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Karl Marx: A Life
The first major biography of Karl Marx since the end of the Cold War provides an in-depth look at the man and his work, painting a picture not of a socialist ogre, but of a fascinating, ultimately humane man who lived both at the center and on the fringes of his age. 15,000 first printing. First serial, Talk.
431 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Francis Wheen
27 books85 followersFrancis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.
Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.
He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.
Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.
Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.
Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.
He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.
Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.
Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 144 reviews
March 16, 2012
It’s strange but arguably true: millions of people died in Siberia because a philosopher in London had carbuncles on his ass. Chaos theory now makes a little more sense to me.
In a famous riff on Hegel, Marx once said that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Marx’s own biography suggests a different sequence. His life was a grubby, shambolic farce that somehow gave birth to a world-historic tragedy. Francis Wheen, the author of this generally excellent biography, snidely pooh-poohs the idea that Marx bears any responsibility for the Gulag, but this seems as naïve as the reductionism it was meant to counter. If Stalinism was a misreading of Marx, it was at least a plausible misreading. It can’t be a coincidence that every communist regime in history got Marx wrong in exactly the same way.
But, okay, Marx himself was no monster, and Wheen does a good job of humanizing the old bogeyman – almost too good a job, actually: his Marx is not just human, but hilariously, embarrassingly, disastrously human. For the first two-thirds of the book, Marx comes across as a bit of a loser, a schlemiel: living in rented rooms, shamelessly sponging off rich relatives and his good buddy Engels, refusing to get a real job, cowering in his study while his wife turned away creditors, fathering children with grim Victorian persistence (including one with the housekeeper), lancing the aforementioned carbuncles with a razor, getting massive boils on his penis, snoring on the sofa all day long while his kids romped among dirty dishes and broken furniture, confidently predicting revolution every other week (always wrongly), going on benders, writing thunderous, 200-page jeremiads against anyone who looked at him sideways, letting a friend fight a duel in his place (and take a bullet in the head), growing a freaky beard, malingering, and constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY complaining...
And yet, damn it, the man was a genius. Deirdre McCloskey, a hardcore neoliberal (and therefore the furthest thing imaginable from a Marxist) calls him the greatest social critic of the nineteenth century. As a philosopher and economist, he was a horror show, but as a writer and all-around shit disturber, he has few equals. If only he’d stuck to journalism...
The last years of Marx’s life were spent traipsing around the fashionable spas of Europe, where he charmed the other guests with his witty anecdotes and impeccable manners. He was also a doting grandfather. Eleven people showed up for his funeral.
In a famous riff on Hegel, Marx once said that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Marx’s own biography suggests a different sequence. His life was a grubby, shambolic farce that somehow gave birth to a world-historic tragedy. Francis Wheen, the author of this generally excellent biography, snidely pooh-poohs the idea that Marx bears any responsibility for the Gulag, but this seems as naïve as the reductionism it was meant to counter. If Stalinism was a misreading of Marx, it was at least a plausible misreading. It can’t be a coincidence that every communist regime in history got Marx wrong in exactly the same way.
But, okay, Marx himself was no monster, and Wheen does a good job of humanizing the old bogeyman – almost too good a job, actually: his Marx is not just human, but hilariously, embarrassingly, disastrously human. For the first two-thirds of the book, Marx comes across as a bit of a loser, a schlemiel: living in rented rooms, shamelessly sponging off rich relatives and his good buddy Engels, refusing to get a real job, cowering in his study while his wife turned away creditors, fathering children with grim Victorian persistence (including one with the housekeeper), lancing the aforementioned carbuncles with a razor, getting massive boils on his penis, snoring on the sofa all day long while his kids romped among dirty dishes and broken furniture, confidently predicting revolution every other week (always wrongly), going on benders, writing thunderous, 200-page jeremiads against anyone who looked at him sideways, letting a friend fight a duel in his place (and take a bullet in the head), growing a freaky beard, malingering, and constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY complaining...
And yet, damn it, the man was a genius. Deirdre McCloskey, a hardcore neoliberal (and therefore the furthest thing imaginable from a Marxist) calls him the greatest social critic of the nineteenth century. As a philosopher and economist, he was a horror show, but as a writer and all-around shit disturber, he has few equals. If only he’d stuck to journalism...
The last years of Marx’s life were spent traipsing around the fashionable spas of Europe, where he charmed the other guests with his witty anecdotes and impeccable manners. He was also a doting grandfather. Eleven people showed up for his funeral.
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July 14, 2016This boils and all biography gives a vivid picture of Marx suffering from boils, smoking cheap cigars (apparently he fell in love with a shop with particularly cheap cigars whose advertising said 'the more you smoke, the more you save'), revealing the man with bad handwriting (which prevents him from getting a job as a clerk with a railway company), who suffered from more boils, cadging money off Engels and engaging in bitter correspondence wars with lesser left-wing thinkers who no doubt lacked his own rich assortment of boils.
However I didn't get a sense of Marx's intellectual development or of his thinking from this book. In that respect this is very much a book of its time: after 1989, when the spirit of the end of history moved upon the face of the waters, but before the financial crash of 2008 and that niggling sense that there might be something worthwhile after all in all that old analysis that Marx did. By contrast Wheen takes the view that Marx in Das Capital is the equivalent of Dickens as a great painter of the landscape of Victorian Britain.
This makes it a fun, knockabout biography but doesn't offer much as to the whys and wherefores of the thinking that had a major influence not just in a narrow political sense but also in a wide range of sociological and cultural applications. McLellan's Marx was both more interesting and very much shorter.
However I didn't get a sense of Marx's intellectual development or of his thinking from this book. In that respect this is very much a book of its time: after 1989, when the spirit of the end of history moved upon the face of the waters, but before the financial crash of 2008 and that niggling sense that there might be something worthwhile after all in all that old analysis that Marx did. By contrast Wheen takes the view that Marx in Das Capital is the equivalent of Dickens as a great painter of the landscape of Victorian Britain.
This makes it a fun, knockabout biography but doesn't offer much as to the whys and wherefores of the thinking that had a major influence not just in a narrow political sense but also in a wide range of sociological and cultural applications. McLellan's Marx was both more interesting and very much shorter.
December 16, 2012
Francis Wheen does for Marx what Safranski did for Schopenhauer. The wild years of philosophy are not over in this book. It's actually brilliant, especially considering the tons of bullshit that have been said and written about Marx in recent years. Sometimes you find yourself missing the good old hagiography. Wheen on the other hand is not in the sanctifying business. His Marx is neither a saint, nor a devil, but a genuine crazy-cat bohemian philosopher.
July 21, 2023
Karl Marx was recommended by Paul Preciado in An Apartment on Uranus, where he observed that this biography makes Marx seem happy despite anger, poverty, and illness. This is the first biography of Marx that I've read and I found its irreverent tone very entertaining. Yet it also responds seriously to other biographers. Marx and Engels are depicted as flawed men full of contradictions; their portraits are sympathetic yet unvarnished. The tone can be judged by this anecdote about Marx's youthful job as a journalist, in 1842:
Wheen largely examines the generally chaotic context in which Marx wrote, but also comments upon the writing itself:
I was delighted to get an insight into the epic friendship of Marx and Engels. Marx fell out with every other friend and colleague he ever had. Indeed, a comment in one of Proudhon's notebooks describes Marx as 'the tapeworm of socialism'. But his partnership with Engels remained strong until his death. Their letters sound very entertaining:
I don't actually find that hard to parse, as I used to write my teenage diary in the very same multilingual style! When you're studying French, German, and Latin at school, why not use all the best words from each language. Another wonderful discovery was that Engels bankrolled Marx (who never had a steady job) by stealing from his father's cotton mill. What could be more fitting?
Even with this subsidy, Marx's household was constantly broke and indebted, as well as afflicted by illness. Yet it seems that these struggles, and his rage at inequality and injustice, fuelled as well as stymied him:
I found Wheen's book an appealing and informative biography, providing an insight into Marx the man to consider alongside his writing and legacy. As I haven't read any other Marx biographies, I can't tell whether it's doing anything hugely original with the narrative of his life. It's undoubtedly vivid, readable, and often funny, though.
