A World to Win Read online

  A number of introductions to Marx’s works have come out over the past few years, intended to initiate new readers into the old master’s world of ideas. The foremost example is Thomas Petersen’s and Malte Faber’s solid, thought-provoking 2015 book, Karl Marx und die Philosophie der Wirtschaft (Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Economics), the third edition of which has already come out.22

  Finally, I would like to mention a few short pamphlets by the celebrated British literary scholar Terry Eagleton. In 1999, he published Marx, a very small biography – in format, a longer essay – and in 2011, the somewhat more extensive Why Marx Was Right followed. The latter is not as apologetic as the title hints at, but is primarily an attempt to explain why Marx is still a current thinker in the twenty-first century.

  That is an ambition that also inspires this book.

  After this review of the literature – in which many more titles could have been mentioned and where the selection is also marked by my ignorance of a number of important languages – it may seem odd to write yet another biography of this man who already has had so much written about him.

  There is a crucial reason that I did it, after all. I believe myself capable of bringing something new in relation to previous biographies. One important reason is that I have devoted greater attention than usual to Marx’s work in the biographical literature about him. His life history is also included here, in both its grand and its trivial details. But it is his writings that make Marx memorable, influential, and still important. I have carefully gone through everything he left behind, both complete documents and manuscripts. I have even reviewed the things that most researchers of Marx browsed past with a reflexive flick of the thumb. As regards the important works – with the great project bearing the name of Capital in the centre – I have tried to summarize current research and have also provided an overview that is entirely my own.

  On a number of points, I feel I am capable of renovating the image of Marx the thinker and scholar. I show that the concept of alienation has a changed, but still central, place in his later works as well. It thereby also becomes possible to elaborate his little-developed theory of ideology. In general, I believe myself capable of explaining his relationship to his philosophical predecessors, particularly Hegel and his central conceptual framework. At the same time, I can indicate the significance of a broad cultural – and in particular, literary – structure for the whole body of Marx’s work. I can derive his rapidly changing political position from his view of the relationship between political and social change. I can locate the border between him and his followers – yes, even between him and Engels: what is called Marxism, I argue, should by rights be called Engelsism.23 Marx did not create a system. As a scholar and author he is more of a Faustian figure, constantly on the way deeper into the endless world of knowledge.

  The Marx I wish to depict is firmly anchored in the nineteenth century. Its horizons were also his. At the same time, he stands out as a suitable red-hot critic of the capitalism that rules the world of the twenty-first century.

  A Great, Unfinished Body of Work

  Only a small part of what Marx wrote was printed during his lifetime. Most of it remained lying in incomplete manuscripts. Since then, posterity has gradually published what he left behind. Engels was first with the continuation of the only volume of Capital that Marx himself allowed the world to study. He not only reproduced Marx’s text but also, by his own accord, filled in the gaps his friend left open.

  Later publishers largely reproduced what Marx wrote. This was so when the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (also called the Paris Manuscripts) were published around 1930, showing a Marx that deviated from the standard picture being punched out at the time. So also a few decades later when another, equally astounding manuscript – the Grundrisse – surprised faithful readers of Marx with its existence.

  An attempt at a critical edition of both Marx’s and Engels’s works was launched in Germany around 1930 (in connection with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts first being published). But Adolf Hitler put a stop to the project’s continuation in 1933.

  The first major edition of both Marx’s and Engels’s works was the Marx-Engels-Werke, or MEW, which was published in East Germany from 1956 onwards. It was not a critical edition. Works in French or English were reproduced in German translation; the long introductions were highly tendentious and carefully adapted to the prevailing political climate in the Soviet Union, and the text editions themselves had their shortcomings. Works considered dangerous to the official ideology – such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the Grundrisse – were boxed off in supplementary volumes or only published much later.

  These shortcomings would be rectified in and through the critical edition – the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe – which, through its name, was already directly linked to the incomplete project from the 1930s. Its first volume came out in 1975, but after forty years the work is still far from completed. The gigantic proportions are a part of the explanation: the edition will eventually comprise approximately 120 volumes with accompanying extensive critical apparatus. Another contributing reason is the collapse of the GDR and the Soviet Union. It took a while before the project got another backer (the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Now volume after volume is being published at a fairly rapid pace.

  A critical review shows that the early volumes of MEGA have certain shortcomings that an observant reader must bear in mind.24 The same sharp gaze has not been directed towards later parts of the edition. Nothing human is perfect. What shortcomings there may be are no longer due to the bad influence of the machineries of power in the GDR and the Soviet Union.

  In any case, MEGA is the most outstanding edition, in principle containing everything (except the irretrievably lost) that Marx and Engels put down on paper. Much that previously lay inaccessible and hard to interpret in the archives is now available, and provides a richer, more complex image of both men than previously.

  But important parts of the totality are still missing. A number of central works by Marx are, for the time being, only in the Marx-Engels-Werke or some other reasonably reliable edition.

