Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

by Jonathan Sperber

Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization’s most influential political philosophers. Two centuries on, he is still revered as a prophet of the modern world, yet he is also blamed for the darkest atrocities of modern times. But no matter in what light he is cast, the short, but broad-shouldered, bearded Marx remains—as a human being—distorted on a Procrustean bed of political “isms,” perceived through the partially distorting lens of his chief disciple, Friedrich Engels, or understood as a figure of twentieth-century totalitarian Marxist regimes.

Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the nineteenth century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States’ leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London émigré journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre’s than to those of twentieth-century Marxists.

With unlimited access to the MEGA (the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the total edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings), only recently available, Sperber juxtaposes the private man, the public agitator, and the philosopher-economist. We first see Marx as a young boy in the city of Trier, influenced by his father, Heinrich, for whom “the French Revolution and its aftermath offered an opportunity to escape the narrowly circumscribed social and political position of Jews in the society.” For Heinrich’s generation, this worldview meant no longer being a member of the so-called Jewish nation, but for his son, the reverberations were infinitely greater—namely a life inspired by the doctrines of the Enlightenment and an implacable belief in human equality.

Contextualizing Marx’s personal story—his rambunctious university years, his loving marriage to the devoted Jenny von Westphalen (despite an illegitimate child with the family maid), his children’s tragic deaths, the catastrophic financial problems—within a larger historical stage, Sperber examines Marx’s public actions and theoretical publications against the backdrop of a European continent roiling with political and social unrest. Guided by newly translated notes, drafts, and correspondence, he highlights Marx’s often overlooked work as a journalist; his political activities in Berlin, Paris, and London; and his crucial role in both creating and destroying the International Working Men’s Association. With Napoleon III, Bismarck, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin, among others, as supporting players, Karl Marx becomes not just a biography of a man but a vibrant portrait of an infinitely complex time.

Already hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a major work . . . likely to be the standard biography of Marx for many years,” Karl Marx promises to become the defining portrait of a towering historical figure.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, Economics, Biography Memoir

648 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2013

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent biography. Herr Marx was a nasty motherfucker. If you did not agree with him, he vilified you. The man was no scholar. He was a polemicist. He was an economic determinist, a crackpot with dubious math skills. The book is terrific. It is not a critical biography. Author Sperber has his hands full simply taking Marx's fragmented and jumbled oeuvre and making some sense of it. The reader in many instances becomes more enlightened than Lenin ever could have been, not to mention Kropotkin or Trotsky. Their view of the great man's thought was grossly distorted in comparison to the sharp overview before us here. Marx belonged to the very bourgeois class that he theorized must be violently eliminated in order to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book is full of such breathtaking paradoxes. Essential reading if one wants to uncloak the mystery of Marx, who was nothing is not enigmatic, not to mention (often) self-confuting.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I realised I knew nothing about Marx’s life except that it was a pity he couldn’t have lived to be 120 years old so he could have seen the big revolution he was plotting and scheming for all his life.
You can be sure of one thing, though, if he had been around in 1917. He would have DENOUNCED Lenin.

He sure loved to denounce. Most days it seems he denounced three guys before breakfast, just to keep in practice. But you know it was a popular pastime in those days, and they dished it out to him too – one guy called him

an intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority

Well it turned out that his life wasn’t that interesting – not like, say, the life of the Marquis de Sade. That was a wow. Marx was one of the world’s great thinkers but all he ever did was

1) Ask for money from a) his mother; b) his friends; c) Engels
2) Form societies whose members he would immediately denounce and then he would resign dramatically
3) Write vituperative lengthy articles about the murky leftist politics of the day
4) Manage to get them published in obscure magazines and newspapers which a) didn’t pay him and b) went bankrupt after the second issue
5) Relocate to another city where he would repeat steps 1) to 4)

Poor Karl. He never became a public speaker because he had a lisp and a thick regional accent, but still all who met him in person instantly knew he was a Great Man. And he would then fall out with them over some esoteric detail or another. He hardly ever had a foot of his own he didn’t shoot himself through.

So the actual doings of his life became a dull affair, especially so because our author Jonathan Sperber is a dry as dust narrator and way more interested in KM’s thought and his mortal battle with the Young Hegelians. For long stretches I was kind of guessing what the heck he was talking about and I thought – this is for level three Marxist scholars, not Level 1! Why didn’t it say that on the cover? The account of the ideas in Capital are, I should say, cogent and enthralling for anyone who has some grasp of the basic concepts involved, but they were several feet above my head.

WAS KARL MARX A JEW?

This is a strange question. We all kind of think obviously Marx was a Jew, but

- His family converted to Christianity (purely for practical reasons – it enabled Karl to go to university and join a profession)
- He was a lifelong atheist and hated all religion
- He married a Christian who then became an atheist
- His children were born in England and grew up 100% English and atheist
- Throughout his life he had nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish culture

Professor Sperber says nobody commented that Marx was Jewish until the 1870s when it began to be thought that the Jews were not just a separate religious/cultural community but a separate race. From that point the antisemites always called Marx a Jew. (The author also deals with the unhappy question about Marx’s own antisemitic remarks which are strewn about his correspondence.)

ORDINARY VICTORIAN TRAGEDIES

I have disrespectfully described Marx’s life as dull but in one respect it was not.

Karl and his beloved wife Jenny had seven children :

1. Jenny. Died aged 38
2. Laura. Had three children, all died in infancy. Committed suicide with her husband at age 66.
3. Charles. Died aged 8, the great heartache of Karl’s life.
4. Henry. Died aged 1.
5. Eveline. Died aged 1.
6. Eleanor. Was the first person to translate Madame Bovary into English. When she found out her husband of 14 years was a bigamist she committed suicide, aged 43.
7. Unnamed child who died on the day of his birth.

THE WRONG BIOGRAPHY

It’s not easy to pick the right biography when there are a lot of them but this was the wrong one for me. Could be a great one for those already marinaded in Marxist theory; but I was after a kindlier, less abstruse volume. So this was a three star read for me. My fault, not Jonathan Sperber’s. Although he could have been a bit livelier. Not asking too much.

[ZaRi · Rating 4 out of 5]

مارکس عاشق-مارکس بیمار-مارکس غمگین-مارکس رومانتیک-مارکس نظریه پرداز-مارکس انقلابی-مارکس فقیر-مارکس ولخرج-مارکس ژورنالیست-مارکس عاشق خانواده-مارکس عزادار-مارکس خشمگین-مارکس متفکر-...