Marx composed a grovelling letter assuring His Excellency that the Rheinische Zeitung wished only to echo 'the benedictions which at the present time the whole of Germany conveys to His Majesty the King in his ascendant career'. As Franz Mehring commented many years late, the letter displayed 'a diplomatic caution of which the life of its author offers no other example'.
Wheen largely examines the generally chaotic context in which Marx wrote, but also comments upon the writing itself:
To wish away Marx's stylistic excess is, however, to miss the point. His vices were also his virtues, manifestations of a mind addicted to paradox and inversion, antithesis and chiasmus. Sometimes this dialectical zeal produced empty rhetoric, but more often it led to startling and original insights. He took nothing for granted, turned everything upside down - including society itself.
I was delighted to get an insight into the epic friendship of Marx and Engels. Marx fell out with every other friend and colleague he ever had. Indeed, a comment in one of Proudhon's notebooks describes Marx as 'the tapeworm of socialism'. But his partnership with Engels remained strong until his death. Their letters sound very entertaining:
[Marx and Engels] had no secrets from each other, no taboos: if Marx found a huge boil on his penis he didn't hesitate to supply a full description. Their voluminous correspondence is a gamey stew of history and gossip, political economy and schoolboy smut, high ideals and low intimacies. [...] As stateless cosmopolitans they even evolved their own private language, a weird Anglo-Franco-Latino-German mumbo-jumbo. All other quotations in this book have been translated to spare readers the anguish of puzzling over the Marxian code, but one brief sentence will give an idea of its expressive if incomprehensible syntax: 'Diese excessive technicality of ancient law zeigt Jurisprudenz as feather of the same bird, als d. religiosen Formalitaten z. B. Auguris etc. od. D.. Hokus Pokus des medicine man der savages.' Engels learned to understand this gibberish with ease; more impressively still, he was able to read Marx's handwriting, as was Jenny [Marx's wife].
I don't actually find that hard to parse, as I used to write my teenage diary in the very same multilingual style! When you're studying French, German, and Latin at school, why not use all the best words from each language. Another wonderful discovery was that Engels bankrolled Marx (who never had a steady job) by stealing from his father's cotton mill. What could be more fitting?
[Engels] acted as a kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sending Marx confidential details of the cotton trade, expert observations on the state of international markets, and - most essentially - a regular consignment of small-denomination banknotes, pilfered from the petty cash box or guilefully prised out of the company's bank account. (As a precaution against mail theft he snipped them in two, posting each half in a separate envelope.) It is a measure of how slackly the office was run that neither his father nor his business partner in Manchester, Peter Ermen, ever noticed anything amiss.
Even with this subsidy, Marx's household was constantly broke and indebted, as well as afflicted by illness. Yet it seems that these struggles, and his rage at inequality and injustice, fuelled as well as stymied him:
Marx was plagued by his usual physical ailments through the winter of 1866-7 but even they could no longer thwart his determination to finish Volume One of Capital. He wrote the last few pages of Volume One standing at his desk when an eruption of boils around the rump made sitting too painful. (Arsenic, the usual anaesthetic, 'dulls my mind too much and I need to keep my wits about me'.) Engels' experienced eye immediately spotted certain passages in the text 'where the carbuncles have left their mark', and Marx agreed that the fever in his groin might have given his prose a rather livid hue. 'At all events, I hope the bourgeoise will remember my carbuncles until their dying day,' he cursed, 'What swine they are!'
I found Wheen's book an appealing and informative biography, providing an insight into Marx the man to consider alongside his writing and legacy. As I haven't read any other Marx biographies, I can't tell whether it's doing anything hugely original with the narrative of his life. It's undoubtedly vivid, readable, and often funny, though.
November 21, 2015
Francis Wheen’s aim with this book was to write a general book about Karl Marx for the intelligent reader. Francis Wheen gives a clear explanation of all of Marx’s works but spends as much time on the man himself, his contemporaries and his relationships.
I came away from this entertaining, interesting book with a good feel for his life and times: the boils on his bum, the numerous creditors, his ingrained procrastination, numerous fallings out with socialist rivals, his wife, his children etc. across his turbulent, chaotic but compelling life.
Born in the Rhineland city of Trier, Marx couldn’t wait to escape this tedious backwater, to the extent that he didn’t even return to attend his father’s funeral. Thus started a roving life until, after the unsuccessful European revolutions of 1848, and having been made unwelcome in Germany and Belgium, he pitched up in London, the last refuge of the rootless revolutionary where he lived in Dickensian poverty with bailiffs at his door
Helpfully, his friend Engels, a great cotton Lord and kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sent him money to keep him afloat for years. It was only Marx's desire to keep up bourgeoise appearances that meant he was permanent spending more than he could afford including, hilariously, for a period, a preening, libidinous and incompetent private secretary, and only because he thought it appropriate for a man of his position to have one.
The book is clear about Marx’s many unattractive traits, however it also paints a delightful portrait of a loving, involved father and husband, and a passionate philosopher. It's a balanced, compact and very readable account of one of most influential thinkers of his era.
4/5
I came away from this entertaining, interesting book with a good feel for his life and times: the boils on his bum, the numerous creditors, his ingrained procrastination, numerous fallings out with socialist rivals, his wife, his children etc. across his turbulent, chaotic but compelling life.
Born in the Rhineland city of Trier, Marx couldn’t wait to escape this tedious backwater, to the extent that he didn’t even return to attend his father’s funeral. Thus started a roving life until, after the unsuccessful European revolutions of 1848, and having been made unwelcome in Germany and Belgium, he pitched up in London, the last refuge of the rootless revolutionary where he lived in Dickensian poverty with bailiffs at his door
Helpfully, his friend Engels, a great cotton Lord and kind of secret agent behind enemy lines, sent him money to keep him afloat for years. It was only Marx's desire to keep up bourgeoise appearances that meant he was permanent spending more than he could afford including, hilariously, for a period, a preening, libidinous and incompetent private secretary, and only because he thought it appropriate for a man of his position to have one.
The book is clear about Marx’s many unattractive traits, however it also paints a delightful portrait of a loving, involved father and husband, and a passionate philosopher. It's a balanced, compact and very readable account of one of most influential thinkers of his era.
4/5
December 14, 2017
Demonized and reviled by mythology posing as fact, the hirsute Prussian emigre has suffered badly at the hands of History. Wheen reclaims Marx from the totalitarians and capitalists who used and abused him. It reads like an adventure novel; the prose is immaculate and very, very funny. Wheen goes against the grain by showing how Marx correctly predicted the major events of the 20th Century. It is pleasing to know that Marx, who understood the workings of capital more than any other, was as wasteful with lucre as I. The deep friendship with Engels comes across without ever having to be underlined, plus there is a great dissection of self-styled 'hero' Bakunin. I doubt I'll ever read a better biography, regardless of the subject. Marx deserved a book like this. An absolute masterpiece.
June 30, 2016
Here is one view on Marx and his influence:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
and here is another:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07gpjmm
Francis Wheen concentrates on Marx the man, not the theorist, so includes plenty of details of his life along with what he was thinking, studying and writing about through the years. As the author points out, there are a lot of books giving detailed critiques of Marxist theory and no need for yet another. Marx himself also wrote a lot, some of which has only been published relatively recently.
Francis Wheen has obviously read quite a lot of Marx's writings himself and his selective quotes are often both illuminating and amusing, particularly from letters. The approach is light and anecdotal, but not lacking in scholarship (which some of the reviews concentrating on Marx's attacks of boils might lead one to believe). He gives a rounded picture of Marx the man and Marx the thinker, and debunks a few myths along the way. Marx's family and friends, collaborators and opponents also feature much more strongly; Marx was not a lonely philosopher scribbling the years away in garrets and the British Library, although he did spend a lot of time there. Both the way Wheen treats his subject and his writing style make this a very interesting and enjoyable book, whether the reader is interested in Marxism or not.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
and here is another:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07gpjmm
Francis Wheen concentrates on Marx the man, not the theorist, so includes plenty of details of his life along with what he was thinking, studying and writing about through the years. As the author points out, there are a lot of books giving detailed critiques of Marxist theory and no need for yet another. Marx himself also wrote a lot, some of which has only been published relatively recently.
