NONFICTION. Call Him Karl. By PETER E. GORDON. Peter E. Gordon's latest book
is 'Adorno and Existence. KARL MARX Greatness and Illusion By Gareth Stedman
Jones Illustrated. 750 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $35.
'If anything is certain,' Karl Marx once declared, 'it is that I myself am
not a Marxist. This remark, though often quoted, is rarely understood with
the depth it demands. The 20th-century intellectuals and party ideologues
who proudly called themselves Marxists typically had a clear sense of their
doctrine: Marxism as they conceived it was a theory of society that pulled
away the mystifying veil of capitalism to reveal the economic exploitation
at its core. It promised a bracing and universal concept of human history
that portrayed class conflict as the final engine of change. More than this,
it served as the modern name for an ancient but enduring dream: to put an
end to unfreedom, and to realize the words of the old prophet, to 'wipe the
tears off every face. It was this notion of Marxism that the historian
Isaiah Berlin ascribed to its founder when he wrote of Marx that 'his
intellectual system was a closed one, everything that entered was made to
conform to a pre-established pattern. This is doubtless true of the
so-called 'dialectical materialism' that became doctrinal orthodoxy in the
Soviet Union and its satellite states. Suspicious of all heretics even to
the point of airbrushing their faces from history, Eastern-bloc Communist
leaders had little patience for the niceties of philosophical speculation.
For them Marxism was not an interpretation of society but an objective
science, fixed in its laws and determinist in its theory of historical
change. As evidence they could cite Marx's colleague Friedrich Engels, who
in his 1883 graveside speech for his deceased friend said, 'Just as Darwin
discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the
law of development of human history. Setting aside the fact that Darwinism
is antideterminist, Marxism's alleged status as a natural science has been
hard to shed. In the lands where Marxism became a warrant for one-party
rule, it was turned into a cudgel to wield against enemies whose opinions
were declared objectively false. But Marx the man was rather more
improvisatory in his thinking than the official ideologies that later
borrowed his name. 'Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion,' by the British
historian Gareth Stedman Jones, has many virtues, among them a graceful
style of narration that will guide even readers unfamiliar with 19th-century
history through the period's political controversies. Stedman Jones has a
keen grasp of intellectual history, and skillfully conveys the various
themes in philosophy and economics from which Marx forged his own ideas. He
has written the definitive biography of Marx for our time. Stedman Jones's
Marx is a man who was responsive to the political world and capable of
changing his mind, sometimes in dramatic ways. The Marx of later legend was
(in Stedman Jones's words) 'a forbidding bearded patriarch and lawgiver, a
thinker of merciless consistency with a commanding vision of the future.
Although this was the hero who would later be chiseled in stone (think of
the hulking statues of Marx and Engels in Berlin), it was not the historical
person. Eager that we distinguish between the individual and the ideology,
Jones calls his subject 'Karl,' a whimsical device that rescues him from
'Marxism' (a term that Jones wraps in scare quotes). Karl was born in the
Rhineland town of Trier in 1818, during an age of reaction. Yet memories of
the French Revolution remained strong. Karl's father, Heinrich, a lawyer and
a baptized Jew, was known to sing the 'Marseillaise' at the local club. His
son, more radical in outlook, chafed at the conservative policies of the
Prussian government and while a student in Berlin attached himself to the
radical circle of 'left Hegelians. Karl was a contributor to Rhenische
Zeitung, a liberal newspaper, and fled the Rhineland when state censors
forced the paper to close. In the aftermath of the 1848 uprisings, he
resettled with his family in London, where he wrote bitter essays on the
failure of the midcentury revolution and the unexpected rise of the
demagogue Louis Napoleon. Stedman Jones is not always sympathetic to his
subject. He faults Karl for 'political myopia' in his understanding of 1848,
and his impatience shows when Karl reconceives specific struggles of history
as a grand battle between proletarians and bourgeoisie. Still, he recognizes
that even a responsibly historical portrait of Marx cannot condemn his ideas
wholly to the past. 'Karl was not just the product of the culture into which
he was born,' Stedman Jones insists; he was also 'determined to impress
himself upon the world. Reading old theories can always yield fresh lessons.
A generation ago scholars still felt burdened with the question of whether
Marx himself was somehow responsible for Stalin's crimes. If this question
has now lost its urgency, the debate over globalization has brought new
questions to the fore. Did Marx allow for variations in time and space? Can
he be redeemed from his own universalist hubris? In his early writings and
well through the 1860s, Marx propounded a theory of history that extolled
the heroic achievements of the bourgeoisie as the collective agent of global
change. Before the proletariat could develop into a mature class and become
truly conscious of its revolutionary task, he reasoned, it was first
necessary for capitalism thoroughly to modernize the world. All remnants of
feudalism would dissolve; local custom and tradition would be swept aside,
and industrial production would surge, condensing the two remaining classes
into radically opposed groups in anticipation of capitalism's final crisis.
This theory implied a certain inevitability to the gathering processes of
historical change. It also left little room for the possibility of
independent revolution in less developed regions around the globe, in the
east or in the outer reaches of Europe's empires. Marx's universalism found
its classic expression in 'The Communist Manifesto,' which declared that all
nations must submit 'on pain of extinction' to the forces of bourgeois
modernity. Elsewhere, Marx celebrated the introduction of steam power into
India and the consequent dissolution of the archaic 'village system. And in
the first volume of 'Capital,' completed in 1867, he still reserved special
disdain for what he called 'ancient Asiatic' forms of production, condemning
them as symptoms of a despotism that must be swept aside on the way to
revolution. After 1870, however, Marx relaxed these strictures, in part
because the failure of the Paris Commune left him dismayed at the prospects
for a Communist revolution in the West. This change of perspective brought a
new openness to the possibility of revolution in Russia and the non-European
world. In 1881, Marx answered a query from Vera Zasulich, a Russian
noblewoman and revolutionary living in exile in Geneva. Pressed to explain
his views on the Russian village commune, Marx agonized over his response --
his letter went through no fewer than four drafts. Though still insisting
that the isolation of the village commune was a weakness, he granted that
the historical inevitability he had once discerned in the process of
industrialization was 'expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe.
Historians of Marxism may disagree on the significance of such changes. Some
may see them as a retreat, born of a desperate wish to find revolution in
the least hospitable locales. For Stedman Jones, however, they signal a late
change of heart as Marx abandoned the illusion of a single historical path
and awakened to a major lesson of European romanticism: In his late research
on medieval communal life, especially in German-speaking lands, he came to
appreciate the possibility of new and diverse paths to the future that did
not conform to the model of the West European bourgeoisie. Just a year
before his death and gravely ill, Marx wrote with Engels a short preface to
the Russian edition of the 'Manifesto. It entertained the prospect that the
common ownership system in the Russian village might serve as 'the starting
point for a communist development. Three and a half decades later, the
Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and by the late 1920s the government
commenced its brutal collectivization of agriculture. Like all intellectual
legacies, Marx's work remains open to new interpretation. But it seems clear
that the man himself would never have accepted the inhumanity undertaken in
his name.. PHOTO: Lev Kerbel works on a clay model for a monument to Karl
Marx. (PHOTOGRAPH BY VOLLER ERNST/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES).