مارکس "اشپربر" مارکسی است از تمام مارکسهای بالا و حتا بیشتر!
به جرات میتوانم بگویم با خواندن این کتاب با تصویر نسبتن جدیدی از مارکسی که تا به حال و از لا به لای صفحات دیگر کتابها خوانده بودم و میشناختمش آشنا شدم.مارکس اشپربر یک مارکس نسبتن دوست داشتنی است نه آنچه که از دل نتایج سیاست‌گذاری‌های لنین و استبداد استالین شناسانده شده است. او مردی است پر از شور حتا زمانی که مدام از سوی اطرافیانش به دلیل ایده‌هایش مورد حمله واقع می‌شود، لجوجانه ادامه می‌دهد. او مردی است با مشکلات مالی بسیار که تا مدت‌ها برای امرار معاش وابسته به خانوادهٔ پدری‌اش بود، مردی که از اتاقی تنگ و تاریک دنیا را به لرزه درآورد.
اشپربر تلاش کرده تا قلمرو آشنایی مخاطب خود را با مارکس گسترش دهد و او را با ابعاد تازه ای از شخصیت مارکس آشنا کند؛ روابط پیچیده و علاقه مارکس به پدر و بی علاقگی و سرد بودن با مادر،متعهد بودن به خانواده،دوستیش با انگلس و تاثیر این دوستی بر کارها و زندگی شخصی مارکس،تاثیر فوئر باخ بر شخصیت و افکار مارکس و مرگ پسر هشت ساله او ادگارد .
او نشان می‌دهد که دلیل اهمیت مارکس در زمانهٔ ما و اینکه هنوز خوانده می‌شود بیش از هر چیز از این نکته نشات می‌گیرد که درک او از مفهوم سرمایه‌داری بسیار روشن‌تر و گسترده‌تر از آن چیزی بود که در روزگار خود مارکس رخ داده بود. اسپربر دربارهٔ این کتاب گفته است: «شاید او پیامبر عصر حاضر نباشد، اما مارکس پرتره‌ای است از قرن گذشته که باید خاک رویش را زدود.»

[Baktash · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب  زندگی شخصی و کاری مارکس رو از زمان تکاپوی پدر یهودیش برای گذران زندگی و به دنیا اومدن خود کارل مارکس شروع میکنه و موازی با اون چکیده ی رویدادهای سیاسی تاریخی رو میگه. بررسی کردن زندگی شخصی-کاری-رویدادهای تاریخی سیاسی باعث بالا رفتن موضوعات و مطالب کتاب شده و  مقداری کتاب رو سنگین کرده.
مطلب جالب واسه من تاثیر محیط و پدر بر زندگی و اندیشه های مارکس بوده. کارل مارکس در مدرسه ای درس میخونده که زبان های یونانی و لاتین رو درس میدادن، در اون دوره فرانسوی هم زبون همه گیری بوده و اون زبان رو هم طبعا بلد بوده. درکنارش زبان آلمانی رو هم که مادرزادی بلد بوده و انگلیسی رو هم بعد از رفتن به انگلستان یاد میگیره. این حجم دانستن زبان های مختلف به نظر من نقش بسیار مهم و حیاتی در شکل گیری چیزی که باید میشده داشته.
از طرفی دیگه دوره ای که مارکس در دانشگاه بن درس میخونده تبدیل به یک میخواره خوشگذرون و عیاش و رفیق باز شده بوده و پدرش با دردسر انتقالش میده به دانشگاه کلن و باعث سربراه شدن و عوض شدن مسیر زندگیش میشه.


 

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific book. It humanizes Marx and places his life and his ideas in his historical context. About the man, we learn, for example, that he loved his family; he was dedicated to his playtime with his children and devoted too to his wife and partner, Jenny. The excerpted love letters (late in their life) are gems. I learned that he wrote much, much more as a journalist than as a theorist; that he was a perfectionist who had to be nagged (by Engels and by Jenny) to get his work in. I learned that he was dogged by (relative) poverty and that without inheritance, loans, and gifts – mostly from Engels – he and his family would not have survived. As it was, three of their seven children died. (Jenny had 7 births. Marx had a child with the live-in family servant – Lenchen Demouth. Everyone agreed to believe in the fiction that this child was the product of Lenchen’s union with Engels). I learned that his inability to secure a job, acquire regular income, or even live in one city was the result of his refusal to moderate his ideas or his convictions.

Sperber places Marx in his Nineteenth Century context. I learned about how Marx responded to the impact of the 1848 revolutions, the Crimean War, and Darwin’s ideas. The strongest sense I had was understanding the role of nationalism in the time period when both Germany and Italy were not yet states. One gets a powerful sense of the lingering influence of the Reformation in response to which some are fighting for a secular world of states while others are fighting for a return to empire and the papacy. Of course, Marx is a partisan for modernity in this context.

Sperber clarifies Marx’s ideas as well. Chapter 10 shows that Marx was fully devoted to Hegel and his methods – even as he dramatically inverted the Hegelian dialectical. Chapter 11 argues that Marx is a Ricardian, that he mostly accepts Ricardo’s political economy but critiques it with his Hegelian methods. As such, Marx is a Hegelianized Ricardo as well as a Ricardian Hegel. I think Sperber gets the ideas right. I got the sense that Sperber understood how to place each element, -- for example, the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the relationship between value and price – in the context of Marx’s overall system.

So, we get vivid details about is life, we learn much about 19th century Europe, and Sperber explains Marx’s ideas in non-technical ways. All this comes alive in a writing style that had me turning the pages – I read the 550 pages in a few days and then immediately purchased the book. I am not sure what else we can ask of a biography.

To see Marx as merely a human being was liberating for me. I could see his incredible genius, his tremendous work ethic, and his sheer tenacity. But I could also see him as created by his times, as essentially flawed, and as a fully human. The result is that I have now become confident in the belief that he made “mistakes.” This might seem obvious to some but not to someone like me who works under the premise that seeing “mistakes” in the thoughts of great thinkers usually indicates poor reading. (We could dub it the “humility premise.”) Against this premise, I immediately set out to make a list of what I think Marx gets wrong. The list of what he got right will take longer to write. Much longer.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has any historical figure ever had so many misconceptions and distortions imposed on his or her legacy as Karl Marx? After reading Sperber's incredibly human biography, I doubt it. This is an incredibly satisfying biography for anyone interested in an objective view of Marx.