Francis Wheen has obviously read quite a lot of Marx's writings himself and his selective quotes are often both illuminating and amusing, particularly from letters. The approach is light and anecdotal, but not lacking in scholarship (which some of the reviews concentrating on Marx's attacks of boils might lead one to believe). He gives a rounded picture of Marx the man and Marx the thinker, and debunks a few myths along the way. Marx's family and friends, collaborators and opponents also feature much more strongly; Marx was not a lonely philosopher scribbling the years away in garrets and the British Library, although he did spend a lot of time there. Both the way Wheen treats his subject and his writing style make this a very interesting and enjoyable book, whether the reader is interested in Marxism or not.
September 11, 2019
Nem tudom, elgondolkodott-e már valaki azon, mennyire felülreprezentáltak a nyugati civilizáció meghatározó figurái között azok a szakállasok, akiknek a neve „M” betűvel kezdődik. Mózes, Marx, Mikulás…* Wheen a legkönnyebb utat választotta, amikor hármuk közül azt pécézte ki magának, akinek a létezése legkevésbé szorul bizonyításra – viszont ezt fényesen meg is oldotta. Könyve egyszerre pergő humorú életrajz egy izgalmas mozgalmárról (vagy mozgalmas izgalmárról?), és ugyanakkor egy nyomasztó hatású filozófiai-közgazdaságtani életmű közérthető gyorselemzése. Az első szempontnak Wheen hibátlanul megfelel, remekül rajzolja meg a fickót, aki a személyes vita közben sosem riadt vissza ellenfele lezsidózásától (egy rabbi leszármazottjától ez meglehetősen derék dolog), Engelstől pénzt kunyerál, gigantikus elméjével földbe döngöl minden elvtársat, aki szembeszáll vele, ugyanakkor még fájdalmas kelései sem akadályozták meg abban, hogy családi körben nagy átéléssel alakítsa a tökéletes nagypapát. Sokszínű fazon, semmiképpen sem az a kannibál, amilyennek konzervatív körökben ábrázolni szokás.
Ami Marx eszmetörténeti munkásságát illeti, itt már érezhető némi elfogultság Wheen részéről – mindenesetre mindent megtesz, hogy megvédje A tőké-t és társait az elhamarkodott ítéletalkotóktól. Az bizonyos, hogy Marx személyében rendkívül eredeti gondolkodóval állunk szemben: mindaz, amit a tőkéről, mint társadalmi viszonyról, a munkaerőről, mint áruba bocsátható termékről, vagy épp a világpiacról és a kapitalizmus ciklikusságáról mond, alapvetően átírta a társadalomtudományi gondolkodást. Amikor kifejti, hogy a burzsujok** önön sírjukat ássák, amikor a városba csábítják a leendő munkaerőt, mert ezzel lehetőséget teremtenek nekik a szervezkedésre, ezáltal arra, hogy megdöntsék őt – hát ez fenemód logikus következtetés. Nem jött be, az igaz, legalábbis ott nem, ahol volt munkásság. Ahol volt, ott a munkások inkább korrigálni igyekeztek a rendszert, nem leönteni benzinnel, aztán pfff… meggyújtani – de hát akkor is: logikus. De ilyen tévedések minden autoriter gondolkodóval előfordulnak, aki nem hajlandó mások aspektusaiból megvizsgálni a problémát, ellenben hajlamos a prófétálásra. Ahogy Wheen tündökletesen jegyzi meg: Marx összetévesztette a kapitalizmus születési fájdalmát az agóniával. Van ez így – velem is gyakran megesik. Vagy az agóniát tévesztem össze a születési fájdalommal? Majd ötven év múlva kiderül.
* Ha Machiavelli szakállt növesztett volna, Jézus pedig felveszi az anyja nevét, még tökéletesebben ülne az elméletem.
** Akikről egyébként Marx meglepő respektussal beszélt – nagyon hálás volt, amiért átvették a hatalmat az impotens arisztokráciától, és felszabadították az emberiség káprázatos teremtő erejét. Más kérdés, hogy mindezt a nyílt kizsákmányolás eszközével tették, így csak átmeneti lehet az uralkodásul. Elméletben. A gyakorlatban viszont a kapitalizmus által alkalmazott nyílt kizsákmányolás fokozatosan egyre kevésbé nyílttá vált, és úgy fest, ezzel ki is fogták a szelet a forradalom vitorlájából.
Ami Marx eszmetörténeti munkásságát illeti, itt már érezhető némi elfogultság Wheen részéről – mindenesetre mindent megtesz, hogy megvédje A tőké-t és társait az elhamarkodott ítéletalkotóktól. Az bizonyos, hogy Marx személyében rendkívül eredeti gondolkodóval állunk szemben: mindaz, amit a tőkéről, mint társadalmi viszonyról, a munkaerőről, mint áruba bocsátható termékről, vagy épp a világpiacról és a kapitalizmus ciklikusságáról mond, alapvetően átírta a társadalomtudományi gondolkodást. Amikor kifejti, hogy a burzsujok** önön sírjukat ássák, amikor a városba csábítják a leendő munkaerőt, mert ezzel lehetőséget teremtenek nekik a szervezkedésre, ezáltal arra, hogy megdöntsék őt – hát ez fenemód logikus következtetés. Nem jött be, az igaz, legalábbis ott nem, ahol volt munkásság. Ahol volt, ott a munkások inkább korrigálni igyekeztek a rendszert, nem leönteni benzinnel, aztán pfff… meggyújtani – de hát akkor is: logikus. De ilyen tévedések minden autoriter gondolkodóval előfordulnak, aki nem hajlandó mások aspektusaiból megvizsgálni a problémát, ellenben hajlamos a prófétálásra. Ahogy Wheen tündökletesen jegyzi meg: Marx összetévesztette a kapitalizmus születési fájdalmát az agóniával. Van ez így – velem is gyakran megesik. Vagy az agóniát tévesztem össze a születési fájdalommal? Majd ötven év múlva kiderül.
* Ha Machiavelli szakállt növesztett volna, Jézus pedig felveszi az anyja nevét, még tökéletesebben ülne az elméletem.
** Akikről egyébként Marx meglepő respektussal beszélt – nagyon hálás volt, amiért átvették a hatalmat az impotens arisztokráciától, és felszabadították az emberiség káprázatos teremtő erejét. Más kérdés, hogy mindezt a nyílt kizsákmányolás eszközével tették, így csak átmeneti lehet az uralkodásul. Elméletben. A gyakorlatban viszont a kapitalizmus által alkalmazott nyílt kizsákmányolás fokozatosan egyre kevésbé nyílttá vált, és úgy fest, ezzel ki is fogták a szelet a forradalom vitorlájából.
April 7, 2025
This biography was shortlisted for the WHSmith Literary Award, Samuel Johnson Prize, Orwell Prize and the Silver Pen Award. I assume it didn’t win any of them and whilst judges are fickle and subjective I wonder if it was because Wheen has this annoying habit of throwing in crass jokes and sarcasm on what is otherwise an excellent biography of Marx.
It is well researched, well written and connects dots that are original. It overall paints a more sympathetic image of Marx the person compared to some biographies. Marx was very sociable, passionate, loyal to his wife, Jenny, and prone to fall out with every friend, but he was animated to help the plight of the poor and the working classes.
I recommend the book (but grit your teeth every chapter with the odd asides).
