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Quite fascinating and I will try to grab a copy of the book and read it. All right, I concede that any hagiography directed at a person or founder of a movement falls short of the mark and it's good to see Marx and Engel's portrayed as the type of people we might have thought they are if we met them today--smile. Still All my reading of Marx and Engel's' his works and my conclusion still remain that Marx and Engles systematic analysis of philosophy, political economy, and socialism broth forth some really earthshaking conclusions. And it is interesting that the reviewer talks about the work "the Jewish Question". That is precisely what brought me to this list--smile. I read something written on the list archives putting Marx and his early writing on the "Jewish Question" in historical context. After reading that archive entry conducted after an internet search, I joined the list. So, now I've gone full-circle--lol. Good day to all and to those who celebrate holidays, I wish you all the best. Dan -----Original Message----- From: marxism-bounces+dcwein=dcwein.cnc....@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu [mailto:marxism-bounces+dcwein=dcwein.cnc....@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2013 10:55 AM To: Dan Weiner Subject: [Marxism] New Karl Marx biography ====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ====================================================================== NY Times Sunday Book Review March 29, 2013 A Man of His Time By JONATHAN FREEDLAND KARL MARX A Nineteenth-Century Life By Jonathan Sperber Illustrated. 648 pp. Liveright Publishing Corporation. $35. The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber's absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain "slummy," and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction. Still, it comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern. It's like discovering that Jesus Christ regularly organized bake sales at his local church. So inflated and elevated is the global image of Marx, whether revered as a revolutionary icon or reviled as the wellspring of Soviet totalitarianism, that it's unsettling to encounter a genuine human being, a character one might come across today. If the Marx described by Sperber, a professor at the University of Missouri specializing in European history, were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein. But that's cheating. The express purpose of "Karl Marx: A Nineteenth--Century Life" is to dispel the dominant notion of a timeless Marx - less man, more ideological canon - and relocate him where he lived and belonged, in his own time, not ours. Standing firm against the avalanche of studies claiming Marx as forever "our contemporary," Sperber sets out to depict instead "a figure of the past," not "a prophet of the present." And he succeeds in the primary task of all biography, recreating a man who leaps off the page. We travel with Marx from his hometown, Trier, via student carousing in Bonn and Berlin, to his debut in political journalism in Cologne and on to exile and revolutionary activity in Paris, Brussels and London. We see his thought develop, but glimpse also the begging letters to his mother, requesting an advance on his inheritance, along with the enduring anxiety over whether he can provide for the wife he has loved since he was a teenager. We hear of the sleepless nights that follow the start of the American Civil War: Marx is troubled not by the fate of the Union, but by the loss of freelance income from The New York Tribune, which, consumed by matters closer to home, no longer requires his services as a European correspondent. We see the trips to the pawnbrokers, the pressure to maintain bourgeois living standards, "the show of respectability," as Marx put it to his closest friend and co-conspirator, Friedrich Engels. The picture that emerges is a rounded, humane one. Marx is committed to revolution, without being a monomaniac. He is an intensely loving father, playing energetically with his children and later grandchildren, but also suffering what would now be diagnosed as a two-year depression following the death of his 8-year-old son Edgar. He is clearly also an infuriating colleague, capable of spending 12-hour days in the reading room of the British Museum but stewing on book projects for years, only to fail to deliver. Engels, Sperber writes, spent decades repeating the same message: Get the work done! Besides the long, devoted marriage to Jenny, there is another love story here: the partnership with Engels, who it seems was prepared to do anything for his comrade. Engels famously subsidized Marx; perhaps less well known is that he spared his friend a scandal by claiming paternity of the child born to the Marx family servant, Lenchen Demuth: the boy was in fact Karl's son. After the great man's death, it was Engels who waded through Marx's scrawled notes to assemble, and publish posthumously, the final two volumes of "Das Kapital." Even Marx's signature text, "The Communist Manifesto," included a 10-point program lifted almost verbatim from an earlier Engels program. Engels was Aaron to Marx's Moses, able to speak in public and so make up for the deficiencies of his partner, who was burdened by both a strong Rhineland accent and a lisp. Such was his devotion that Engels even planted anonymous reviews of "Das Kapital" in the German press. Imagine what the pair would have got up to in the age of Amazon. All this is fascinating enough as human drama (complemented by Sperber's provision of a comprehensive reading of every Marx-related text - whether speeches, letters, articles, grocery bills or invoices - in a winningly informal, readable style). But it has extra value. For the act of reclaiming Marx as a man, and a man of his time, alters the way we understand his ideas. Plenty of scholars sweated through the 20th century trying to reconcile inconsistencies across the great sweep of Marx's writing, seeking to shape a coherent Marxism out of Marx. Sperber's approach is more pragmatic. He accepts that Marx was not a body of ideas, but a human being responding to events. In this context, it's telling that Marx's prime vocation was not as an academic but as a campaigning journalist: Sperber suggests Marx's two stints at the helm of a radical paper in Cologne represented his greatest periods of professional fulfillment. Accordingly, much of what the scholars have tried to brand as Marxist philosophy was instead contemporary commentary, reactive and therefore full of contradiction. Thus in 1848 Marx could make a speech denouncing as "nonsense" the very idea of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, even though that notion formed a core plank of Marxist doctrine. The old Communist academicians used to insist the text of that speech must have been a forgery, but Sperber believes in its authenticity. Marx delivered it to a Rhineland audience then demanding the broadest possible front against authoritarian Prussian rule. Pitting one Rhenish class against another made no sense in that place at that time, so "Marx repudiated his own writing." The book makes clear that, determined though Marx was to devise an overarching theory of political economy, he was, even in exile, forever preoccupied with German politics and fueled by a lifelong loathing of Prussian despotism. Whatever he wrote in the abstract was informed by the current and concrete. Only in one area do Sperber's efforts at contextualization fall short. He argues that Marx's writings on the Jewish question, including his hostile comments about Jews, should be understood as "embedded" in the attitudes of the age and therefore not deemed straightforwardly anti-Semitic. But such a view is not easy to hold given the evidence Sperber himself marshals, including an 1875 letter to Engels in which Marx - born a Jew, apparently just before his father's conversion to Protestantism - casually describes a fellow train passenger as a "little Yid," before offering a description that Sperber, to his credit, concedes "is a stereotypical denunciation of an uncultured and greedy Jew." Not that this relatively soft treatment of Marx's anti-Semitism detracts from the overall achievement of the book. Sperber forces us to look anew at a man whose influence lives on. And he also offers a useful template for how we might approach other great figures, especially the great thinkers, of history - demystifying the words and deeds of those who too often are lazily deemed sacred. For all the books that have been written about America's founding fathers, for example, we still await the historian who will do for them what Jonathan Sperber has done for Karl Marx. Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/dcwein%40dcwein .cnc.net ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
