ebooks Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones in History

Review

100 of 100 people found the following review helpful. An immersive; profound study of Marx's intellectual developmentBy Nigel SeelEveryone has an agenda with Marx. The Second International under Kautsky used him to justify its minimal/maximal programmes of de facto collaboration with the bourgeois state. Lenin and Trotsky used him to demonstrate unavoidable; terminal contradictions within capitalism and the necessity of violent revolution. Bourgeois writers distorted his words while left-liberals saw him as a much-maligned but benign genius; whose far-sighted humanity had been co-opted by extremists.Gareth Stedman Jones’s response has been a deep; immersive dive into the history; politics and ideas which swirled around the contemporary Marx. For most of the book it seems that Jones – along with the reader - has become an invisible member of that small group of friends; colleagues and acolytes of ‘Karl’ as he lives his life from one month to the next responding to events. Jones appears to have read everything important in those debates and to be intimately acquainted with the detailed history of Western Europe and America during Marx’s lifetime (1818 – 1883).The picture which emerges is much more realistic than the disengaged; omniscient oracle of legend. Marx starts as a classicist and aspiring poet with some legal training. Always political (the ‘Young Hegelians’); he is not at first interested in economics; much preferring philosophy; the subject of his PhD. In the 1840s he supports himself by radical journalism which was to remain his career through most of his life: it was not lucrative.‘Capital’ was written in the 1860s; in London. Jones describes the major innovations which Marx introduced – specifically the clear distinctions between use-value and exchange-value; the concept of surplus value and the analysis of generalised commodity production as distinctive of capitalism. Here; the exploitative character of capitalism has been laid bare; while in the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall (through an ever-increasing level of automation - ‘constant capital’) a rationale was proposed for inherent limits of the capitalist mode of production.It was here; according to Jones; that Marx ran out of steam. Although he had a decade or more of life ahead of him he was unable to resolve a number of theoretical problems. How was the abstract concept of exchange-value translated into prices as seen in the shops and on the stock exchanges? How did capitalism interact with the pre-capitalist world as it expanded across the world - what was the nature of the dynamic and to what extent was ‘imperialism’ forced by its very nature? How could we understand the distinctive incarnations of the capitalist state?Whenever Marx was under deadlines to write up his analysis of these issues; promised for the later volumes of ‘Capital’; ill-health seemed to intervene – liver problems; headaches and those famous ‘carbuncles’. Jones suggests this was not an accident.Marx was not incredibly famous during his lifetime. He was for periods notorious however - demonised by the press as a dangerous agitator in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871. Meanwhile ‘Capital’ volume one sold well enough (one wonders how much of it was read; however). His real fame came posthumously when his views; as packaged by Engels; became very convenient – in a crude form - as a foundational vision for the influential German Social-Democratic Party (the Erfurt Programme). Things never looked back after that.Gareth Stedman Jones has written a stellar book here; the scholarship immense. The reader truly feels present in Marx’s life and times. Jones shows how frequently Marx was wrong; tending to impose his ideas as a smothering straightjacket over the complexity and subtlety of political events. Yet he also showed more insight than many of his left-wing colleagues while his thinking was far deeper and more profound. We should also not forget that; in journalistic terms; he was a highly-talented writer.I have a small quibble: Jones has scrupulously adopted an observational tone; with only small amounts of critical commentary on the more theoretical issues. I would have welcomed a chapter; perhaps at the end; where the author could have summed up what he thought Marx’s fundamental contributions had been - and more specifically; where he though Marx had been intellectually defeated.Note: while this is an excellent book; it does presuppose the reader is actually interested in the intellectual debates and political disputes of mid-nineteenth century Europe. If you feel underwhelmed; for example; by the issues which so agitated the Young Hegelians; it’s unlikely that you’ll get past the early chapters.2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. An intellectual biography that should have been more intellectual; less biographyBy JoshThe greatest strength of this book is Stedman Jones’s thorough understanding of the intellectual lay of the land—including the variations between the intellectual landscapes in different Western European countries and how they changed over time. More than just being able to tell you which ideas influenced Marx; he tells you how Marx adopted them—which ideas he adopted whole; which he adopted in an idiosyncratic fashion without fully understanding what they meant to their originators; which ideas he stubbornly clung to even when events seemed to disprove them; which ideas slowly changed in his mind over time. One outstanding example of this is his portrait of Marx; Arnold Ruge; and other German Hegelian confreres in Parisian exile. Stedman Jones says outright that they did not really understand the debates going on around them (coming from a Prussian context in which radical atheists warred against a conservative Christian monarch; they were ill-equipped to understand the Christian socialist labor movements they encountered in Paris) and thus adopted French radicals’ class terminology (including familiar terms like proletarian) while still preserving an essentially German mindset. A more macro-level example is Stedman Jones’s argument that Marx failed to grasp the importance of democratic politics and political participation in the age of mass media; deriding Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as a farce instead of recognizing him as the exemplar of a new populist democratic form of politics.Stedman Jones is also prepared to criticize Marx’s intellectual project in a substantive and rather deep-going way. He argues that Marx was unable to complete volumes two and three of Capital because of “intellectual difficulties”—because he couldn’t manage to make it coherent and convincing.The book is at its best as an analytical and critical intellectual biography—when talking about the development of ideas; not people. The more conventional biographical information is present; and is occasionally well-done (especially when talking about Marx’s youth) but other times it seems to be in there purely out of obligation. The chronology can be a little confusing. In a given chapter; Stedman Jones may start out by giving a historical overview of an era; then; without sufficiently signaling it; he’ll start surveying the same era a second time from a different angle; with the result that the reader will suddenly be surprised by the same events happening twice or out of chronological order. At its most farcical this involves Marx’s daughters reacting to their mother’s death dozens of pages before it even occurs. The mix of intellectual history and biography is not always well done; and the structure of the book is a little odd and disjointed.In fact; I fear that GSJ’s framing of this book as a biography means that some of his most interesting arguments are never properly developed. In his prologue and epilogue; Stedman Jones explains some of his rationale for writing this biography. He explains that very; very quickly after Marx’s death; August Bebel; Karl Kautsky; Engels; and other socialists of the turn of the century began; very intentionally; to create a mythos of Marx as a forbidding genius; at the same time; the doctrine known as Marxism began to be formalized in a way that emphasized certain of Marx’s (and Engels’s) ideas at the expense of others. Certain of Marx’s ideas went down the memory hole in a very weird way. Thus Stedman Jones states his ambition to “put Marx back in his nineteenth-century surroundings” and recover a true account of Marx’s intellectual development in order correct a false; mythologized one. But that contrast is left implicit in 99 percent of this book. His project is an interesting one. In my opinion he should have made the stakes much clearer and pointed out much more clearly at which points of his book he was contradicting the received wisdom (of 19th- and 20th-century socialism; of Marxism-Leninism; of previous biographers). Instead this is an intellectual biography that is scrupulous about putting Marx in his context; but does not put itself in context.4 of 10 people found the following review helpful. It was great but perhaps too much informationBy Walter J GordonIt was great but perhaps too much information. I guess I would prefer a straight philosophical biography of ideas rather than mixed with his personal life.