It is well researched, well written and connects dots that are original. It overall paints a more sympathetic image of Marx the person compared to some biographies. Marx was very sociable, passionate, loyal to his wife, Jenny, and prone to fall out with every friend, but he was animated to help the plight of the poor and the working classes.
I recommend the book (but grit your teeth every chapter with the odd asides).
April 15, 2024
Interesting, but bit popular account of the human side of Karl Marx instead of that what most books about him portray, the towering historical figure he's become through the role Lenin and the Sovjets ascribed to him.
It's shows him on the one hand as a loving husband and family man and on the other hand as small minded, wasting a lot of energy on the strives with people he disagreed with. And remarkably, a bit of a snob, who lived way beyond his means, always depending on his wealthy friend, Friedrich Engels, to bail him and his family out of financial trouble when baillifs came knocking at the door.
The book lacks an indept view in Marx theoretical thinking, but for me that was actually an advantage. I'm still out of my depth trying to understand Marx' thinking, but the way Wheen summarizes his ideas helped to get a bit more of understanding.
What I did miss was more of an insight in the historical times in which Marx lived and which formed him as a human and a political thinker. Most of the ground covered is family live and the ailtments that resctricted a lot of the energy available to him for writing.
I'm still looking for a book that in a, for those challenged in economical theory, comprehensible way makes me get a grip on the theories of Marx. Because I'm convinced that a lot of the insights he had in the inner workings of capitalism could help us in the economical and political crisis we're experiencing today.
This book helped a bit, but only a little bit.
It's shows him on the one hand as a loving husband and family man and on the other hand as small minded, wasting a lot of energy on the strives with people he disagreed with. And remarkably, a bit of a snob, who lived way beyond his means, always depending on his wealthy friend, Friedrich Engels, to bail him and his family out of financial trouble when baillifs came knocking at the door.
The book lacks an indept view in Marx theoretical thinking, but for me that was actually an advantage. I'm still out of my depth trying to understand Marx' thinking, but the way Wheen summarizes his ideas helped to get a bit more of understanding.
What I did miss was more of an insight in the historical times in which Marx lived and which formed him as a human and a political thinker. Most of the ground covered is family live and the ailtments that resctricted a lot of the energy available to him for writing.
I'm still looking for a book that in a, for those challenged in economical theory, comprehensible way makes me get a grip on the theories of Marx. Because I'm convinced that a lot of the insights he had in the inner workings of capitalism could help us in the economical and political crisis we're experiencing today.
This book helped a bit, but only a little bit.
June 13, 2014
We always heard that Marx was a humorless drudge, the equivalent of a computer geek, slaving away in the British Museum Reading Room. Nonsense. He was a merry one, or at least as merry as one could be --- having been born in dreary Trier, Germany.
He was a dynamite speaker, especially when there was a brouhaha amongst his fellow rabble-rousers, as there usually was. He could round up the troops, get anything he wanted passed when he was running, say, the International Working Men's Association.
And he was wonderful at insults. Arnold Ruge, he said,
stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: "It is permitted to pass water here."
Rudolf Schramm:
A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannequin whose life-motto came from Rameau's Nephew --- I would rather be an impudent windbag than nothing at all.
After he started Das Kapital, he was forever and a day promising to deliver the manuscript to the publishers, forever and a day putting it off. He had bad liver, pains here and there, and boils so terrible that he often couldn't sit to work. These carbuncles gave a colorful edge to his work. When he delivered Das Kapital to his German publishing house, the manuscript had blood all over it. Engels had to lacerate one of his more pernicious boils, sited on his...well, don't ask; I won't tell.
He and Frederick Engels were a pair. They used to go pub-hopping along Tottenham Court Road. There were eighteen pubs, and they vowed to visit each and every one. By the time they got to the last, they were drunk enough that they began to throw cobblestones at streetlights --- until the police came running. To avoid being caught, they ducked down alleys and jumped over fences like a couple of rowdy schoolboys. O these kids!
More reviews at www.ralphmag.org
He was a dynamite speaker, especially when there was a brouhaha amongst his fellow rabble-rousers, as there usually was. He could round up the troops, get anything he wanted passed when he was running, say, the International Working Men's Association.
And he was wonderful at insults. Arnold Ruge, he said,
stands in the German revolution like the notices seen at the corner of certain streets: "It is permitted to pass water here."
Rudolf Schramm:
A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little mannequin whose life-motto came from Rameau's Nephew --- I would rather be an impudent windbag than nothing at all.
After he started Das Kapital, he was forever and a day promising to deliver the manuscript to the publishers, forever and a day putting it off. He had bad liver, pains here and there, and boils so terrible that he often couldn't sit to work. These carbuncles gave a colorful edge to his work. When he delivered Das Kapital to his German publishing house, the manuscript had blood all over it. Engels had to lacerate one of his more pernicious boils, sited on his...well, don't ask; I won't tell.
He and Frederick Engels were a pair. They used to go pub-hopping along Tottenham Court Road. There were eighteen pubs, and they vowed to visit each and every one. By the time they got to the last, they were drunk enough that they began to throw cobblestones at streetlights --- until the police came running. To avoid being caught, they ducked down alleys and jumped over fences like a couple of rowdy schoolboys. O these kids!
More reviews at www.ralphmag.org
July 4, 2008
Wheen's wonderfully written book illustraits, with colors as vivis as possible, the life and works of Karl Marx, warts and all; from blood-thirsty arguments with opponents, to medical details of the various many ailments Marx suffered from to the horrificly true and not-so-nice predictions of Europe's political future including the world wars and what brought them about.
Karl Marx is an educating idol for anyone who wants to think on their own, to conclude only what their mind understand by constantly checking for contradictions and 'plot holes' in grand theories around them and Wheen describes wonderfully both how Marx came about this and what it brought him.
The book is well written, light to read and enjoyable. The style is humorist and serious at the same time, with a keen eye on the various misdeeds various politically-enclined historians twisted or wrongly presented Marx history and work, which is always nice to see.
A very good book, I highly recommend it.
Karl Marx is an educating idol for anyone who wants to think on their own, to conclude only what their mind understand by constantly checking for contradictions and 'plot holes' in grand theories around them and Wheen describes wonderfully both how Marx came about this and what it brought him.
The book is well written, light to read and enjoyable. The style is humorist and serious at the same time, with a keen eye on the various misdeeds various politically-enclined historians twisted or wrongly presented Marx history and work, which is always nice to see.
A very good book, I highly recommend it.
February 24, 2017
Kindlasti kasulik lugemine, mõistmaks 20. sajandit enim mõjutanud filosoofi elu ja kujunemislugu. That said, oli see veidikene kuiv ja igav lugemine minu jaoks.
July 31, 2020
The book concentrates mostly on the trials and tribulations of the revolutionary philosopher and very little on the critique of his writings, which the author defends in a few praising sentences.
Marx had charisma, and he was accepted as the star philosopher first by colleagues at the university and later in the weird and politically insignificant communist movement of the time.
An armchair revolutionary, whose apocalyptical prophecies didn’t materialise the way he thought they would, he would have been considered a minor thinker by the posterity if his writings weren’t seized by the Lenin’s Bolsheviks and used as a theoretical justification of their communist dictatorship.
After finishing his studies, he worked for a while as a journalist but the despotic regimes in Germany and France forced him to locate his family to London, where the authorities let him pursue his politics without any interference.
Here, despite his personal magnetism, he couldn’t cooperate with almost anyone except Engels, who had an incredible devotion to him. He supported financially Marx and his family until he died and even decided to have a cremation in order not to eclipse Marx’s tombstone as a place of pilgrimage.
He was an egocentric, who preferred a holiday instead of attending to his father’s funeral, fathered a child with the housekeeper and let Engels take the rap for it “ (Pg 168) Freddy has never found out, either from his mother or from General, who his father really is. Marx was continually aware of the possibility of divorce since his wife was frantically jealous. He did not love the child, and the scandal would have been too great if he had dared to do anything for him)”.
