Customer Reviews

Karl Marx

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3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
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Enjoyable and witty read on the life of Karl Marx. If I have any complaints it's that when I finished the book I still didn't have a very good grasp of his economic and political philosophy or how he came to his conclusions within a historical context. Nevertheless, Francis Wheen does give a good view of Marx's family life and helps to clear up some common misconceptions about Mark's overall character.

This is the first book to describe Marx as a person, a father, husband, friend and individual. Previous books have focused on his theories and/or philosophy. Thus they describe him as a genius or a devil depending on the author's political persausion. Well worth reading. Full of humour, and interesting anecdotes. Marx comes across as being very much more a man than a monster!

This is a highly-readable account of the life of a genuinely unpleasant and selfish man who changed the world. I have read several biographies of Marx, as well as wading through Das Kapital in the original, but none has done such a fine job of bringing the man himself to life. Wheen's research is excellent, and his prose, though sometimes just a bit too colloquial, is refreshingly cant free and smooth. I would gladly have given this entertaining (isn't it remarkable that a book about Marx can be called "entertaining?") book five stars, but the author has one flaw that ultimately becomes laughable. After repeatedly reporting what a noxious beast and vicious betrayer of friends and human trust Marx was his entire adult life, Wheen invariably hastens to excuse Marx and assure us that he was actually a lovely, pleasant, hearty, generous prankster of a fellow. The author has been seduced by his subject, and Marx, who did much wrong, can do no wrong for Wheen. All others are disparaged with relish (poor old Bakunin gets even worse than he deserves, and every other Socialist, anarchist, would-be Communist--even Engels--must be tramped down so Marx the noble soul can be elevated). Well, too much complaint. This is a good and useful book, taken with a few dozen grains of salt. And Francis Wheen did bring the selfish old self-centered huckster to life, while providing a sort of Marx For Dummies explanation of what the man wrote. Paradoxically, this book works best for someone who has already been through a good bit of Marx, and who also enjoys some familiarity of with the work and lives of his contemporaries--that way the text adds to one's knowledge while allowing for a bit of discrimination when Wheen starts gushing about Marx's underlying goodness. Reading carefully, one gets a fine picture of the man; reading without wit or context, the portrait of Marx becomes whoppingly distorted.

This book is chilling reading. It is difficult to put one's finger on the reason why. Perhaps because Karl Marx (1818-1883) was always a distant person - even while he lived As Marxism flickers out, Wheen takes us back in time to find the "historical Marx". A solid grounding in 19th century European history will make reading this work a lot more interesting. Wheen's book is whimsical, eclectic, comprehensive, and humorous, but it presupposes a knowledge of the 19th and 20th century European revolutionary and political history which is rapidly fading from our 21st century minds. This book dwells as much on Marx's family life as on his political life. ----Wheen's work is filled with fascinating anecdotes. It does not explain Karl Marx, but this man was so complicated that no one (including himself) may have ever understood his motivations. He was a family man, deeply devoted to his wife and six children, four of whom died before he did. (The other two who took their own lives!) On the other hand he quarreled with and was hated by scores - if not hundreds - of former friends. Karl Marx was not a likeable man. This book uncovers hundreds of gems about his life that most persons who studied "Marxism" or "Communism" would never stumble on: for example, the moves in a chess game he played in 1867 (he lost!). That he was precocious, to the point of being expelled from Prussia, France, and Belgium - each time by royal order - before he reached 30 years of age. While many are vaguely aware of Marx's friendship with Friedrich Engels, how many know that it began when Marx was 26 and Engels was 23? Or that Engels was one of only 11 persons present at Marx's funeral 37 years later! Wheen has done an excellent job on a very difficult topic!

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.

This is a rambunctious and vivid portrait of Marx the man, too often Marx the myth, as an extended snapshot of the individuality of his achievement, no force of history, a man. There is something awesome in the challenge of two men, Marx and Engels, to the unfolding of the capitalist juggernaut in its steamroller immensity of industrial transformation, imperialism and violence, as the disappointment and disillusion of the hopes of the French revolution turn into the malformation of the liberal modernist age. What is to be done? Can such a vast system change course, is there a fix, can anyone be heard in the din of social mechanization? It is testimony to some weakness in the all-powerful system, that a great underswell rose from these men to tidal wave proportions. There is something more than brilliant in Marx's downfield razzledazzle through the ruins of the Hegelian system, encountering the world of Ricardo, to conceive a universal history in this hybrid of material and ideal concepts. The meaning of democracy is in the balance in the rushing years before 1848, after which the quaint hope universal suffrage might create a socialism by the vote of workers is met with the rigged plebiscite dictatorship of the last of the phantom Napoleons, in the litany of cooptations that greet all efforts to make the triad of liberty, fraternity, and equality more than a slogan. Cf, also, Isaiah Berlin's Karl Marx, and Jerold Seigel's Marx's Fate.