Sperber does a masterful job of recounting Marx's life, struggles, humanity, flaws and ambitions. We meet a Marx who is a brilliant polemicist but also frustratingly hypocritical at critical times during his lifetime. But most of all, we learn about a man who is far removed from the 20th Century ideas imposed upon him by self-described disciples and enemies alike.

I disagree with some of the reviewers who find the discussions on political economy less than satisfying. To meet their unrealistic standards, Sperber would have had to write a book of thousands of pages. Instead he delves into some critical ideas that help the reader to understand the context in which Marx intended them to be. And that means understanding how his ideas were formed and fit into the 19th Century in which he lived. I was particularly struck with the thorough way that Sperber showed the progression and inner conflict Marx experienced with his early days of Hegelianism philosophy and his later incorporation of positivist ideas. Additionally, the contrast with his writings and his constant striving for the ideal Victorian family life is masterful.

Sperber makes me wish I could be a young man again and attend his classes at the University of Missouri. Having read Isaiah Berlin's somewhat unsatisfying biography (the only book written by Berlin I haven't loved), I envy any student today who will have this work as a starting point to understand Marx and his ideas.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work delves deeper into Marx's personal life than Isaiah Berlin's biography, which I enjoyed. Although we often perceive Marx as highly influential in world history, Sperber offers a different perspective. In reality, it was the Russian Revolution that revived Marx's ideas and made him a symbol of socialism. This outcome was not foreseeable in the 19th century.

Nevertheless, in the 20th century, Lenin, Trotsky, and many others adapted Marx's concepts to a new reality. They presented Marx as a prophet of economic and political developments that should occur, but his ideas did not align with the reality they faced. This does not mean that Marx's work is irrelevant, but it is important to be cautious in trying to interpret it for contemporary times.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book. Sperber wears his immense learning lightly, and offers what seems to me, as a layman, a balanced account of a passionate and conflicted life. I was very much taken on the late chapter on Marx as a a private man. And, as someone who had never read a biography of Marx before, I was fascinated by his life—by the way he blended scholarship and revolutionary activism, by the difficulty he had in finishing writing projects, by the intensity of his relationships—quick and strong to friendship, sudden and intractable to anger.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

--This book was good at times, pretty boring most of the time (mainly the middle).

--The main thesis of the book is the subtitle, "A Nineteenth Century Life." The author Jonathan Sperber makes the case that Marx has too often been judged by 20th and 21st century standards, especially given his influence on these time periods, but that this is unfair and misleading, and that Marx can only be understood within the context of 19th Century European history and politics, especially the French Revolution, Revolutions of 1848, and the nationalist movements of the mid to late century. That being said, it really helps if you already have an understanding of 19th century Europe when reading this book. I am familiar but not well versed, making the reading difficult some of the time.

--You hear a lot about Marx being Jewish, especially from Nazi propaganda in WWII histories about "Jewish Bolshevism." Marx was Jewish in ancestry, but his parents had converted to Protestantism to avoid discrimination in the Prussian society of orders. Marx very much thought of himself as Christian from a young age, before his eventual atheism. He did not at all identify as a Jew. Marx's thesis when graduating high school was about his love for Christ and how the ancients could never escape their “dumb superstition” without the coming of Jesus.

--Marx was what could be described as a libertarian in his early life, before he came up with all the theories that would be called Marxism. His biggest influences were Hegel (he was part of this group called the Young Hegelians, which got him into a lot of trouble) and the Jacobins of the French revolution. Marx would have described himself in these terms.

--Earlier in his career, Marx seemed to be the only person studying economy that understood the concept of supply and demand.

--Several of Marx’s early works are anti-semitic. As is the theme, Sperber wants his readers to look at these writings through a nineteenth century lens. Essentially, Marx criticized the religious practices of Jews, much like he criticized the church and clergy. He thought their religion and culture were backward, a relic of the society of orders he hated so much and wanted to destroy. The idea of Jews being a biological race was not yet a thing, so his writings do not follow later anti-semitic patterns, like the ones used by the Nazis. This of course doesn’t excuse Marx, but Sperber wants to drive home his main thesis of Marx being a product of nineteenth century Europe.

--Marx was constantly in deep, deep financial trouble, a lot of it due to his status as a political refugee for most of his life. He had to ask his friend Engels for money so many times I couldn’t keep track. Engels and his family gained wealth producing cotton textiles, one the most important industries to the development of modern capitalism.

--Marx loved to pick fights, most of the time with people on his side. He was really petty when it came to his social circles and you probably wouldn't have liked him if you hung out with him. He challenged lots of people to duels, a fact exacerbated by his intense drinking as a young man. Engels was the charming one in the duo, challenged with smoothing over tricky situations caused by Marx’s pettiness. There are several moments when Marx treats people on his side worse than the reactionaries they are fighting against.

--While living in exile in London, Marx cheated on his wife with their maid, who had a child as a result. All of this was kept a secret until recently when some personal writings revealed the out-of-wedlock birth. Given the power dynamics of the situation, one can assume the sexual relations were coerced by Marx.

--Engels had a great influence on Marx's legacy, as he was the first person to write analyses of Kapital and other economic writings after Marx's death. Because Engels' writing was so much clearer, it was through his interpretations that many came to "understand" the confusing works of Marx.

--I found the most boring parts of the book were anytime Sperber discussed Marx’s writing, which is too bad because this is what Marx is known for! The most engaging parts were the details about his life. I think Sperber is a better biographer than literary critic.

--Marx had an obsession with Russia in later life, which today would have landed him a primetime gig on MSNBC. In fact, during the Crimean War, Marx pioneered a wild conspiracy theory that the British PM Lord Palmerston was actually secretly a Russian agent, a puppet of the Csar working to destroy Britain from the inside. This thus proves once and for all that the media is in fact run by radical feminist post-modern neo-marxists. And Marx was a #restistancewarrior. The end.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marginal utility theory was just developing in the 1870s. According to the Russian academic Maxim Kovalevsky, then a frequent visitor in the Marx household, Marx was resuming his study of calculus to respond to the ideas of an English economist, William Stanley Jevons, one of the first marginal utility theorists, who deployed this advanced mathematics. Marx never seems to have put his considerations of this new version of economics on paper, but by the time all three volumes of Capital had appeared, it had increasingly become the dominant form of economic analysis. In Germany itself, marginal utility theory could make little headway against the Historical School; instead, it was Austria that became a center of marginal utility analysis in the German-speaking world and on the Continent more generally. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, one of the leading Austrian economists, wrote a celebrated critique of Marx's ideas in 1895, following the publication of Volume Three of Capital. The point at which Boehm-Bawerk struck at Marx was his analysis of the transformation problem, the way that commodities, whose value was derived from the socially necessary labor time needed for their production and reproduction, came to be sold at market prices....