The communist propaganda claims he lived a poverty-stricken life. “(Pg 168) In fact, he belonged to the class of distressed gentlefolk, desperate to keep up appearances and unwilling to forgo bourgeois habits.
For most of the 1850s he could scarcely afford to feed his own children and vet he insisted on employing a secretary, the young German philologist Wilhelm Pieper, even though Jenny Marx was eager to do the job.
The employment of Pieper was a needless extravagance from the outset, but had been allowed to continue because Marx thought it unseemly for a chap in his position not to have a confidential secretary as well as regular seaside holidays, piano lessons for the children, and all the other costly appurtenances of respectability.
However empty his pockets, he simply refused to accept a sub-proletarian 'way of life, as he put it. What to other refugees might seem luxuries therefore became 'absolute necessities' while more imperative exigencies, such as paying the grocer, were treated as an optional extra.
If Marx was too skint to pay his own doctor, Engels might have wondered, how would he afford a fare to Germany? The question certainly occurred to his long-suffering creditors when they learned that Jenny had equipped herself with a new wardrobe of clothes for trip. Marx affected not to understand their indignation, maintaining that the daughter of a German baron 'could naturally arrive in Trier looking shabby.”
For a supporter of the proletariat, he was ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh and found work below his status. (Pg 186) “Without his benefactor, Marx wrote, 'I would long ago have been obliged to start a "trade"'. The retching disgust represented by those inverted commas is almost audible. As it was, thanks to Engels's generosity, he could spend most of his days in the reading room of the British Museum, resuming his long-neglected study of economics.”
Conspiratorial and viciously authoritarian, Marx disliked organisations or institutions which he could not dominate. In London, we worked very little, wasted his energy in squabbles with fellow philosophers and revolutionaries (sometimes using vile ad hominem attacks, even anti-Semitic insults).
He and Engels tried to lead the First Communist International with the result that the General Council was transferred from London to New York where it died the death.
“After the dissolution of the Communist League in 1852 he had no political chores to distract him, and he dealt with the demands of the New York Tribune by subcontracting much of the work to Engels. 'You've got to help me, now that I'm so busy with political economy,' he pleaded on 14 August 1851”.
Marx wanted to revolutionise the philosophy and society and tried endlessly to find news that will confirm his apocalyptic rhetoric. Alas, all his predicted imminent revolutions did not happen - Germany, France and Britain (“the wealthiest and most modern industrial society in the world”) were not “ripe for destruction”.
Writing was his legacy, inflammatory and shocking, full of energy, but of little coherence.
His best works - The Communist Manifesto and The Capital were meant to give a “scientific” base to his apocalyptical idea – the end of the world is nigh; the proletariat will rule the world and everything will be milk and honey.
Both are known for incendiary quotes, re-used at infinitum by people who did not and will not read Marks’s works:
“History is the judge - its executioner, the proletarian.”
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Prone to ceaseless procrastination, he was unable to complete The Capital. Engels collected some of his writings into The Capital Part 2 and 3.
“Marx thought his new dialectical science would allow him to predict the future as well as understand the present. Yet he failed to anticipate two of the biggest developments of the 20th century—the rise of fascism and the welfare state—and wrongly believed communism would take root in the most advanced economies.
Soul-crushing in its hatred of human nature, and irritating in its misconstruing of economic maxims. Beginning with a vast oversimplification of Adam Smith's theory of value, Marx proceeds to describe, for ants, bees and other insectile collectivists, the kind of economics he wishes had evolved among humans. He then offers--via a distortion of the Hegelian dialectic, which is itself a distortion of logic--a historicist, "scientific" account of how the "proletariat" will inevitably rise and take control of the world.”
His works were not successful during his life:
“Sheer incomprehension, rather than political prejudice, may explain the muted reaction to Capital when it was published. The silence about my book makes me fidgety, 'Marx wrote to Engels in October, revealing that insomnia had begun to persecute him again.
Even some of Marx's most adoring disciples found their eyes glazing over as they tried to make sense of the obscure chapters.”
Afterlife he became a historical celebrity because of Lenin and the Bolshevik dictatorship that needed a “scientific bible” as a theoretical foundation of its regime.
And it was most of a secret bible – nobody read it. In my time in Romania, we were forced to study the “scientific socialism” at school and at university but we were only given quotes from the bearded patriarch. Even the communists couldn’t make too much sense out of his verbosity.
His place is, as he very well put it, “in the dustbin of history”.
Other than that, I enjoyed the book, minus the parts where the author makes acrobatics to defend the indefensible conspiratorial, ignorant, brutally authoritarian bearded spectre.
Marx had charisma, and he was accepted as the star philosopher first by colleagues at the university and later in the weird and politically insignificant communist movement of the time.
An armchair revolutionary, whose apocalyptical prophecies didn’t materialise the way he thought they would, he would have been considered a minor thinker by the posterity if his writings weren’t seized by the Lenin’s Bolsheviks and used as a theoretical justification of their communist dictatorship.
After finishing his studies, he worked for a while as a journalist but the despotic regimes in Germany and France forced him to locate his family to London, where the authorities let him pursue his politics without any interference.
Here, despite his personal magnetism, he couldn’t cooperate with almost anyone except Engels, who had an incredible devotion to him. He supported financially Marx and his family until he died and even decided to have a cremation in order not to eclipse Marx’s tombstone as a place of pilgrimage.
He was an egocentric, who preferred a holiday instead of attending to his father’s funeral, fathered a child with the housekeeper and let Engels take the rap for it “ (Pg 168) Freddy has never found out, either from his mother or from General, who his father really is. Marx was continually aware of the possibility of divorce since his wife was frantically jealous. He did not love the child, and the scandal would have been too great if he had dared to do anything for him)”.
The communist propaganda claims he lived a poverty-stricken life. “(Pg 168) In fact, he belonged to the class of distressed gentlefolk, desperate to keep up appearances and unwilling to forgo bourgeois habits.
For most of the 1850s he could scarcely afford to feed his own children and vet he insisted on employing a secretary, the young German philologist Wilhelm Pieper, even though Jenny Marx was eager to do the job.
The employment of Pieper was a needless extravagance from the outset, but had been allowed to continue because Marx thought it unseemly for a chap in his position not to have a confidential secretary as well as regular seaside holidays, piano lessons for the children, and all the other costly appurtenances of respectability.
However empty his pockets, he simply refused to accept a sub-proletarian 'way of life, as he put it. What to other refugees might seem luxuries therefore became 'absolute necessities' while more imperative exigencies, such as paying the grocer, were treated as an optional extra.
If Marx was too skint to pay his own doctor, Engels might have wondered, how would he afford a fare to Germany? The question certainly occurred to his long-suffering creditors when they learned that Jenny had equipped herself with a new wardrobe of clothes for trip. Marx affected not to understand their indignation, maintaining that the daughter of a German baron 'could naturally arrive in Trier looking shabby.”
For a supporter of the proletariat, he was ridiculously proud of having married a bit of posh and found work below his status. (Pg 186) “Without his benefactor, Marx wrote, 'I would long ago have been obliged to start a "trade"'. The retching disgust represented by those inverted commas is almost audible. As it was, thanks to Engels's generosity, he could spend most of his days in the reading room of the British Museum, resuming his long-neglected study of economics.”
Conspiratorial and viciously authoritarian, Marx disliked organisations or institutions which he could not dominate. In London, we worked very little, wasted his energy in squabbles with fellow philosophers and revolutionaries (sometimes using vile ad hominem attacks, even anti-Semitic insults).
He and Engels tried to lead the First Communist International with the result that the General Council was transferred from London to New York where it died the death.
“After the dissolution of the Communist League in 1852 he had no political chores to distract him, and he dealt with the demands of the New York Tribune by subcontracting much of the work to Engels. 'You've got to help me, now that I'm so busy with political economy,' he pleaded on 14 August 1851”.
Marx wanted to revolutionise the philosophy and society and tried endlessly to find news that will confirm his apocalyptic rhetoric. Alas, all his predicted imminent revolutions did not happen - Germany, France and Britain (“the wealthiest and most modern industrial society in the world”) were not “ripe for destruction”.
