tooze on marx

On August 24 1857 the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed. Within months, more than 1,400 banks had collapsed across America and the shockwave spread outwards to Liverpool and London. By the end of the year it had reached continental Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and Asia. In London, where the suspension of the Bank Charter Act of 1844 had freed the Bank of England to take whatever emergency action was necessary, an obscure German exile was fired into intellectual action. He set himself to diagnosing a new phenomenon, a global economic crisis. Over the previous millennium the world had been swept by religious movements, political upheavals, plagues and famines. 1857 was the first worldwide convulsion in the system of production, credit and exchange. From the efforts of this lonely scholar, known then only to a narrow circle, would emerge an intellectual tradition that would find its place alongside that of Darwin as one of the great legacies of the Victorian age. It would inspire a political movement that spanned the world. Karl Marx was born 200 years ago on May 5 1818 in the ancient Palatinate bishopric of Trier to a converted Jewish family. Growing up in the shadow of the French Revolution, religion and monarchy were the first targets of his youthful radicalism. But, in the 1840s, as industry spread across Europe, Marx took a further radical turn. Reading Friedrich Engels’s reportage on The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Marx glimpsed a new reality. He did not use the term capitalism — that would be later coined by his students — but there was no denying the massive dynamic resulting from the combination of competitive capital accumulation and technological change. As Sven-Eric Liedman shows in his landmark anniversary biography, A World to Win, the quest to understand contemporary reality by way of the forces of production, class relations, and the structures of politics, law and culture built on them would occupy Marx for the rest of his life. As Liedman shows, from the 1840s, these were the threads that Marx followed into “the labyrinths of the age he lived in”. Marx and Engels were far from alone in their criticism of the effects of the industrial revolution. But whereas many of their contemporaries reacted by opting out, seeking salvation in utopian communities, the two Germans remained true to their upbringing in Hegel’s philosophy: there was no escape from history and its logic. The two men wagered that the revolutionary transformation of capitalism would come not from without, but from within. For all its terrible side effects, the enormous dynamic of industrial development could not be suppressed or sidestepped. It would have to be transcended. © Getty When the revolutionary tocsin sounded across Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels were ready with The Communist Manifesto. The great French revolution of 1789, they announced, was just a stepping stone, a bourgeois revolt against feudalism. Capitalism had been unleashed across the world and now it was giving birth to its gravediggers in the form of the disenfranchised and propertyless industrial working class. Marx and Engels addressed themselves to the workers of the world not for sentimental or ethical reasons. Their impulse was not charitable. They spoke to the proletariat because they were destined to be the protagonists of the next great act in the history of class struggle. The Manifesto offers an astonishing glimpse of a future to come. But Marx and Engels were thinking on their feet. In the heat of 1848 they had no time for in-depth analysis. Marx was already a marked man, exiled both from Prussia and France. The failure of the revolution in France forced him to move once more, this time to London. There he first set himself to diagnosing what had gone wrong. How had the promising revolutionary uprising of 1848 ended three years later in the seizure of power by the upstart nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte? 1848, it turned out, was not a genuine revolution. It was history as farcical repetition. The real drama of world history was the epic of capitalist development. In particular, Marx was fascinated by the spectacle of America’s relentless expansion. The really decisive event in 1848 was the conquest of California and the ensuing gold rush that promised to reorient not just the American but the world economy towards the Pacific. It was both dazzlingly dynamic and terrifyingly unstable. Nine years later, the crisis of 1857 revealed how connected the world had become. News of a financial failure in the Missouri river valley sent markets in Britain crashing. Would this be the “big one”, the crisis that threw open the door to the new type of revolution? Marx would surely have insisted on the need to stare the full drama of our current situation in the face Despite Marx’s feverish activity in the reading room of the British Museum, the pace of events outran him. By 1858 the rebound was already in full swing. His effort to grasp in real time the first crisis of global capitalism resulted in a mass of notes later known to aficionados as the Grundrisse or “Groundwork”, but no finished analysis. Marx knew that he would have to dig deeper. As revolutionary ardour dampened and in the 1860s, the world entered the age of Bismarck, blood and iron and realpolitik, Marx set himself to the analysis of capitalism’s inner workings, concocting a unique synthesis of economic theory, empirical data drawn from factory inspector