Boehm-Bawerk was not contending, as other contemporaries did, that Marx had gotten the transformation problem wrong, but that a transformation from value to prices was conceptually impossible. His criticism was a declaration that most economists were living in a completely different intellectual world from the one Marx had inhabited. Of course, this applied to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James and John Stuart Mill as well, since they too had based their economic analysis on a labor theory of value. Boehm-Bawerk was honest enough to admit this, but most "neoclassical" economists, as partisans of the marginal utility approach came to be known, were not so open about the fundamental differences in their understanding of economics from that of the iconic pioneers of their discipline. They hid these differences by quoting phrases, such as Smith's "invisible hand," generally wrenched completely out of their original context.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Marx's economics had become unorthodox, fundamentally different from the mainstream, neoclassical version of economics, and also at odds with the chief established alternative to the mainstream, the ideas of the Historical School. Marx's economic conceptions, however, had found a home in the burgeoning early twentieth-century socialist labor movement, as part of that movement's more general rejection of the ideas of the bourgeois society it criticized and rejected. This was not at all what Marx himself had intended. Far from opposing the mainstream political economy of his day, the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, and their followers, Marx had embraced it and promoted his own work as the most advanced and correct version of their approach. His criticisms generally centered on the extent to which political economists were unwilling to develop the ultimate consequences of their ideas. Marx was an orthodox political economist, who rejected most socialist criticisms of Ricardo. He did not want to see his economic writings limited to a ghettoized existence in a labor movement promoting a counterculture to the established bourgeois capitalist world; he had yearned for a public confrontation in the established newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals of his day, and was frustrated when it failed to materialized.

[JS Found · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sperber's basic premise is to locate Marx and his work in his time and not in the time that followed. He clears away what the twentieth century said and did under his name to reveal Marx as a fundamentally nineteenth century thinker. Seen as a future prophet after his death, and used for some very un-Marxian totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and China, the actual man actually looked backward for his life's work and thought. He looked to the French Revolution, to the philosopher G.W.F Hegel, and to early economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. His communism was decidedly NOT the communism practiced in the 20 century by those two empires, and it was not violent. But I'm talking as if this biography talks about the 20th century when it does not. It simply and compellingly describes his life and thought, usually studying the Communist Manifesto and Capital but also some of the more neglected writings. It also of course talks about the man, the friend of Engels, the husband and the father.

This was my first biography of the man and I read it alongside the Communist Manifesto, which I also hadn't read before. The biography talks about this deep intellectual who spent his life and days reading the news, economics and abstruse philosophy--while the Manifesto is short, pithy, punchy and very easy to read. Marx was a gifted writer of intellectual argument as well as stirring pamphlets. What surprised me--everything surprised me because it was all new--was that he was a rhetorical jerk towards others. Former friends and followers he had cutting remarks for and attacked in his writing. Engels, was supposedly the jerk in social real life. But don't be deterred by that little factoid. He was a very loving husband and father. His at times attacking attitude stemmed from his deep advocacy for what he always and firmly believed in, and this was based in the evidence of what he read for all his life. He was an enormous thinker, one of the West's titans, and it is invaluable intellectually to get to know the man and read his work.

[Adam Ford · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve just finished Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. Some thoughts:

Communism’s roots in personal responsibility and equality of opportunity:

The origin of Communism was the inability of the poor to gather wood in forests previously owned by monasteries or the nobility. Prior to the industrial revolution and the revolutionary political period in Europe during the 18th century the poor were largely rural and agricultural and free to hunt small game and gather tree-fall (the naturally falling branches and trees in the forest) for cooking and warmth through the winter. But with the political revolutions (peaceful in England and most of modern Germany, violent in France and much of what would become Italy) the land was sold off to private owners who asserted trespass rights and claimed theft for any takings. The industrial revolution moved the poor to a significant degree out of the countryside and into the cities to work in the factories.

So there existed for the first time in western European history a large population of urban poor without the ability to fend for themselves. They were surrounded by private property and left without the hunter/gatherer recourse their ancestors had enjoyed since the beginning of time. What to do with these poor? Give them handouts? No. Better to allow them to fend for themselves by opening back up the forests and countryside so they could hunt rabbits and squirrels and gather their fallen branches.

But how to open up the forests when everything is titled and owned and recorded with deeds? Someone had to own the ground. Should they give it back to the Catholic Church? That wouldn’t work as there were lots of Protestants about and even many Catholics didn’t trust the Church to use the wealth for the benefit of the poor. So who to hold the deed? The people would be best off to hold the property in common. Communism enables the poor to take the initiative and take care of themselves. All that is needed is to take the vast land-holdings away from the wealthy, who could not possibly use all that tree-fall themselves anyway.

This history of the founding rational for Communism I never before understood. Amazing.

The influence of Hegel:

Georg Hegel was the philosopher within whose framework Marx lived and worked. He was a “Young Hegelian”, according to Sperber. Hegel’s name appears more often in the book than even Engels. I don’t know anything about Hegel and the abstract descriptions of Hegel’s philosophy here were not detailed or clear enough for me to really get a grasp. Hegel’s Wikipedia page has an amazing quote: Michel Foucault has contended that contemporary philosophers may be "doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel". Hegel is clearly a very important guy in the history of thought and I should learn more about him and his work. I’m sure that my understanding of Marx’s ideas was significantly hampered by not first understanding Hegel—like jumping into a Russian novel half-way through.

The Importance of Engels:

Friedrich Engels and Marx entered a partnership, very nearly a marriage in its commitment and longevity. Engels provided financial support to Marx for decades. He even took the blame for fathering the child Marx fathered with his long-time housemaid in order to save Marx’s marriage. (Engels kept a mistress and had a number of lovers. He believed that marriage was relic of private property rights to ensure inheritance to biological which would fade away in a Communistic future.)

Marx was desperately poor and never would have survived without Engel’s constant financial help. Marx regretted marrying and having children as they suffered greatly (and even died due to poor living conditions and medical care). Engel’s would send what he could and did so regularly for many decades. Without Engels there would be no Marx.