Writing was his legacy, inflammatory and shocking, full of energy, but of little coherence.
His best works - The Communist Manifesto and The Capital were meant to give a “scientific” base to his apocalyptical idea – the end of the world is nigh; the proletariat will rule the world and everything will be milk and honey.
Both are known for incendiary quotes, re-used at infinitum by people who did not and will not read Marks’s works:
“History is the judge - its executioner, the proletarian.”
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!”
Prone to ceaseless procrastination, he was unable to complete The Capital. Engels collected some of his writings into The Capital Part 2 and 3.
“Marx thought his new dialectical science would allow him to predict the future as well as understand the present. Yet he failed to anticipate two of the biggest developments of the 20th century—the rise of fascism and the welfare state—and wrongly believed communism would take root in the most advanced economies.
Soul-crushing in its hatred of human nature, and irritating in its misconstruing of economic maxims. Beginning with a vast oversimplification of Adam Smith's theory of value, Marx proceeds to describe, for ants, bees and other insectile collectivists, the kind of economics he wishes had evolved among humans. He then offers--via a distortion of the Hegelian dialectic, which is itself a distortion of logic--a historicist, "scientific" account of how the "proletariat" will inevitably rise and take control of the world.”
His works were not successful during his life:
“Sheer incomprehension, rather than political prejudice, may explain the muted reaction to Capital when it was published. The silence about my book makes me fidgety, 'Marx wrote to Engels in October, revealing that insomnia had begun to persecute him again.
Even some of Marx's most adoring disciples found their eyes glazing over as they tried to make sense of the obscure chapters.”
Afterlife he became a historical celebrity because of Lenin and the Bolshevik dictatorship that needed a “scientific bible” as a theoretical foundation of its regime.
And it was most of a secret bible – nobody read it. In my time in Romania, we were forced to study the “scientific socialism” at school and at university but we were only given quotes from the bearded patriarch. Even the communists couldn’t make too much sense out of his verbosity.
His place is, as he very well put it, “in the dustbin of history”.
Other than that, I enjoyed the book, minus the parts where the author makes acrobatics to defend the indefensible conspiratorial, ignorant, brutally authoritarian bearded spectre.
July 11, 2021
Marx
This is a well written biography albeit a little unorthodox. It is much shorter than most biographies. The brevity works because Marx is a rather uninteresting subject until later in his life and the full impact of the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital in the intellectual and revolutionary circles would not be felt until the late 19th century.
When Marx died outside London in 1883 he was nearly broke and as a person largely forgotten. This was despite the fact that his works were banned in so many European countries.
In the biography there is an interesting letter from Charles Darwin congratulating Marx on his publication of Das Kapital. The two men lived just a few towns away from one another but they were otherwise unacquainted. Much was made by some biographers that they were friends but Wheen says it is hogwash.
Marx is not portrayed as a likable figure in this biography and some of this is probably that Marx is an oddity in England. He did not like the Englishman’s view on literature and he did not believe in working regular hours. But there is no doubt the safety and security of England and its capitalistic society allowed him to write in safety.
The author points out the Marx was bourgeois at his core and unsuited to regular employment. And he didn’t exactly practice what he preached when it came to Communism.
He was, perhaps surprisingly, a family man who in fact had a rather large family to support. Many of his children did succumb to tuberculosis which was a leading cause of death in England in the mid 19th century. But thanks to Engels and his publishing prowess, Marx made just enough of an income over the decades to keep his wife and remaining children out of the poor house.
4 stars
This is a well written biography albeit a little unorthodox. It is much shorter than most biographies. The brevity works because Marx is a rather uninteresting subject until later in his life and the full impact of the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital in the intellectual and revolutionary circles would not be felt until the late 19th century.
When Marx died outside London in 1883 he was nearly broke and as a person largely forgotten. This was despite the fact that his works were banned in so many European countries.
In the biography there is an interesting letter from Charles Darwin congratulating Marx on his publication of Das Kapital. The two men lived just a few towns away from one another but they were otherwise unacquainted. Much was made by some biographers that they were friends but Wheen says it is hogwash.
Marx is not portrayed as a likable figure in this biography and some of this is probably that Marx is an oddity in England. He did not like the Englishman’s view on literature and he did not believe in working regular hours. But there is no doubt the safety and security of England and its capitalistic society allowed him to write in safety.
The author points out the Marx was bourgeois at his core and unsuited to regular employment. And he didn’t exactly practice what he preached when it came to Communism.
He was, perhaps surprisingly, a family man who in fact had a rather large family to support. Many of his children did succumb to tuberculosis which was a leading cause of death in England in the mid 19th century. But thanks to Engels and his publishing prowess, Marx made just enough of an income over the decades to keep his wife and remaining children out of the poor house.
4 stars
October 3, 2024
ache uma alma-gêmea que te escute quando você reclama dos seus furúnculos E te ajude a construir a revolução
(e que elogie seus rabiscos sobre como o capitalismo é uó e tem que ser derrubado, sustente você durante a procrastinação da sua obra-prima, esconda os seus b.o.s etc. etc. alguém que no casamento da sua filha faça ela passar vergonha com wikileaks de momentos zuados da infância fazendo ela chorar na frente do noivo francês que você detesta. enfim, alguém devotado a você até os seus últimos momentos, jurando que você será o maior gênio do século PERIODT)
...
ninguém supera essa ship :') (marx <3 engels)
(e que elogie seus rabiscos sobre como o capitalismo é uó e tem que ser derrubado, sustente você durante a procrastinação da sua obra-prima, esconda os seus b.o.s etc. etc. alguém que no casamento da sua filha faça ela passar vergonha com wikileaks de momentos zuados da infância fazendo ela chorar na frente do noivo francês que você detesta. enfim, alguém devotado a você até os seus últimos momentos, jurando que você será o maior gênio do século PERIODT)
...
ninguém supera essa ship :') (marx <3 engels)
August 24, 2017
A typically precocious and enjoyable romp from one of Grub Street's real intellectuals. Hugely entertaining and readable. When Wheen started the book in 1997 he provocatively chose the least seemingly fashionable or relevant topic possible; now, as throughout history, it's proving to be suddenly pertinent all over again.
October 29, 2011
I finished reading this book in less than two weeks, which is quite fast considering I only read while I'm in the skytrain. But with this book I found myself reading and walking through the crowded Bangkok streets at the same time, occasionally pushing over some Thai people.
A flawed genius that wrote one of the most important and influential books in human history. Marx here comes by as a sectarian asshole alienating almost all his comrades all the time, as being mostly dirt poor, but also as being unable on giving up on bourgeois conveniences (private secretary, maid etc) that fitted a man of his caste (and therefore leading his family to unnecessarily suffer from lack of food), as a loving housefather that becomes a real softy at old age, as one that jokes together with Engels about nigger jews, of him (supposedly) impregnating the maid, as a serious binge-drinker, and how he rises and falls in infamy several times in his life. It's a fascinating subject and I didn't know Marx's life was that interesting. Also, sad are the endings of all Marx's children, with all the daughters that outlived him killing themselves leaving Karl Marx without any grandchildren. That Lenin spoke at Laura Marx's funeral in 1911 claiming that her father's ideal would soon become reality is also a fun little tidbit.
Don't expect a critical engagement with Marxist theory or anything like that. This is about Marx, the human. Although, there's enough on the theory in it that can help you pretend what you're talking about when discussing Marxism with your friends. Quite interestingly, Francis Wheen does however make the case that people should take Marx's theory seriously and he was writing this book in the "end-of-history" late 90s. And propping up Marx and highlighting how relevant is as a critique of today´s capitalist society was a brave thing to do in a mainstream publication in 1999, but reading it in 2011 after 3 years of economic meltdown this appreciation of Marx almost seems rather tame.
Highly recommended to everyone though. While I've not read any of the other bibliographies on Marx, this must be -the- book you have to read if you're interested in Karl Marx's personal life, which is in fact pretty damn interesting.