Karl Marx has gained fame in large measure as an "ism" rather than a man, with little focus being generated about the fascinating and complex individual who lived between 1818 and 1883. He is brought to life in all his myriad complexities by sagacious and colorful Guardian columnist Francis Wheen, whose extensive research has resulted in a comprehensive study of Karl Marx as opposed to Marxism.

Wheen is at an advantage being a knowledgeable British analyst of lives and politics. His readers benefit from his Britishness as well since he is able to provide profound insight on the period in which Marx lived in London as well as the mindset of British thinkers, so often a problem for the German born revolutionary since his intellectual underpinnings remained basically in Europe. A writer from another country would be unlikely to provide the kind of unique sociological insight which Wheen provides in this informative as well as readable work.

Wheen points out early in the book that London was the inevitable stopping point and permanent base for Marx since it was a melting pot of disparate viewpoints embraced by revolutionary thinkers throughout the world. Many, like Marx, were banished from many nations. Marx was evicted from his native Germany, but never stopped thinking European and interacting with Europeans whenever possible.

The London in which Marx did his studying and writing is described by Wheen in Dickensian terms. The author notes the high degree of childbirth death and paints a picture correlative with Dickens' "Bleak House." In addition to experiencing numerous health problems, enduring particularly painful carbuncles, his life was shrouded in sadness over the four children who predeceased him. The Marx tragedy continued after his 1883 death with the suicides of his only surviving offspring, daughters Eleanor and Laura. The only child who endured over an entire life cycle was an illegitimate son, Freddy Demuth, who lived and worked quietly in East London and died of cardiac failure in 1929 at the age of 77.

Marx's hatred for Russia is noted, a sore point with Communist adherents of Marxism-Leninism. An interesting element of Wheen's work is his focus on Marx the determined bourgeois figure. Despite his intellectual concern for the working classes and loathing of the bourgeoisie, which he insisted in his works needed to be overthrown, through his friend and faithful associate Friedrich Engels' money, he hired servants and managed to maintain living quarters well beyond his means. This occurred due to Engels' devotion to him and his cause. Engels worked for over 20 years at his father's Manchester factory. In addition to being a free-spirited advocate of free love, Engels also preferred the bourgeois social existence, leading an active social life in Manchester that included a vigorous devotion to the aristocratic sport of fox hunting.

Wheen points out that Marx miscalculated on the subject of proletarian revolt in England, ironically failing to perceive that the bourgeois, aristocratic classes and working classes would interlock in certain areas just as he had managed to live a bourgeois life while achieving a reputation as the leading intellectual architect of revolution in the nineteenth century. Wheen cites the current England in which all classes of citizens shop at Tesco and the younger members of the royalty attend rock concerts and wear jeans and baseball caps.

Wheen sees Marx as an intellectual rather than an overtly forceful, violent revolutionary. He notes that journalists the world over who interviewed him at his residence would be surprised to find someone more closely resembling an erudite, friendly college professor rather than a bomb throwing revolutionary. Wheen notes the dissimilarities between Marx and one of his most hated rivals in Communist revolutionary circles, the Russian anarchist Bakunin.

Let's write a book about Karl Marx which wants to talk about the Man, rather than simply about the Ideas. Sounds great, right? Except that in Wheen's hands, the relationship of the life to the ideas and the ideas to the life are brutally banalized.

The opportunity to write a good biography obviously presented itself, but what we have instead is some charming personal biography by a man who does not grasp the smallest part of Marx's ideas nor any meaningful engagement with Marx's political activity.

This book is so lame on the theoretical level that one would think that Wheen spent too much time reading old Stalinist schoolbooks on Marx, avoiding any actual scholarly work, such as Debord, C.J. Arthur, the journals Common Sense and Capital and Class, the work of Lukacs, Korsch, Adorno, Horkheimer, Rubin, etc. Wheen's treatment of the politics is less than worthless and mars his obviously generous sentiment towards Marx the man because Wheen simply cannot grapple with Marx as a whole human being.