  On the other hand, Capital and all its preliminary work back to the Grundrisse have now been published in MEGA. It is possible for the first time to distinguish between Marx’s own texts and Engels’s contributions – something that is important, particularly as regards the third volume of Capital, to which Engels made extensive changes and supplements to what Marx wrote.25

  In this case, we can know exactly what Marx wrote in his own hand. This is so for most of his texts. For a long time, Jenny Marx, his wife, made clean copies of his hard-to-read handwriting, but so far as can be determined, she made no additions of her own. There is, however, one notable exception: she made, by all appearances, her own small but not insubstantial contribution to her husband’s manuscript for the Communist Manifesto.26

  As regards the many newspaper articles Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune, it is sometimes difficult to precisely distinguish Engels’s share, particularly concerning the purely linguistic formulation in English. As luck would have it, Marx’s and Engels’s styles of writing differ in a fundamental way. This makes it easy to determine when Marx, in all essentials, is the author of the articles.

  The intent of this book is not only to provide an all-round picture of Marx and above all his work. It is also to entice into further reading. Marx is an exciting writer, sometimes brilliant, sometimes carefully investigative, often polemically razor-sharp – and occasionally coarse, or biased, or thoughtless. His repertoire of knowledge is substantial, his frames of reference are broad.

  Texts by Marx have been my reading matter for more than fifty years now. In 1965, I published my first selection of writings from his youth – Människans frigörelse (The Liberation of Mankind) – and three years later came a book about the young Marx, En värld att vinna (A World to Win). In the 1970s, I became engrossed in Engel
s’s philosophy and its relation to nineteenth-century scientific and ideological development. The result was a two-volume work published in 1977: Motsatsernas spel (The Play of Contradictions).

  Over all the years that have passed since then, I have come back again, off and on, to questions about Marx and Engels, about Marxism and socialism and communism. In 2003, together with Björn Linnell, I published a selection of central Marx texts.

  The book the reader now holds in their hands is the most extensive I have written about Marx. In principle, I try to cover all the important things Marx wrote. Against this background – before I give an account of the book’s contents – it may be reasonable for me to say something about the most appropriate path into the world of Marx’s ideas. These recommendations cannot be anything but highly personal.

  The best beginning is the brilliant first section of the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto as a whole is marked by the problems of the 1840s, by dreams of the future, and especially by the disputes among various factions of the left. But it is as if the prelude were written for our own time.

  After that, it would be good to follow with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Marx soon abandons the ideas about human nature he brings forward there, but he holds on to the crucial ideas about what human life should be and what prevents it from being so in capitalist society.

  It is best if the path into Marx’s great theory of society goes through his little pamphlet Value, Price, and Profit, which originally was a few lectures he gave for the London members of the International Workingmen’s Association – the famous First International – where he himself soon began setting the tone. It was at the same time as he was completing the first volume of Capital, and the lectures are an easily accessible introduction to several of the main thoughts there.

  From there the path to Capital should lie open – this remarkable, powerful foundation of the theory, as eternally incomplete as Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The Grundrisse also lies within reach, as with everything else Marx left behind in the form of books, manuscripts, newspaper articles, excerpts, and letters. It should be a pleasure to read Marx – an intellectual and emotional adventure.

  If I succeed in infecting any of my readers with this love of adventure, I will be satisfied.

  A Guide Through the Work

  The first chapter briefly depicts the historical background of Marx’s life: the path from the industrial and political revolutions of the late 1700s to the age when electricity transformed the world and the social democratic parties began to be established.

  The following four chapters cover Marx’s life up through the revolutions of 1848–49. They deal first with his childhood and youth up until his marriage with the baroness Jenny von Westphalen and their departure from Germany.

  After that it is the nineteenth-century capital of Paris that will come into focus both for the young family and for this account. Paris of the 1840s is a magnificent environment, and young Karl will become acquainted with both luxury and poverty, with both the finest salons and the dark places where rebellious journeymen gather and hammer out insidious plans. In this environment, he also begins the great project that would gradually be given the name of Capital.

  But German (or more precisely, Prussian) police spies were on his trail all the time, and finally got him deported from Paris. He was forced to take refuge in Brussels, a considerably less colourful city. He and his new-found friend, Friedrich Engels, nevertheless created a small rebellious centre there and soon came into contact with like-minded people in London. From there, they were both tasked with working out a programme for the Communist League, which had now taken shape. Engels wrote the model for the Communist Manifesto, but it was Marx who completed the text and gave it its brilliant stylistic formulation.

  The Manifesto came out just as a long-heralded revolution broke out, first in Paris and then in many other parts of Europe. Marx could have returned to Paris in triumph, though it was not in Paris that his strengths were needed most but in Cologne, where the rebellion was also in full swing. In Cologne, he became a celebrated journalist: like a red flag to a bull for some, a guiding star for others. But this time as well, the vigilant censorship was too much for him, and his paper – the Neue Rheinische Zeitung – had to be shut down. As always, Marx fought using only words, in newspaper columns or in other revolutionary organizations, but never with weapons. His friend Engels also tried his luck on the barricades. But the revolution was soon put down and reaction triumphed.