A flawed genius that wrote one of the most important and influential books in human history. Marx here comes by as a sectarian asshole alienating almost all his comrades all the time, as being mostly dirt poor, but also as being unable on giving up on bourgeois conveniences (private secretary, maid etc) that fitted a man of his caste (and therefore leading his family to unnecessarily suffer from lack of food), as a loving housefather that becomes a real softy at old age, as one that jokes together with Engels about nigger jews, of him (supposedly) impregnating the maid, as a serious binge-drinker, and how he rises and falls in infamy several times in his life. It's a fascinating subject and I didn't know Marx's life was that interesting. Also, sad are the endings of all Marx's children, with all the daughters that outlived him killing themselves leaving Karl Marx without any grandchildren. That Lenin spoke at Laura Marx's funeral in 1911 claiming that her father's ideal would soon become reality is also a fun little tidbit.
Don't expect a critical engagement with Marxist theory or anything like that. This is about Marx, the human. Although, there's enough on the theory in it that can help you pretend what you're talking about when discussing Marxism with your friends. Quite interestingly, Francis Wheen does however make the case that people should take Marx's theory seriously and he was writing this book in the "end-of-history" late 90s. And propping up Marx and highlighting how relevant is as a critique of today´s capitalist society was a brave thing to do in a mainstream publication in 1999, but reading it in 2011 after 3 years of economic meltdown this appreciation of Marx almost seems rather tame.
Highly recommended to everyone though. While I've not read any of the other bibliographies on Marx, this must be -the- book you have to read if you're interested in Karl Marx's personal life, which is in fact pretty damn interesting.
September 26, 2015
In an obituary of Christopher Hitchens, his longtime friend, Francis Wheen recounted Hitch's ludicrously improbable experiences and his exceptional clarity of mind, no matter how inebriated. It's hard to shake off the suspicion that Hitchens, who described Marx as "friend and mentor" in his memoir, supplies some of the vividness with which Wheen portrays Old Major. Never would you have guessed, in reading the customary 300-word biographies of sociology textbooks, what an extraordinarily rowdy, diseased, hectic, painful, poverty-stricken life the man led. Never do you get a sense of the sublime force of his character, the socratic hideousness of his appearance, the maniacal obsession with petty squabbles.
Wheen doesn't leave it at brilliant descriptions of day-to-day life. Analyses of his work, of ideological battles, and a refreshing elucidation of the first chapters of Das Kapital are not just there, but they make for captivating reading.
The book is not uncritical of Marx, but Wheen decidedly takes his side in the battle of the International, designating Bakunin as an occultist conspirator. He seems to have some serious apprehensions about Karl Marx -- but is unable to resist that fascinating thunderstorm of a character. As Wheen wrote about Hitchens, Marx was "a prodigiously energetic worker whose focus, as he observed the world and its follies, was never blurred. Even when he reached for another late-night whisky, his perception remained unerringly sober."
Wheen doesn't leave it at brilliant descriptions of day-to-day life. Analyses of his work, of ideological battles, and a refreshing elucidation of the first chapters of Das Kapital are not just there, but they make for captivating reading.
The book is not uncritical of Marx, but Wheen decidedly takes his side in the battle of the International, designating Bakunin as an occultist conspirator. He seems to have some serious apprehensions about Karl Marx -- but is unable to resist that fascinating thunderstorm of a character. As Wheen wrote about Hitchens, Marx was "a prodigiously energetic worker whose focus, as he observed the world and its follies, was never blurred. Even when he reached for another late-night whisky, his perception remained unerringly sober."
May 9, 2017
Quite enjoyed this. Two things worth knowing at the onset. Wheen presumes rather rich contextual knowledge on the part of the reader regarding 19th-century Europe, and the political and social trends of the period. Not in the sense that this is a forbiddingly over-intellectualised book, but because he kept alluding to entertaining or alluring titbits that sent me on significant digressions on wiki and elsewhere. The second is that this is more a critique of Marx's life (and rather personalised at that, with occasional ad-hominem pops at both Marx's contemporaries and other Marx biographers) than a straight up-and-down biography.
Neither of these diminish the book (far from it) but one does feel that a little editorial discipline (and consistency) would have made it a better read. As it is, it is rather idiosyncratic, quite entertaining, and wholly succeeds in demystifying Marx and his times. But also dense and occasionally claustrophobic.
Neither of these diminish the book (far from it) but one does feel that a little editorial discipline (and consistency) would have made it a better read. As it is, it is rather idiosyncratic, quite entertaining, and wholly succeeds in demystifying Marx and his times. But also dense and occasionally claustrophobic.
October 3, 2011
I think what readers will really enjoy with this one is the authors ability to keep it all in perspective. You can tell the author has no agenda, he doesn't push any "ideal" onto you he just tells you what happened and leaves the agenda pushing to the rest of us. I really liked that and thought he came at the character of Karl Marx from a number of different angles. He let you see what Marx may have looked like to his wife Jenny, to his friend Engels and to a whole host of other characters, that were both interesting and integral to his life. This was enjoyable, but perhaps not something to bother with if you are not really into this subject as it does turn out Marx's life was rather mundane.
May 21, 2019
A little bit too partial for my taste. Wheen clearly admires Marx and tries to explain away all of philosophers character flaws and decisions. Beside that, Wheen attacks and mocks all Marx's enemies almost like a friend was being attacked. But still the facts are here and a smart reader can detect all the problems of Communism in Marx's own life and political decisions, just by reading this book.
did-not-finish
January 10, 2021dnf @ 40%
October 2, 2020
This book, I had received it twenty years ago and I found it on my bookshelf, in this COVID19-times that force me to stay inside and to reflect. Each day, I read only one chapter. That was enough since each gives much food for thought. Marx's revolutionary ideas and his life in the 19th century are so intriguing. The book explains rather late Marx's main considerations and then dwells on these for a long time. It also describes quite tediously Marx's interactions with Charles Darwin and his fights late in his life with others that did not cite his work according to his liking. The latter is so familiar. All in all, I was most intrigued by the fact that Marx sacrificed so much for the sake of his 'proletarian mission'. He was stateless, after having fled from German to England and later even refused to become a German again, and while living in England for a very long time, Marx never fully integrated or was naturalised. He did not even write his works in English. The poverty in which this great mind lived, the loss of five children, his bad health (suffering from carbuncles all the time), the lacking of a proper office to work in and using the British Library instead, it is all shocking in comparison with current times.
February 14, 2024
Sucht man nach einer theoretischen Aufarbeitung von Marxens Denken, ist Francis Wheens Biographie mit Sicherheit die falsche Adresse, möchte man aber den vielschichtigen Mann und seine Familie mit Witz und Tragödie kennenlernen, ist man hier goldrichtig. Eine durchgehend interessante Lektüre!
January 23, 2023
The biography is excellent. The subject, Karl Marx, excellent philospher that he was, was also a disaster of a human being.
October 2, 2016
Three or four years ago, I went to go on a walk in the woods with my wife. It was early spring and the sun was shining, so we hoped to take the day and make the most of it. Or she did, and I have problems saying no to her when she asks because she’s just so darn persuasive. The walk didn’t last long. No one told the snowpack on the trail that it needed to have melted so that we could walk on the trail.
I’m not sure how I managed it, but there was a mall with an actual physical book store close by the trail we were trying to walk. At one point I had at least a couple hundred dollars worth of books in my hand (hardbacks at bookstore prices). One of them was the new biography of Marx that had recently come out. I almost bought it but put it down because I realized that a life of Marx is one of those things that is hard to be objective about. I didn’t want to spend seven hundred pages with an author who was a staunch Hegelian mad about Marx’s subversion of their hero or some marginalist economist mad that the subject didn’t fully wrestle with the mathematics of their revolution. Or, you know, whatever else you could possibly see the life of Marx and his ideas being politicized somehow.
