Karl Marx: A Life

Everything arrived on time and as advertised

In the wake of fresh evidence (the near-fatal financial melt-down of 2007-2010) that whatever else capitalism may be it is not eternally rational, I read two biographies of Marx: the well-regarded one by David McLellan and this one. (Just to insure I wasn't inspired to immediately rush out and storm the barricades, I read a biography of William F. Buckley Jr in-between.)In my opinion this biography is superior to the one by McLellan. Yes, McLellan attempts to push the reader into the depths of Marx's very deep thoughts, often with soporific effect. On these matters Wheen skates far more lightly. But for background a reader might be better served by reading the Wikipedia articles on Hegel and Dialectics. And Marx neatly summarized the key concepts he spread over thousands of maddening pages of "Das Kapital" in a 30 page address to working men entitled "Value, Price and Profit" (1865). Proof that, like William Faulkner, Marx could express himself in a straight-forward manner on those rare occasions when he chose to do so.If Marx's ideas are better explored elsewhere, then the proper subject of a biography should be his life and times--and it is in this realm that Wheen shines. But beware: if you have an aversion to droll wit, go elsewhere. When describing Europe on the eve of the stillborn proletarian revolution of 1848, the author cribs a line from Bob Dylan, "There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air." Marx in his prime could unleash wit as well as massive erudition at his (many) opponents. So I find it nice that the author is similarly inclined--even when the target is occasionally his subject.Wheen clearly has a fondness and respect for Marx, but this never descends into mere hagiography. One feels the result is a clear-eyed view of Marx, carbuncles and all. The picture that emerges is of a brilliant polymath who evolved into a social revolutionary due to his personality and his times. These times consisted of oppressive, reactionary governments (royalty still reigned) and draconian exploitation of labor in newly established factories. In his prime Marx was a man of vast self-assurance. He directed withering scorn at anyone who disagreed with him. Agreeing with him often yielded the same result. He carefully avoided delineating the contours of the society he anticipated in the wake of the proletarian revolution. When someone asked him who would shine shoes after the revolution, he snarled, "You should."Marx's lifestyle was curiously at odds with his ideals. Aside from meager earning as a journalist, he depended on stipends from his comrade Engels. To do so, Engels sacrificed his own revolutionary ambitions and became a manager in a family cotton mill. Whereas Engels lived with a former factory girl, Marx married a baroness. By the 1850s Marx was banned from most European countries, so he settled his family in dowdy England. He became a denizen of the British Museum reading room and participated in occasional pub crawls. Aside from the largess provided by Engels, he impatiently awaited family inheritances (!) while perpetually outstripping his income. Marx consistently advanced up the bourgeois social scale by inhabiting residences one or more steps beyond his means, even while his winter coats and his wife's silver languished in pawnshops. He claimed it was necessary in order to allow his daughters to marry well.Marx seems to have reversed the usual progression from youthful curiosity to later dogmatism. The more he learned, the more he felt he needed to know. He taught himself calculus to develop economic formulas and Russian in order to study developments there. This prodigious mental activity resulted in thousands of pages filled with nearly illegible scribbles, but only glacial progress on "Das Kapital." The first volume finally limped off his desk in 1867; two more were assembled by Engels from the mountain of notes after Marx's death.He witnessed the social upheavals of 1848 and 1870 be ruthlessly suppressed. The International he helped found eventually floundered in a sea of intrigue and bickering. As he aged, Marx seemed to accept that his attempts to manipulate both the pace and trajectory of history had failed. His secret wish that his daughter marry upward into English society was cruelly dashed when two of them instead wed French Socialists. Nevertheless, the last accounts of him depict a genial, devoted grandfather.Francis Wheen's "Karl Marx: a life" is a fine biography.

Three or four years ago, I went to go on a walk in the woods with my wife. It was early spring and the sun was shining, so we hoped to take the day and make the most of it. Or she did, and I have problems saying no to her when she asks because she’s just so darn persuasive. The walk didn’t last long. No one told the snowpack on the trail that it needed to have melted so that we could walk on the trail.I’m not sure how I managed it, but there was a mall with an actual physical book store close by the trail we were trying to walk. At one point I had at least a couple hundred dollars worth of books in my hand (hardbacks at bookstore prices). One of them was the new biography of Marx that had recently come out. I almost bought it but put it down because I realized that a life of Marx is one of those things that is hard to be objective about. I didn’t want to spend seven hundred pages with an author who was a staunch Hegelian mad about Marx’s subversion of their hero or some marginalist economist mad that the subject didn’t fully wrestle with the mathematics of their revolution. Or, you know, whatever else you could possibly see the life of Marx and his ideas being politicized somehow.So instead of buying that unknown book, I went looking for people who had read various lives and what they would recommend to read. The Wheen biography came up a lot. So I bought that book, and then I put it on my shelf as a decoration and then forgot about it for the next several years. And recently, once I finished my MBA program, I found myself with time and inclination to go about reading some of the scores of books I own but haven’t read yet, and a familiar name looked out at me from the shelf.For any student of the left, the life and career of Marx is knowable in broad strokes - youth in Germany, exile in England, friendship with Engels. Wheen fills all of those blank spots in. What Wheen does more than anything else is to humanize Marx from someone that is a boogeyman of the cold war to a guy with a family trying to make due in Victorian England.I think Wheen, like myself, had already made his mind up about Marx before he approached this book. If there is any criticism to be had, I offer two. For one, it is only 400 pages. What lacks for me is a deeper engagement with the philosophy and economics of Marx. I’m not sure if that was a choice made to keep the book more accessible or why it was made. But I think it plays into my other criticism. I felt that the author may have been too sympathetic to Marx. He was a human who did make some bad choices (like maybe cheating on Jenny Marx) and I think glossing over that nuance in fear of attacking the subject makes the book less than what it could be. This sympathy is also evident where he addresses some of the more well-known intellectual rivals to Marxism, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, so that these men and their followers are diminished in the book, the casual reader isn’t really let into why Marxian ideas are superior.Overall, though, if you only know those broad strokes then the Wheen biography is a good entry point for learning about the life of Marx. If you want to get deeper into his ideas, there are other avenues, like the work of David Harvey or Paul D’Amato. Or you can just climb the mountain of Capital itself, something I need to do.

This book the best ever on Karx Marx's real life.A drunkard, a book worm, a reckless son, an irresponsible family man, an inexperienced adult who never did a real job to understand how the world works decides to read more books. After comprehending the little from the books he read, he proceeds to write his own theory with zero practical knowledge. Marx talking about communism as economic model is like someone studying the prescriptions given by many doctors, then coming up with his own medicine without actually studying medicine, let alone learning the surgery.Thank you Francis Wheen, the world is indebted to you.

If you're interested in Marx-the-man, this is the book to read. You get a real (tactile, physical) feeling for the conditions under which he wrote his masterwork--carbunkles on the ass, as it turns out Some more careful attention to the theoretical side of his labors and struggles(as opposed to or in addition to the endless domestic crises) would have rounded out the more satisfactorily. But a wonderful read despite this short-coming.

Among several Karl Marx books, Francis Wheen at least recognizes the research side and his many years of investigating the relationship between job providers and their workers - which makes him a leading theorist of his times - while others, such as Engels misused Marx' findings for what became a Communist movement.... "Karl Marx - A Life" puts some light on the everlasting confrontation of Capitalism and Socialism.....John Peoples