A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. Sven-Eric Liedman. A Marxist Review.

 

 

A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. Sven-Eric Liedman. Verso. 2018. Translated by Jeffrey N. Skinner. (This appears in the latest Chartist magazine).

“I have attempted to explain not only who Marx was in his time” announces Sven-Eric Liedman, “but why he remains a vital source of inspiration today.” This major biography, published in Swedish in 2015, aims to offer a “portrait of Marx unobscured by what happened after his death.”

The book is also, the Preface to this English edition explains, a counterweight to Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx Greatness and Illusion, which appeared (2016) after the present work’s original publication. Jones, he asserts, tends to overshadow Marx’s own writings through his detailed portraits of the inspiration of his thought, and the early socialist and workers’ movement. Jones saw Marx’s crowning achievement in the years when the International Working Men’s Association, the First International, began to flourish, from 1864 to 1869. In that study this was the period when the author of Capital deployed “a language with which politically aware working men at the time could identify”.

Stedman Jones is known for an interest in the way language forms class. But he also stated that Marx was buoyed up by the belief that, “the process of a transition from the capitalist mode of production towards the society of associated producers had already begun.” It was this that propelled him to reach out to the activists in trade unions and the co-operative movement, associations that could change the course of history. It is from these origins that ‘Marxism’ took political shape.

Liedman, by contrast, is inspired by the approach of the largely German New Marx Reading (neue Marx-Lektüre) of figures such as Hans Georg Backhaus. This aims to show Marx’s ideas, not the Marxism that developed inside these movements. A large part of A World to Win is taken up with the conceptual analysis of Marx’s categories, from the method announced in the 1859 Introduction to the Grundrisse, that work itself, and the “unfinished Masterpiece” of Capital.

Marx nevertheless stood out as more politically active “than any other political thinker in the nineteenth century”. “In his own time”, Liedman states, “Marx was almost exclusively known as a politician.” He was “allied with the working class” acting for their liberation, the pivot of “the liberation of all humanity.” Liedman’s account of Marx’s involvement in radical German ‘young Hegelian politics’ is largely philosophical. But he soon brings the issue of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution to the fore. The account of the 1848 Revolutions, above all in France, lacking Jones’ familiarity with  (largely French)  utopian socialism and communism, Christian social thinking, and early social democratic politics, portrays the bond between social and political revolution.

The International.

In the late 1860s Marx made a significant contribution to the International. While advancing his views on the “abolition of the wages system”, this involved “compromising” with a variety of socialist, anarchist and trade union forces. Spreading the word of “solidarity” between workers’ struggles (the body’s prime aim), to the “duty of the working classes to conquer political power” allowed for leeway between opposing viewpoints. But the months of the Paris Commune in 1871 saw Marx convinced again that “bloody conflicts as part of social development that would be hard to avoid.”

Liedman is less informative than Stedman Jones on why many of the British trade unionists recoiled from the Commune. It was not just that they considered it “rash” and “hopeless”. Their lack of sympathy extended to its plans for federal self-government faced with what was already the foundation, under initial Orléanist, constitutional Monarchist, and constitutional republican leadership, of the French Third Republic. Marx’s social democratic and republican rival, Louis Blanc, the veteran of the 2nd Republic, who would go on to serve in that Republic’s National Assembly, enjoyed great influence over the British radical movement. (2)

A World to Win gives substance to the ideas that Marx developed. This ranges from a discussion of Method, from the 1959 Introduction to the Grundrisse, the traps of the ‘metaphors’ of base and superstructure, the category of the “totality”, dialectics, form and content. There is a more accessible account of Marx’s studies of technology, machinery, and the industrial revolution, its downside for the working classes, and, Liedman’s forte, science. In this the book deploys with a welcome freshness greater textual resources than other recent biographies.

Was Marx, in this context, a pioneering thinker of globalisation? Liedman’s claims (he is far from the first)  about his “prophetic” insights are not wholly convincing. Joseph Addison talked in the Essay on the Royal Exchange (1711, Spectator No 69) of merchants who “knit mankind together in mutual intercourse”, and Ricardo, of free commerce creating a “universal society of nations”. Marx highlighted the planet-wide development, and, while not thinking it through, did not regard colonisation as a straightforward boon. In this respect, an observation that deserves underlining for critics of globalisation is Marx’s view, which he cites,  that, “free trade expedited the classless society”.

Benefits of the Doubt.

A World to Win, as a biography must, traces out a life. Liedman gives Marx the benefit of some weighty doubts on his behaviour towards his servant Helene “Lenchen” Demuth, his personal feuds (notably with Bakunin), and the abusive, often racist, vocabulary of his correspondence with Engels, described as “roguishly nonchalant”.

A World to Win often cites one of Marx’s favourite authors, Honoré de Balzac. For Liedman one tale, Melmoth Reconciled (1835), is a “picture of capitalism” in which the capitalists “live their lives at the Stock Exchange in a pact with the Devil.” (Page 462) Others recall that the hero Castanier got for his soul an eye into “men’s thought’s. I see the future, and I know the past. I am here, and I can be elsewhere also.” After peeling away Marxism from Marx, to reveal Marx’s original picture of the “mechanism and the scheme of the world.” Liedman has many pages on the thoughts of theorists who have attempted to do the same. Little of this is accessible to those not already familiar with the terrain. Despite the great strengths of the biography, many may come away feeling, like Balzac’s Cashier in the short story, that such painstaking knowledge of thinker’s insights into the whole of creation is too much to absorb.

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1. Pages 465 – 466. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Gareth Stedman Jones. Allen Lane 2016.
2. Page 510. Karl Marx. Greatness and Illusion. Gareth Stedman Jones. Allen Lane 2016.