So instead of buying that unknown book, I went looking for people who had read various lives and what they would recommend to read. The Wheen biography came up a lot. So I bought that book, and then I put it on my shelf as a decoration and then forgot about it for the next several years. And recently, once I finished my MBA program, I found myself with time and inclination to go about reading some of the scores of books I own but haven’t read yet, and a familiar name looked out at me from the shelf.
For any student of the left, the life and career of Marx is knowable in broad strokes - youth in Germany, exile in England, friendship with Engles. Wheen fills all of those blank spots in. What Wheen does more than anything else is to humanize Marx from someone that is a boogeyman of the cold war to a guy with a family trying to make due in Victorian England.
I think Wheen, like myself, had already made his mind up about Marx before he approached this book. If there is any criticism to be had, I offer two. For one, it is only 400 pages. What lacks for me is a deeper engagement with the philosophy and economics of Marx. I’m not sure if that was a choice made to keep the book more accessible or why it was made. But I think it plays into my other criticism. I felt that the author may have been too sympathetic to Marx. He was a human who did make some bad choices (like maybe cheating on Jenny Marx) and I think glossing over that nuance in fear of attacking the subject makes the book less than what it could be. This sympathy is also evident where he addresses some of the more well-known intellectual rivals to Marxism, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, so that these men and their followers are diminished in the book, the casual reader isn’t really let into why Marxian ideas are superior.
Overall, though, if you only know those broad strokes then the Wheen biography is a good entry point for learning about the life of Marx. If you want to get deeper into his ideas, there are other avenues, like the work of David Harvey or Paul D’Amato. Or you can just climb the mountain of Capital itself, something I need to do.
I’m not sure how I managed it, but there was a mall with an actual physical book store close by the trail we were trying to walk. At one point I had at least a couple hundred dollars worth of books in my hand (hardbacks at bookstore prices). One of them was the new biography of Marx that had recently come out. I almost bought it but put it down because I realized that a life of Marx is one of those things that is hard to be objective about. I didn’t want to spend seven hundred pages with an author who was a staunch Hegelian mad about Marx’s subversion of their hero or some marginalist economist mad that the subject didn’t fully wrestle with the mathematics of their revolution. Or, you know, whatever else you could possibly see the life of Marx and his ideas being politicized somehow.
So instead of buying that unknown book, I went looking for people who had read various lives and what they would recommend to read. The Wheen biography came up a lot. So I bought that book, and then I put it on my shelf as a decoration and then forgot about it for the next several years. And recently, once I finished my MBA program, I found myself with time and inclination to go about reading some of the scores of books I own but haven’t read yet, and a familiar name looked out at me from the shelf.
For any student of the left, the life and career of Marx is knowable in broad strokes - youth in Germany, exile in England, friendship with Engles. Wheen fills all of those blank spots in. What Wheen does more than anything else is to humanize Marx from someone that is a boogeyman of the cold war to a guy with a family trying to make due in Victorian England.
I think Wheen, like myself, had already made his mind up about Marx before he approached this book. If there is any criticism to be had, I offer two. For one, it is only 400 pages. What lacks for me is a deeper engagement with the philosophy and economics of Marx. I’m not sure if that was a choice made to keep the book more accessible or why it was made. But I think it plays into my other criticism. I felt that the author may have been too sympathetic to Marx. He was a human who did make some bad choices (like maybe cheating on Jenny Marx) and I think glossing over that nuance in fear of attacking the subject makes the book less than what it could be. This sympathy is also evident where he addresses some of the more well-known intellectual rivals to Marxism, namely Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, so that these men and their followers are diminished in the book, the casual reader isn’t really let into why Marxian ideas are superior.
Overall, though, if you only know those broad strokes then the Wheen biography is a good entry point for learning about the life of Marx. If you want to get deeper into his ideas, there are other avenues, like the work of David Harvey or Paul D’Amato. Or you can just climb the mountain of Capital itself, something I need to do.
September 13, 2018
It's partially my fault that reading this was such a chore. I knew before I picked it up that this was about Marx the person, rather than about his intellectual output. Still, I figured no biography could just gloss over Capital and the rest of his works. But this book did!
If you read this you will learn nothing, or next to nothing, about why Karl Marx was a socialist, why he moved from philosophy to economics, or how he developed the theories described in Capital.
You will learn a lot about Marx's personal squabbles, his money troubles, his ailments, whether or not he knocked up his maid, and whether or not he wanted to dedicate a book to Charles Darwin.
Some of this is entertaining, interesting, and even moving. Most of it isn't. It's virtually all based on personal correspondence, presented in chronological order, so it feels like a timeline of Marx's life strung together in an artlessly dry narrative.
Maybe you already know about Karl Marx, the intellect. Maybe you want to know about Karl Marx, the mooch with carbuncles. If so, I recommend this. It is sympathetic to its subject, which is nice. Steer clear otherwise.
If you read this you will learn nothing, or next to nothing, about why Karl Marx was a socialist, why he moved from philosophy to economics, or how he developed the theories described in Capital.
You will learn a lot about Marx's personal squabbles, his money troubles, his ailments, whether or not he knocked up his maid, and whether or not he wanted to dedicate a book to Charles Darwin.
Some of this is entertaining, interesting, and even moving. Most of it isn't. It's virtually all based on personal correspondence, presented in chronological order, so it feels like a timeline of Marx's life strung together in an artlessly dry narrative.
Maybe you already know about Karl Marx, the intellect. Maybe you want to know about Karl Marx, the mooch with carbuncles. If so, I recommend this. It is sympathetic to its subject, which is nice. Steer clear otherwise.
August 5, 2018
Portrait of Karl Jeremiah Wooster Cosby Marx. Wheen’s an ideal biographer: fearless, careful, sympathetic on balance. (So, ideal for the readers rather than the subject.)
Most of his shortish book is debunking slanders; the rest is in cementing others. Was Marx a bully? No: bullies take weak targets. A dogmatist? No; he spent twenty years researching one-quarter of his big book, and admired his bourgeois forebears Ricardo and Feuerbach. Was he a Whig ‘historian’? Sort of. Petty? Oh yes indeed. A hypocritical idealist? Tried not to be. Anti-semite? Yes, or, used the same language. Russophobe? Definitely somewhat. A bourgeois patriarch? Very much so. A heartless philanderer? Once. A show-off? Yup.
I came up with an epitaph for him – “KM. Excellent journalist, journeyman economist, awful leader.” but I am not learned enough to assert it yet. Wheen is in a rush (Hegel’s system gets five lines) but he writes well, seems to have read everything in the vicinity.
Most of his shortish book is debunking slanders; the rest is in cementing others. Was Marx a bully? No: bullies take weak targets. A dogmatist? No; he spent twenty years researching one-quarter of his big book, and admired his bourgeois forebears Ricardo and Feuerbach. Was he a Whig ‘historian’? Sort of. Petty? Oh yes indeed. A hypocritical idealist? Tried not to be. Anti-semite? Yes, or, used the same language. Russophobe? Definitely somewhat. A bourgeois patriarch? Very much so. A heartless philanderer? Once. A show-off? Yup.
I came up with an epitaph for him – “KM. Excellent journalist, journeyman economist, awful leader.” but I am not learned enough to assert it yet. Wheen is in a rush (Hegel’s system gets five lines) but he writes well, seems to have read everything in the vicinity.
January 17, 2016
Francis Wheen managed to do here something that must have been really hard: avoiding everything in Marx's life and work that really matter, while still being able to fill what seemed like an endless amount of pages with irrelevant everyday gossip on the guy's come and goes from the time. One may perfectly well like or díslike Marx for so many reasons, but one thing seems undeniable: he (his work, or how it has been translated to public opinion) have been referencial, influential and transcendental, to say the least. Was i the only one to find it surprising and dissapointing that this sounded too much like a written reality show set in the victorian era? I wasn't expecting to suddenly become a fan (Marx's), but reading this had me caring about him about as much as i do for the Osbournes or the Kardashians...
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