Getting Work Done:

Marx couldn’t/didn’t finish Capital in spite of spending decades working on it. What you buy now as Capital is actually Engel’s synthesis of Marx’s papers and drafts and other articles and pamphlets all put together in the form of a book. Engels should probably be on the spine along side Marx. Engels complained that Marx would get side-tracked for months in the details of Russian peasant labor wage data and make no progress. Marx was hiding in minute data from the daunting task of writing his magnus ops. A struggle many writers can relate to. Only the devotion of Engels to complete Capital saved Marx from being remembered only as a moderately influential economic journalist.

Marx would not write anything for weeks, then find inspiration and sit and write non-stop for days, finally collapsing from exhaustion. Hundreds of pages would result, to be tinkered with slightly and ignored until the next visit from the muse. Not a great formula to meeting deadline or getting a book done at all—which not surprisingly Marx failed to do.

Celebrating Economic Downturns:

Marx and Engels believed that the worker’s rebellion would begin after an economic collapse, so they watched with glee for news of pending economic calamity. They would write letters back and forth excitedly about each recession in the United States and each crop failure in Russia and each drop in the stock market in England. They were so hopeful for the revolution, but so convinced that only a significant economic disruption could prompt it to occur, that they constantly hoped for dire economic news. What a odd way to live and read the events of the day.

Economic Theory—The Death of Capitalism:

Marx felt that the death of capitalism was unalterably foretold in the falling rate of profit in any given industry under capitalism—and idea set forth by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mills. The idea is that over time due to competition and efficiency gains, every industry would see profits slip so low as to no longer be able to attract investment which would seek greater returns in younger industries. Capitalism’s competition lead owners to invest in better machinery and increase efficiency until no more gains could be squeezed out of the business—including further product price reductions. When this happened in all industries, capitalism would collapse as there would not be anywhere for capitalists to invest to meaningful returns.

The failure of this theory to actualize seems to be due to its lack of belief in the creativity of man to invent new industries and to general geographical myopia. Even today an efficient business in London in an established field can nearly always increase profits by opening new markets. And every decade new industries are created—Marx might not have been able to foretell air travel or the internet, but history shows us that there have always been new industries every decade or two. This biography didn’t get into the matter deeply enough to explain why Marx missed this basic insight. Smart guy; had to have some reason.

Best quote: Marx’s letter to his daughter’s suitor:
“If you wish to continue your relationship with my daughter, you will have to give up your way of paying court. The habits of an all too great intimacy would be all the more inappropriate as both lovers will be residing in the same vicinity during a necessarily extended period of rough hardships and purgatory. In my opinion true love is expressed in reserve, modesty and even in the shyness of the lover towards his idol. But definitely not in letting lose passion and demonstrations of a premature familiarity. If you offer the justification of your creole temperament, then I have the duty to interpose my reason between your temperament and my daughter. If you do not know how to express your love to her in a form appropriate to London’s latitude, then you will have to content yourself from loving at a distance. . .

“Before the final arrangements of your relationship to Laura, I must have serious information about your economic circumstances. You know that I have sacrificed my entire fortune in revolutionary struggle. I do not regret it. Quite the opposite, were I were to start my career over again I would do the same, only I would not marry. As much as it is within my power I wish to keep my daughter from the cliffs on which the life of her mother has been shattered.”

Conclusion: A somewhat dense book that presupposed a lot of economic and philosophical background, it got caught up in theory for a while in a negative way. But I learned a number of things and found it worthwhile. Not a masterpiece, but solid book worthy of your time. On a personal level, I ended up impressed (not necessarily in a positive way) with Marx’s willingness to suffer, and allow his family to suffer, in order that he could continue to push political and economic theory toward the hoped-for revolution. Pretty selfish really, but so most “great” men seem to be.

[Hannah]

Nick Estes is running an online class on communism right now and recommended this book. The thought of sitting in general hurts my back, and the thought of doing some dry intellectual heavy lifting while looking at a screen majorly bums me out. But to read a door stopper of a book? I’m game.

Reading this coincided with an especially bad, especially colorful period in my “career” (I’m substituting that word only because series-of-meaningless-and-or-exploitative-and-ultimately-temporary-jobs is too long. Though if anyone were to have coined a word for that, I’d think it would have been Marx, in German).

Anyhow. This book is really splendid. It forced me to reckon with worldviews and notions I grew up with - both those considered overtly Marxist and less articulated, less apparently ideological elements of how I understand things. It forced me to finally appreciate what is Hegelian about Marx, too. To the initiated that’s a stupid thing to say, but I always felt like I missed the Marx 101 class where that connection was made plain. That’s partly because I just found Hegel inscrutable as shit. Til now! It also allowed me to step outside our neoliberal deadlock of the last 45 years and recall the shifting strangeness of what appeared solid and real in, say, 1848 Central Europe, and what appeared to be up for grabs. What appeared certain and what was not certain. I gotta wonder if my own theory of social development over time is particularly tethered to that: social change is possible when some meaningful minority of previously assured certainties are no longer considered certain.

I guess what dogs me, as I figure most contemporary readers of this book might be dogged by, is how do we GTFO. What’s the lever that pries open real social change? I had always hoped, in my accidentally Marxist way, that a Great Depression would. The availability of credit indirectly reassures me that could still be true - as in, credit is a way to keep the masses quiet. Let ‘em buy their own bread and roses, I mean.

But then again. Reading snippets of Marx’s letters about his own anticipation of prerevolutionary conditions, which then didn’t pan out - that does stop me short.

But on the other hand!

While I am no atheist, I have never thought that accuracy in predictions should be the measure of value. That’s been such an abiding belief of mine, even when I was a kid, I forgave the weather forecasters for getting it wrong. I just always found it totally absurd that people put much stock in predictions. That’s part of what’s kept me away from much social media all this time - so many of the articles to doomscroll by are predictions, and I’ve just never found much comfort in those. At all.

I do find comfort in people willing to grapple with reality and change, explore the past, and imagine a better future, though. That’s more than enough.

So! If you find yourself unemployed as I just found myself, check it out while it’s still available! Oof, apologies. That was a prediction in hiding.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Algumas pessoas têm o hábito de chamar um software de "opinionated" quando ele deixa pouca margem de customização para o usuário final. Essa não é necessariamente uma característica ruim, já que alguém pode preferir que o software funcione da forma mais automática possível. Os mais familiarizados com computadores, porém, costumam ter uma preferência por mais liberdade no uso.