Instead, we are treated to tawdry discussions of Marx's 'psychologically induced illnesses' every time deadlines came due. And these are tawdry not for being uninteresting, but because we never get a sense of the juxtaposition between Marx the researcher (who happily spent a great deal of time in the London Library system) and Marx the writer who did not simply hate deadlines, but who struggled with the content and style of each line he wrote. We never get any sense of why Marx might be the single most influential thinker of the last 150 years.

I gave it two stars because I do not see Wheen as intentionally malicious, but as merely incompetent. In a world where malicious intent and lack of scholarly scruple towards Marx seems welcome, this is not the worst book ever written on the man, but certainly not one worth reading.

Ah, "dialectical materialism","urban proletariat","opium of the masses". The days of my youth and memories of my college course in radical political thought with Professor Fleisher at Brooklyn College came back to me as I read the above phrases...But, I digress! I feel that two important things a biography must accomplish to be considered successful are that the subject should come alive for you and you should come away from the book feeling you know what made the person tick. This book accomplishes the first goal but not the second. As mentioned by other reviewers, the book has many colorful anecdotes and Mr. Wheen is a good writer, so Marx does come to life for you. You can just picture the burly Marx with his beard and lion's mane of hair bullying his associates and always getting things his own way. You can also picture him as a loving husband and father, thoroughly bourgeois in his home life. But after I read this book I didn't get the feeling I really knew what made Marx tick. How could he be so selfish and insensitive and brutish one moment and loving and caring the next? Why would a man who enjoyed middle-class life and to be in the bosom of his family subject himself and them to a life of penury? You don't get an answer from this book. Mr. Wheen is also very selective about his comments concerning Marx's works. While Wheen does not hesitate to criticize Marx the man he is extremely reluctant to criticize Marx the political and economic theorist. He oftimes would come to Marx's defense and show where Marx had been misunderstood or where Marx had been shown to be right in his predictions or descriptions concerning capitalism, but equal time is not given to the areas where Marx has been shown to be wrong. In fact, Wheen tries to deflect criticism from "Das Kapital" when he says that Marx never claimed his economic analysis was scientific, that he considered his writing to be "artistic". Oh? Well, he did claim that he was correct and everybody who criticized him was incorrect, so that certainly gives us the right to "test" his theories. It is almost 120 years since Marx's death and capitalism still seems to be quite lively! I want to end this review by returning to what is good about this book and that is in showing Marx's relationships with those around him. His long-suffering wife Jenny comes alive from the pages as a smart and funny person and Mr. Wheen does an especially good job in giving us a portrait of Friedrich Engels. Engels was not just a collaborator but a true friend. He wrote articles for Marx and pilfered money from his father's business in Manchester and sent it to Marx to keep him on his feet and he was always there when Marx needed him. He was also quite the ladies man and liked a good bottle of wine! In fact, one of the best things about this book is that it comes close to being a dual biography of Marx and Engels. So, when I added up all the pros and cons I found this a book worth reading. It is flawed but you will come away knowing a lot more about what Marx's day to day life was like.

In this very good biography, Wheen strives to "strip away the mythology . . . to rediscover Karl Marx, the man" (p. 1), and he succeeds. Much of the life of Marx reads like the life of Job. Following his 1818 birth, Marx's life was a struggle, spent mostly in poverty, and plagued with chronic ailments (including Job-like carbuncles). His relationship with his parents was "icy and distant" (p. 8) at best. Marx outlived his wife, Jenny, as well as four of his six children (p. 386). (The two surviving children later committed suicide.) Marx reportedly fathered an illegitimate son, Freddy Demuth, with the family housekeeper. However, unlike Job, when Marx died on March 14, 1883, he died without religious faith, and estranged from class and citizenship. Only eleven mourners attended Marx's funeral, and his death passed with little notice in Britain, his last home.

Wheen's unique personality is evident throughout this biography, although it rarely detracts from his complicated subject. He contrasts Marx, the husband and family patriarch, with Marx, the "hot-headed" intellectual who, together with Friedrich Engels, sparked revolutionary movements in France, Germany, and London. Wheen's 431-page biography also brings the friendship between Marx and Engels to life, and contains some memorable anecdotes. For instance, we find Marx loafing with his friends. We find him corresponding with his Victorian neighbor, Charles Darwin. "Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in human nature," Engels observes, "so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history" (p. 364).

Marx was a thinker with dreams, a true revolutionary, and a family man with a rich domestic life. Bottom line: after reading Wheen's book, you may not understand the "ism" in "Marxism" much better, but you'll be more familiar with the man in Marx.

G. Merritt