as a scientific materialist, which went on to influence later generations. It was taken up and assiduously promoted by Karl Kautsky in his radical paper Die Neue Zeit, which from 1883 to 1914 was the theoretical journal of the German Social Democratic Party and the leading journal of the Second International of Working Men (1889 to 1916).

Among the radicals it influenced was Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) one of the founding fathers of Russian Marxism, who was in personal touch with Engels from 1883 and went on to found a radical organisation called ‘the Emancipation of Labor Group’. In 1895 Plekhanov published In Defence of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History, which despite its daunting title put forward a Marxist view based on the Anti-Dühring. Among the early members of the Emancipation group was the young Vladimir Ulianov, who later gave himself the revolutionary name ‘Lenin’. In 1900 Plekhanov and Lenin were among the founders of the revolutionary newspaper, Iskra or The Spark.

Later, after he had founded the breakaway section of the Russian Social Democratic Party which became known as the Bolsheviks (in 1912), Lenin was fiercely criticised by Plekhanov on the classical Marxist basis that Russia was still a backward nation not ready for revolution because it hadn’t industrialised or produced a bourgeois class.

Lenin disagreed, believing that there were sufficient workers to justify a violent revolution which would seize power in the name of both workers and peasants. Despite his criticism of Plekhanov, Lenin never ceased praising his role in disseminating ‘scientific Marxism’ and insisted that his texts be taught in schools after the revolution of 1917.

Thus a direct thread runs from Engels’ creation of a new ‘scientific Marxism’, updated to suit the age of Darwin, through its dissemination among leading German and Russian radicals, to the Russian revolution itself.

But it was a Marx who was carefully tailored to the new age of scientific rhetoric. Jones devotes his last few pages to showing just how different the ‘scientific Marx’ of 1900 was from the ‘Hegelian Karl’ of 1840 or 1850, the actual, living, breathing, thinking Karl who we have accompanied through these 600 enthralling pages. Hence his conclusion:

The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth. (p.595)

Summary

On every page of this staggeringly well-informed work, we learn new things about the thought and politics of the era, about the many radical thinkers of the day as they wrote articles, pamphlets, books, argued and squabbled with each other about the precise definition of ‘human consciousness’ or ‘civil society’ or ‘democracy’ and so on. And then, into the more politicised 1850s and 60s, we learn masses about the conflicting theories of political action proposed by the likes of Proudhon and Bakunin; and then on to the crystallising of ‘scientific Marxism’ in Karl’s final years and after.

Jones helps us see how Karl weaved the various fragments and influences together into what would become known, after his death, as his doctrine of ‘dialectical materialism’, and provides detailed critiques of every stage of Karl’s thought, presenting summaries of his key writings and then assessing their success and failure.

Jones provides unparalleled detail on the key political events of the Karl’s lifetime as they affected his work and the work of other radicals – giving the reader a really deep understanding of the dynamics which flowed from 1815, through the revolution of 1830, to the continent-wide disruptions of 1848, into the two long decades of capitalist conquest and the rise of trade union militancy in the 50s and 60s, through the shocking events of the Paris Commune, and on into the gritty 1870s. This historical strand by itself presents a bracing, thrilling panorama of an age.

In its scope, its breadth and depth of scholarship, and in the confidence with which Jones deals with economic theory, abstruse German philosophy, or the key historical events of the era, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion feels like an unprecedented synthesis of knowledge and insight.

On the cover the Economist magazine is quoted as saying, ‘There is no better guide to Marx’, and it is really difficult to see how a more thorough and compendious account could ever be written of the man’s life and thought.

Books & Boots

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones (2016)

A book of summaries

Das Kapital

Contemporary history

The 1850s and 1860s

The influence of Hegel

Bruno Bauer and the gospels

Feuerbach and alienation

Materialism in the 1860s

The failure of inevitability

Bakunin and the end of the IWMA

The creation of ‘Marxism’ in the 1880s

Summary

Related links

Related blog posts

Karl Marx

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

Communism in England

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Books & Boots

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones (2016)

A book of summaries

Das Kapital

Contemporary history

The 1850s and 1860s

The influence of Hegel

Bruno Bauer and the gospels

Feuerbach and alienation

Materialism in the 1860s

The failure of inevitability

Bakunin and the end of the IWMA

The creation of ‘Marxism’ in the 1880s

Summary

Related links

Related blog posts

Karl Marx

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

Communism in England

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