Karl Marx A Life Essay Research

Karl Marx: A Life Essay, Research Paper

Karl Marx: A Life. Francis Wheen. New York: Norton, 1999. 431pp

There were only 11 mourners at Karl Marx s funeral in Highgate cemetery on March 17th 1883, but within a hundred years of his death governments that professed Marxism as their guiding faith ruled half the world s population. Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion or so been so calamitously misinterpreted. (p.1) It is easy to forget that Marx was also human. Neither his enemies nor his disciples have been willing to admit as much: in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin he was declared a saint, while the West demonized him as the father of all evil. In Francis Wheen s Karl Marx: A Life he presents Marx as an intricate and vulnerable figure, a Prussian refugee who, in Wheen’s words, became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes. He was a prodigal son to whom his mother said, I wish you would make some capital instead of just writing about it. The permanently impoverished pamphleteer was inordinately proud of his wife’s aristocratic background, the father grieving bitterly over the loss of his child, the player of the stock market forever plagued by boils on the bum and tension headaches that paralyzed him for days. Unlike the legion of biographers who have dealt primarily with Marxist economic theory, it is Wheen’s goal to avoid another lengthy volume on class struggle, dialectical materialism and the triumph of the proletariat. Instead, the author is drawn to the more human aspect of the father of Communism in an attempt to demolish the myths that obscure the man behind the theories. Wheen does, however, acknowledge Marx’s lifelong assault on capitalism through his chapters on The Communist Manifesto, arguably one of the most influential political pamphlets ever published, and on the monumental undertaking that would eventually lead to Das Kapital.

It is not the Wheen’s goal to demonize or discover keys to Marx’s behavior; rather, it is to reveal his true nature as an individual who was genuinely human. Wheen gives the reader glimpses into the Marx household and the domestic, day-to-day side of this great intellectual, who was also a stern patriarch toward his wife and six children in their cramped north London apartment. Marx is caricatured as either a wild eyed revolutionary lunatic or a dry academic who spent his life in the British Museum. He did spend many years researching political economy, but his life was also punctuated by intense periods of political activity. He was hounded from country to country because of his agitation in support of the democratic revolutions of 1848.

The defeat of the revolutions of 1848 was a turning point that affected the whole working class across Europe. Marx withdrew from active politics for much of the dismal 1850s as a consequence. But he sprang back into activity with the revival of radical politics in the 1860s. The formation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 ushered in a period of frenetic activity. Marx was the central figure of the International until its demise following the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx hated hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness and bowing and scraping. He found it frustrating to be forced to fight with pinpricks instead of clubs. When Marx’s children submitted him to a parlor game questionnaire, he responded that his idea of happiness was to fight, his idea of misery was submission and the vice he most detested was servility.

Financially, Karl Marx lived a life of dependence. There is the endless cadging from relatives and friends (from Friedrich Engels especially, who stole petty sums from his family firm to support Marx) that was unaccompanied by any serious attempt on Marx’s part to find employment. When he did undertake paid assignments, from the New York Daily Tribune and, later, the American Cyclopaedia, it was Engels often wrote the articles. The Marx family was constantly in debt and hiding from its creditors. All gifts of money that he did receive were invariably squandered, leaving him and his family bereft and seeking yet more handouts. In spite of all of the financial difficulties that Marx had he remained a devoted family man to his wife and children throughout his life. He frolicked and picnicked with his daughters, read and declaimed to them his favorite passages from Shakespeare, and was genuinely concerned about their well-being. Yet he had no regard at all for his own mother, brothers, or sisters, whom he publicly ignored and privately derided. It is remarkable that the Marx s marriage survived the hardships and the disorders that plagued them: the moves from one city to another as they were expelled from one or another (Paris, Brussels, Paris again, Cologne, and yet again Paris, all in half a dozen years) and later, when they were settled in London, from one lodging to another (this time for financial reasons); the ailments that plagued both of them and the premature deaths of three of their children; the humiliating expeditions abroad to wheedle money from relatives; the lifelong reliance upon En