Essa biografia do Marx não é, obviamente, um software, mas é certamente "opinionated". Sperber é um autor que opina quase que livremente sobre diversos aspectos polêmicos sobre a vida e obra de Marx. Para os entendidos de Marx, algumas passagens podem soar até como ofensa ou simplificação da obra. Eu, encontrando-me no exato oposto desse espectro, ou seja, um completo ignorante em Marx, gostei dessas intervenções do Sperber. Mesmo que com boa carga de opinião do autor, o amplo conhecimento deste sobre história europeia e o cuidado de mostrar que algumas visões articuladas no livro era compartilhada por contemporâneos de Marx, faz com que o livro seja altamente informativo e crível. Para mim foi uma experiência fantástica de descobertas.

Em particular, o que mais me impressionou foi que o Marx que surge das páginas do livro do Sperber é, acima de tudo, um militante. Na verdade, é mais fácil entender cada dimensão da vida do Marx, como a privação material, ocupações laborais - estudante e jornalista -, moradia - vivendo em Berlim, Paris e Londres, se a gente coloca como centro gravitacional da vida de Marx a militância política e os sacrifícios próprios exigidos por ela.

É interessante também notar que Marx foi um militante muito mais importante do que eu imaginava. Antes pensava que ele era apenas um intelectual alemão obscuro e relegado ao ostracismo por seu radicalismo e que, post-mortem, viria a ser vingado pela história. Mas, para seus contemporâneos, Marx era, antes de tudo, um revolucionário de 1848 e uma das principais lideranças da Primeira Internacional. De fato, o reconhecimento de seu trabalho precisou esperar a proliferação do movimento trabalhista em fins do século XIX e início do XX (bem como o rebrand positivista de Engels na difusão da obra), mas não eram poucos os ilustres leitores admiradores da obra de Marx em vida. Basta notar,por exemplo, que um dos fundadores do SDP, Wilhelm Liebknecht, era seu amigo pessoal e leitor de sua obra.

Poderia ficar horas aqui escrevendo sobre outras coisas que achei interessante (o judaísmo na vida do Marx, seu conservadorismo em aspectos pessoais, a personalidade super interessante de Engels, o trabalho de Marx como comentarista de eventos contemporâneos, etc), mas o melhor é que você leia o livro. Poucos períodos históricos são tão encantadores como o século XIX na Europa e poucas personalidades tão interessantes como Marx. Esse livro tem a graça de combinar os dois.

[Ivan Self · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review: Karl Marx A Nineteenth-Century Life
By Jonathan Sperber


Marx was perhaps the most influential single philosopher for the 20th century. The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China both cited him as a pillar of their modus operandi and ideology; concepts which justified and framed countless conflicts of that century. Still today, the People’s Republic pays him lip service. It is therefore understandable that most see him in relation to that century, a century he did not even live to see. The famous enigmatic bearded photograph of Marx probably appears to most as a photograph at a double remove. In their minds eye they probably see it hanging on a wall in the Kremlin, rather than seeing an ageing German exile living in Hampstead; an image of an image. Jonathan Sperber in his biography of Marx has set himself against this categorisation of Marx’s place in time; Sperber writes that ‘his political strivings and aspirations belonged primarily to the 19th century, a period of human history that occupies a strange place in relation to the present: neither evidently distant and alien, like the Middle Ages, nor still within living memory as, for instance … [the] communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc’. Sperber wants to expose the real disconnect between the man's life and his ideas, and the times we most associate him with. A tall order, which in my opinion he delivers on.
Sperber is certainly qualified. Unlike most who would have a partisan reason - siding either with or against Marx - for writing a biography, Sperber is here for the 19th century. He is not a communist or a neo-liberal or even an economist but a historian of the 19th century, particularly of the pre-German states. Indeed his other titles include ‘The European Revolutions 1848-1851’, ‘Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany, 1820-1914’ and ‘Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany’. Knowing all about the October Revolution is utterly worthless for writing a book about Marx’s life and the development of his ideas - it occurred a full 36 years after his death. Understanding German society and the wider European situation in the 19th century however, is imperative to understanding Marx. No one in the 1848 revolution called themselves a marxist and very few communists. By and large it was the at time left-wing, but now extreme right, ideas of liberalism and nationalism butting against the remainder of the autocratic post-feudal regimes still extant throughout Europe. However, this was a - and in fact the only - revolution that Marx personally participated in, a point Sperber is keen to impress. Sperber even goes so far as to state the unthinkable to most 21st century adderants of Marx: ‘Putting Marx into that era means remembering that what Marx meant by “capitalism” was not the contemporary version of it, that the bourgeoisie Marx critically dissected was not today’s class of global capitalists.’ Sperber is the man for this job because he is an expert on the times not on the ideas. For that reason of course the book is not everything one could want. While Sperber’s writings on the man’s ideas are respectful, intelligent and indeed do highlight and inform; they are not penetrating. So I must personally recommend that for a better experience one ought to at least have read some of Marx’s work before reading this biography, ideally even some commentary on the ideas away from the man. This book is about Marx’s life first and his ideas second.
Sperber doesn’t present us with a direct narrative of Marx’s life in strict order. Rather he breaks up narrative, political discussion and the private Marx into chapters which have a loose chronology. For instance, Sperber waits till near the end of Marx's life to give a complete analysis of his economic theory in chapter 11 - ‘The Economist’. This makes a complex text more digestible as Sperber isn’t dashing about trying to update us on the private man’s life, his theories, infighting with other leftists etc all at once. Key to knowing the spectre of the man who still haunts Eastern Europe is his private life. This is perhaps the strongest section of the book in which Sperber goes into details of Marx genteel poverty while in exile in London. Sperber illuminates a precarious but nonetheless bourgeois in appearance and attitude family oriented Marx. The Marxs, despite their debts, never went without a maid. Who herself had an affair with Marx, who fathered with her an illegitimate child. Engels, the famous friend and editor, stepped in to save Karls honour and marriage to Jenny Westphalen by claiming the child was his own; saving Karl in this and many other things. Marx insisted that his daughters be well taught young ladies who learnt Italian, French and Piano, In addition to attending an all girl school. Perhaps one of the most amusing anecdotes Sperber writes of is Marx’s election to a minor legal office, Constable of the Vestry of St. Pancras, by his bourgeois neighbours. Marx wrote in a letter to Engels that the office was ‘an honour much valued by the philistines of St. Pancras.’ Sperber points out that this ‘shows a lot about [his neighbors] opinion of him’; indeed as the famous picture shows Dr. Marx made an effort to appear as a respectable bourgeoise. Another interesting anecdote involves Marx being asked for assistance at a train station by Bismarck’s niece, unaware that she was addressing a famous dissident; Marx chaperoned her all the way to her destination as a true Prussian gentleman ought to.
The development of Marx’s thought is also a key part of the book. Enough theory behind it is explained to get the gist of Marx’s ideas, but in order to understand them properly there can be no solution but to engage with the actual philosophy he was influenced by. For example, Sperber gives, by his own admission, a tooled down outline of the Hegalian dialectic, so essential to Marx’s early development, in order to discuss how the ideas progressed in the context of Marx’s life. One needs to study Hegel and the young Hegalians such as Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach in order to really understand Marx’s roots in Hegelianism and one would also have to read Adam Smith and David Ricardo to understand his economic theories. Nonetheless there is enough discussion of Marx’s thought and it’s influences for a sound basis of its development. Striking to me is that Sperber takes pains to elucidate that it was Engels positivist development of Marx’s theories after his death, rather than Marx’s own predominantly Hegalian theories which were most influential to Lenin and the Bolsheviks; ‘as long as both 20th communist and socialist parties identified themselves as Marxist, it was Engels interpretation of Marxism that they had in mind’.
It is reasonable to argue that it matters little who a man was, and that all that should matter are his ideas and his influence. But in order to understand the development of those ideas and the context which molded them; one is forced to try and digest the life and times of the man who gave them to the world. Sperber’s book examines both of these things in a well written and interesting fashion. While the book is far from enough to understand marxism, it will doubtless assist anyone who is a true student of economics, philosophy or politics to understand Marx and his thoughts. At the close of the book one is left with an impression of a man who was more than anything a true philosopher. Someone who loved wisdom, who’s ideas and theories are so wide ranging and nebulous that no true unified idea of them can be easily packaged up into an ideology; no matter how hard many have tried.