  Now there was only one European country Marx could seek refuge in: Great Britain. It was in London that the rest of his and his family’s lives would take place. The remaining chapters of the book deal with his activities there. This account is more systematic than chronological.

  But the first terribly dark and heavy years in London deserve a particular description. The financial problems seemed to be too much, and the only possibility was a steady stream of money from Engels, who was now working in the family company of Ermen and Engels in Salford, outside Manchester. But Engels’s money could not prevent several of the Marx children from falling ill and dying. For Jenny and Karl Marx, the pain was dreadful.

  The situation was not improved by Karl most likely having had an affair with the family’s maid, Helene Demuth, behind his wife’s back. The result was a son, who was immediately given up.

  At the same time, Marx tried to continue working as a journalist and author. The newspaper and journal articles are given their own chapter here. In particular, I look at his collaboration with the New York Daily Tribune. Engels sometimes got to step in as his ghostwriter, as Marx himself was occupied with his great project on Capital. But he wrote most of them himself; the articles unmistakably bear his mark, and on the other hand it is often magnificent journalism and an important source for anyone who wants to know how he concretely assessed the age in which he lived. The picture of Marx and his works would be incomplete if these articles are left out.

  Nonetheless, his labour on the great theory of society was and remains the backbone of his work. The first grand example of his plans is a more than 700-page manuscript that he quickly compiled over a few months at the end of the 1850s, exhilarated by an international economic crisis that he saw as a forerunner to social revolution. This is known to posterity as the Grundrisse (the ‘Outlines’), and it is a partially chaotic but in long parts extremely profound, sometimes completely brilliant and thoroughly original account. A thoroughgoing exposition is devoted to it here.

  But Marx himself was not satisfied with the open form of the Grundrisse and went over instead to a significantly more austere setup. This became Capital, the first volume of which came out in 1867. More volumes were to have come, but Marx was never finished; it was Engels who, after Marx’s death, completed Volumes II and III. In particular, he put his mark on the third volume. Now Marx’s own text exists in a critical edition, and it thereby becomes possible to make comparisons. The differences, as we shall see, are significant.

  Capital is the subject of an enormous amount of literature. Interpretation often stands against interpretation. This diversity will be illustrated as comprehensively as possible here, at the same time as my own preferences are indicated. The chapter on Capital is the most extensive, and perhaps also the most intensive, in the book. Readers who tire out can be glad of the opportunity for getting a good rest in the chapter’s final section, ‘The unknown masterwork.’

  Marx cannot be thought of without Engels, nor Engels without Marx. In the literature about them, the issue of differences and similarities is extremely controversial. Sometimes they are represented as intellectual twins, and sometimes it is said that Engels completely misinterpreted his friend. Here, I attempt to provide a nuanced response. They were two distinctly different personalities united by a long, deep friendship complicated by Marx’s financial dependency; at the same time, Engels never questioned that it was Marx who was the groundbreaking thinker and researcher. Their scientific int
erests coincided partially, but not completely. Marx was well acquainted with Engels’s ambition to create a kind of philosophy that resulted in works such as Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, but the results made no impression on his own work. On the other hand, as we shall see, a few peripheral notes in Capital had unintended consequences both for what Engels achieved and for all of subsequent history. Engels was also the one who above all got to pass on the heritage once Marx was dead. He did it both reverentially and in his own way at one and the same time.

  Marx and his politics is a chapter in itself. He was politically active during several important periods of his life; at the same time, he saw politics only as a form for society’s real content, which was the way that class societies created and distributed resources among themselves. Political power was a confirmation and reinforcement of the basic relations of power. But it was also there that people became conscious of their own different interests.

  Marx’s fundamental understanding explains why, in his political activity, he sometimes appears as a man of compromises who wants to assemble a radical left, and sometimes as a caustic polemicist castigating those who do not have the same opinions as he does. Within the International, he succeeds in writing programmes that satisfy a broad spectrum of perceptions about how society should be changed. But when clashes of opinion between his followers and Bakunin’s anarchists become sharp, he is again a man of battle and would rather let the organization come to nothing than engage in negotiations. At first, he greets the Paris Commune of 1871 with mistrust, but soon it fills him with enthusiasm. He follows the development of German social democracy with a certain ambivalence: his criticism of the first party programme is merciless but becomes crucial for the future.

  With the chapter on his politics, Marx’s life and work is illustrated in its various facets; the great question that must finally be asked still remains: what is the relationship between Marx and what is called Marxism? The answer requires a brief exposition of Marxism’s varied history. From this it becomes clear that Marx is not a system builder, as both leading German social democrats and Lenin asserted. He was always on the road, never satisfied with the results he had reached, guided by what he himself calls a clue.