Karl Marx on History and People

by Saul K. Padover

Hardcover

Published June 1, 1977

About the author

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1...

Saul Kussiel Padover was an Austrian-born American professor, writer, and historian.

He was married first to Irina Padover and then to screenwriter Peggy Thompson, also known as Peg Fenwick.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox]

A female frenemy of mine once informed me that back in the 2010's an off-Broadway play was dedicated solely to the struggle between Karl Marx and his hemorrhoids. (Her Marxist political organization collapsed. I am still here.) Yes, that lugubrious and ridiculous fact is to be found in this tome, the only collection of Marx's writings guaranteed to make you laugh and think. On researching DAS KAPITAL at the British Museum, in a letter to Engels: "The rear conditions do not permit this yet". These collected letters, newspaper articles, encyclopedia entries, and even an interview with an American reporter illustrate a mind that is constantly thinking, ever curious, and also full of mischief. Marx was blessed to live in an age of great contemporaries, some of whom he honored (Darwin, Lincoln) and others scorned (Bismarck, Disraeli). Marx once began a letter on Disraeli with "a member of our tribe..." thus joking about his Jewish background and giving ammunition to future anti-semites. Of Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism: "He is the embodiment of bourgeois stupidity". (I had a British UCLA Professor, world-renowned, who told me "Abroad Bentham was highly regarded. In England he was considered a lunatic".) Curiously, Marx's appraisal of Bismarck echoed that of Nietzsche: "Pissmarck" {sic} is a political mediocrity". Yet Marx was not shy of hailing and scrutinizing the truly eminent: "Darwin sees in the animal kingdom the embodiment of English class society. He provides living proof of historical materialism". Like many a great man, ---Churchill, Patton, De Gaulle---Marx spoke of historical figures as contemporaries: "Julius Caesar intentionally made the most colossal errors on the battlefield to confuse Pompey, a real idiot". Marx could also play prophet. Towards the end of his life he became fixated on Russia and the possibilities of a revolution there: "Nowhere has the publication of my writings had more relevance or given me such joy". Finally, summing up his own life, in a letter to his future son-in-law Paul Lafarge: "If I had to live my life over I would do the same, but I would not marry. I would not impose such a burden on Jennie {Mrs. Marx} or my daughters." This splendid collection, edited by the late Saul Padover, a self-described "Jeffersonian Democrat", not a Marxist, goes a mighty way to explaining both how a man shuttered in the Reading Room of the British Museum, could change the world posthumously and why Marx is urgent reading in the age of globalization.