[Thomas Ray]

The author says capitalism failed to collapse of dwindling profit because of constant new industries. James Livingston in Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 shows very specifically how the owner class escaped the nightmare of "many buyers, many sellers, no one of which has control over price:" they reorganized into industry-dominating, rent-taking monopoly corporations.

[emese toth · Rating 2 out of 5]

oh hey, my professor is in the acknowledgments! this is a robust, meticulous examination of the man himself. the underlying thesis of purely viewing marx within the 19th century is one i disagree with, but it also works within the context of a biography written by a historian.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

A well-researched albeit slightly overly academic chronological examination of the life of Karl Marx. The book is best when it is debunking the larger-than-life mythology that surrounds his life and distorts his political ideology.

[Brittany McLaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kind of boring.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a new biography of Karl Marx, the historian Jonathan Sperber set out to explain his subject in the context of nineteenth-century circumstances and attitudes. “Marx was not our contemporary,” he writes, “[but] more a figure of the past than a prophet of the present.” He concludes that the way we view the man today is substantially different from the way he was viewed by his contemporaries — or the way he viewed himself. However, to my mind, he’s only partially successful.

Karl Marx, the armchair revolutionary

In one important way, Sperber makes his case with a detailed recitation of Marx’s decades-long career as a journalist and activist. The book is at its strongest in describing the evolution of his thinking from the 1830s, when he was a student of philosophy and enamored of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In the 1840s and 50s, as Marx became progressively more engaged in writing (and arguing) about politics, he grew hostile toward Hegel and his followers, often engaging in acrimonious public debates about the philosopher’s work. During that period, his politics bore no resemblance to the beliefs he professed even a few years later. As Sperber notes about a polemic Marx penned in 1843, “The man who would write the Communist Manifesto just five years later was advocating the use of the army to suppress a communist workers’ uprising!”

Marx “had much more success in founding a radical political newspaper than in organizing the working class.” He appears to have come closest to becoming actively engaged in political action during the Continent-wide wave of revolutions in 1848, but even then his involvement was limited to intellectual fisticuffs. Later, as his fame grew through the 1860s, Marx became even more insulated from political action. Instead, he grew preoccupied with sectarian debates among the many small and ineffectual Communist organizations that sprang into being in mid-century and devoted most of their energy to quarreling among themselves. Marx wrote hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of words about revolution. The most common thread among all these writings was that he was wrong about nearly every prediction he ever made. For decades on end, he continued to predict that the revolution that would overthrow capitalism was just around the corner.
Karl Marx, the theorist

Self-described Communists in the twentieth century idolized Marx as the patron saint of their movement. However, Marx himself would not have recognized what has passed as Communism since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Latter-day Communists have built much of their ideology around imperialism, following Vladimir Lenin’s reformulation of the gospel according to Marx. By contrast, Marx did not view capitalism and imperialism as integrally linked. In fact, he often wrote favorably about the British Raj, implying that the British had helped drag millions of Indians out of a more primitive state by introducing them to civilization. In other ways as well, the tortured historical analysis Marx laid out in his many books and thousands of essays and articles bore little resemblance to the simplistic logic of twentieth-century Communism. Marx would have been scandalized by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. He was not a Marxist.

Karl Marx, the anti-Semite

One of the recurring themes in Sperber’s biography is that Marx was not a self-hating Jew even though he wrote disturbingly anti-Semitic statements on many occasions. The “‘Israelite faith is repulsive to me,'” he wrote in 1843. Later, he “explicitly endorsed the view of Judaism as an ethically inferior religion.” On other occasions, he described other Jews individually using pejorative, anti-Semitic terms.

Sperber attempts to make his case by asserting that in the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were not viewed through the lens of biology as a “race.” That only came later with the emergence of Social Darwinism. Instead, Jews were defined by religion and culture; since Marx was neither a practicing Jew (his father had converted to Protestantism, and Marx himself married a Protestant woman) nor did he identify with Jewish culture, he was free to engage in talking and writing about Jews in a highly disparaging manner. The argument falls flat. For many centuries, Jews had been persecuted throughout Europe, not because of their religion or cultural practices but simply because they had descended from Jewish ancestors. To understand this fact, all you need do is look to the persecution of conversos (Jews converted to Catholicism) by the Inquisition.

Karl Marx, the man

In Sperber’s telling, Marx was a loving husband and a doting father and grandfather. Nonetheless, he routinely took steps in his life as a journalist that guaranteed he and his family a life of poverty. Until the 1870s, when Friedrich Engels finally inherited a fortune and was able to support the Marx family in a semblance of comfort, Marx, his wife, and the three of his many children who survived into adulthood lived hand-to-mouth, forever begging, borrowing, and dodging creditors. And Marx fathered an illegitimate son on the family’s long-time, live-in maid.