reports and economic history all mixed with Hegel’s dialectical logic. The result was not economics as we know it, so much as an analysis of how capitalist production and exchange, down to the commodity form itself, gave rise to a world of appearances that conventional economics then sought more or less naively to explain. It was a mammoth intellectual effort undertaken in the face of considerable personal adversity. Marx’s doctorate in philosophy was a testament to his comfortable upbringing. His wife, Jenny von Westphalen, without whom his scrawled manuscripts would never have seen the light of day, was born an aristocrat. But Marx was no well-upholstered academic radical. Karl and Jenny paid for their political commitment. For years they eked out a living in a two-room slum dwelling in Soho, surviving from day to day on store credit and a diet of bread and potatoes. Four of their eight children died before they reached their teens. Only gifts from Engels and jobbing journalism kept them afloat. If Marx were transported across time to 21st-century London, the bedraggled, foreign-accented scholar in his ragged overcoat would be lucky to get past security at the British Library. The first volume of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, appeared in 1867 and was rapidly translated into English, Russian and French. In the wake of the shortlived uprising of the Paris Commune of 1871 Marx became notorious as the most dangerous thinker in Europe. Much of his time was taken up in political and intellectual arguments over the emerging socialist movement. Volumes II and III of Das Kapital were never completed and had to be edited by Engels after Marx’s death in 1883. Nevertheless, by the 1890s, Marxism was the official ideology of the largest mass party in the world, Germany’s Social Democrats. In the wake of Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution and the expansion of Soviet power under Stalin, statues of Marx were erected worldwide. In Cuba, China, Vietnam and North Korea they still stand today. In 2017, to the dismay of the locals, China paid for a giant 4.4-metre statue of Marx to be erected in Trier. Writing a biography of Marx is challenging. You have to braid history with philosophy, politics and economics. And then there is the question of the plot line. How do you tell the story of an acorn that grew into a mighty oak, an oak which was subsequently riven and split and a large part of which, in 1989, was blasted by the lightning of world history? The safest thing is to consign Marx to the 19th century. He was the acorn and nothing more. Others take a gloomier view. The seed was blighted from the start. The dismal end was foreseeable. It was not by coincidence that Marx could not finish Das Kapital. It was riddled with contradictions. His personal frustration anticipated that of the Soviet Union. Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win narrative is pitched in a more upbeat key. His Marx is not a historical relic, nor is he the harbinger of a 20th-century shipwreck. He is the initiator and inspirer of a live intellectual tradition and a model of the kind of capacious thought that is necessary to grasp contemporary modernity. Liedman’s strength is as a political philosopher and he is superbly well-equipped to take us on a tour of Marx’s intellectual workshop. Rather than harping on the incomplete nature of much of Marx’s work, he exposes the richness to be found perhaps particularly in such unfinished works as Grundrisse and the early “Paris manuscripts” of 1844. An image of Karl Marx in a traffic light in Trier, Germany © Reuters What makes returning to the original Marx worthwhile for Liedman is the conceit that with the passing of the 20th-century era of welfare states and Soviet communism, the world of globalised free-market capitalism we inhabit today has much in common with the world about which Marx wrote in the mid-19th century. “It is the Marx of the 19th century,” he tells us, “who can attract the people of the twenty-first”. What speaks to us today is the true Marx of the mid-Victorian period, not the traduced Marx of the 20th-century state ideologies. This historical ellipse from the first, Victorian age of globalisation to the present is seductive, but it ignores the uncomfortable reality of the 20th century, whose legacies include not only the failure of Soviet communism, but also China’s formidable state capitalism, American hyperpower and the existential threat of climate change. It hardly seems likely that Marx would have approved of such a historical sleight of hand. Rather than relying on casual historical analogies, Marx would surely have insisted on the need to stare the full drama of our current situation in the face and in doing so we can indeed take inspiration from his pioneering effort to make sense of both the political failure of 1848 and the economic crisis of 1857. In 2013, in the wake of another global crisis of capitalism, another European economist published a comprehensive account of recent economic history. Thomas Piketty named his book Capital too. If you read Piketty and Marx back to back, you will not be surprised that generation after generation of readers have been drawn back to Marx. Even the best 21st-century social science pales beside the complexity and richness of Marx’s protean, 19th-century thought, to which Liedman’s readable biography provides a comprehensive and reliable guide. A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, by Sven-Eric Liedman, translated by Jeffrey N Skinner, Verso