In his personal relationships outside his family, Marx was no more considerate. He was combative and often nasty and vindictive. Much of his writing consisted of lengthy diatribes attacking his personal enemies — who were often former friends with whom he had parted company on one or another minor point of ideology. Typically, the reason he had grown so hostile to them was that they continued to advocate beliefs he had once held himself. In one of the many unfinished manuscripts Marx wrote, he devoted “about 65 percent of the 517 pages . . . to a distinctly minor figure who died soon afterward in obscurity.” Sperber adds, “internecine conflict became an obsession for Marx and Engels.” Marx even quarreled, sometimes to the point at which they cut off relations, with Engels, who was the closest he ever had to a brother. In fairness, Engels was widely viewed as an even nastier fellow whose “tactless remarks and excessive behavior had alienated fellow leftists.” Even so, Karl Marx was not a guy you’d likely want to become your best friend.
About the author

Jonathan Sperber is a history professor at the University of Missouri. He teaches modern European history. Karl Marx is his eighth book.

[Todd Decker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karl Marx has to be a difficult person to treat objectively, as neither hero nor villain. But Jonathan Sperber manages to do that in my opinion. And he does it by deliberately situating Marx in the nineteenth century, hence the subtitle. The book is professional, scholarly, and moderately challenging. Rather than viewing Marx through the lens of twentieth century communism Sperber focuses on his nineteenth century cultural and intellectual contexts. Instead of Marx in proximity to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao we get Marx in proximity to Hegel, Feuerbach, Bauer, Bakunin, Ricardo, etc. To me this seems much more illuminating to Marx's biography. While it's totally appropriate to adapt Marx's ideas to later developments it's a different project from understanding what Marx meant to say when he said it, which may be distinct in many cases from later Marxist interpretations. The Marx that emerges is neither a brilliant prophet nor a failing fool. Sperber's Marx is a thoroughly nineteenth century figure who was intimately involved in and contributed to the major issues alive in Europe at that time, something I find fascinating as a student of European history. Rather than Marx through the lens of twentieth century communism we get the nineteenth century through the lens of Marx, which makes for an interesting study.

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great biography. As a Brazilian I am used to a very romantic, ideologilized vision about communism for those who preach it almost like religion. On the other hand, there are those who hate it but know nothing about it or say that Marx was an atheist, against family and s on.

Well I am atheist I am neither against family or communist. So I am in between two extremes. Hard place to be.

[Joshua Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent biography for those who love and vilify Marx. It does a good job at placing him within his context. Examining what produced him, economically, socially, religiously, technologically, and philosophically.

[Cauã Valentim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprei esse livro por causa do nando moura quando tinha 13 anos.

[Alizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

capitalism is poison.

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a prime example of how to write a biography. jonathan sperber is a leading historian of the nineteenth century, and he uses this book to paint one of the most in/famous(?) individuals from then in his own age. this might not seem all that impressive, but, as the author points out, many people see marx in the consequences of the twentieth century, rather than as the nineteenth century man that he was.

I didn’t begin this book as a marxist - and I still wouldn’t consider myself one upon finishing it - but I do have a lot of sympathy for marx and his followers.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank Christ that’s over. Reminds me why I despise reading philosophy- I hope you enjoy reading about a guy continuously contort the world around him to fit something he read in his 20’s so the Robin to his Batman could try to sell it years later.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the greatest for an intellectual history of Marx, but seems to do a good job of tracing Marx's life and presenting him as a person. At the end, I can't help but feel that Marx's life was largely a failure

[Andrew Mossberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting biography of Marx with context about the times and events surrounding him during his writings.

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

A supremely lucid biography of Marx that takes as its central thesis the fact that all his innovations were maid in the context of now largely forgotten nineteenth century machinations. I'll admit that at first this approach struck me as simply common-sensicle. But Sperber convinced me that much of twentieth century Marx historiography was rooted in the conviction of finding a prophet of twentieth century communism, rather than the Jacobin sentimentalist that Sperber brings to life.

I must say that the histories of Bolshevism that I have read, such as those of Isaac Deutscher, describe a cabal of young revolutionaries obsessively comparing themselves to the Jacobins and wondering with dread which one of them would reveal themselves as the Bonapartist element. All eyes were then, in retrospect tragically, on Trotsky rather than Stalin. So perhaps the original Bolsheviks, at least, were not so out of step with Marx's Jacobinism.

Sperber makes clear the reasons for Marx's Jacobin-centrism. The French republican revolutionaries had been the first to rid his native Prussia of feudalistic absolutism, and the first to grant full citizenship to Marx's Jewish ancestors. It seems not so surprising, then, that Marx consistently prioritized a bourgeois capitalist revolution over a communist revolution in his Europe, most forcefully in his Prussia. Indeed, he was a life-long champion of free-trade, feeling that it facilitated the still-comparatively progressive cause of the bourgeoisie over feudalism in Europe.

The book also goes into detail about the nineteenth-century European conception of Jewishness and its affects on Marx's thought. Marx often ruminated on his own ethnic Jewish ancestry while making notes about the Jewish religion that would today be considered insensitive. Then again, he simultaneously called for full Jewish (religious and else-wise)-citizenship in all European countries, then a radically egalitarian stance.

The book also shows that the racialization of Jewish people has been a relatively recent occurrence. It was the Nazis, following the footsteps of the American colonizers's racial dehumanization of Native Americans and Blacks, that transformed the notion of Jewishness into racial, ancestral terms.

In terms of Marx-studies, Sperber tries to deconstruct the long-standing bifurcation, holy to Marxist philosophers, between Marx's early thought- the 1844 manuscripts- and his most "mature" thought, such as Das Kapital. Sperber has been perhaps the first biographer to have access to the MEGA- the entirety of Marx and Engel's complete oeuvre. While the earlier manuscripts do indeed touch heavily on Hegelian and/or "existentialist" themes, much of the manuscripts, the majority of which has remained unseen until recently, dealt with political economy in a spirit not so different than that of Kapital. And the spiritual elements of the Manuscripts are repeated in Kapital, if in less obviously spiritual terminology.

The last innovation of the book is its focus on Marx's journalistic writing, the least studied, and most voluminous, of his life. In his articles and editorials he at once developed a line that would prove to be his most prophetic, that the first socialist upheaval would occur in Russia against the Czar, his most just, taking up the Abolitionist cause in the United States, and his most bizarre: his conviction that the then-PM of Britain, a rabid nationalist Torry, was an agent of the Russian Czar.