Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life
This September a new edition of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital translated by Paul Reitter is set to come out. Seeing this asteroid hurdling toward me sent me to my bookcases. In good doomsday prepper fashion, I considered rereading Capital in an older translation or returning to one of my many biographies or studies of the man. I settled on a biography I hadn’t read before, Jonathan Serber’s fairly lengthy Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life.
Serber finds two versions of Marxology as “singularly useless pastimes.” The first which attempts “to update Marx, to make his ideas more relevant by adding to them or reinterpreting them in light of. . .intellectual movement[s] emerging in the years between Marx’s death in 1883 and the Present.” And the second which studies “Marx’s own ideas, so that revisions and later accretions can be erased and Marxism can be returned to its original purity.”
Instead, Serber argues that “Marx’s life, his system of thought, his political strivings and aspirations, belonged primarily to the nineteenth century,” and there they should have stayed: dead like their author. . . Okay that last bit is me.
To this end, the book is successful, perhaps distressingly so, for some. It’s not just that we get Marx a nineteenth century life, we get a Marx who feels like a marginal figure in a big century – no, worse: Marx, the marginal figure whose ideas were defunct before the century itself had closed.
He was most known, for most of his life, within radical circles, among his newspaper readership, and by the authorities. For example, while at the Rhineland News in Cologne – a fascinating “nodal point” Serber handles brilliantly – we’re told that his work here,
particularly the four stormy months when he served as its informal editor, from mid-October 1842 to mid-February 1842, was a period of intense and productive effort that would make him known, in impressive fashion, to three very different audiences.
Those audiences being: the Young Hegelians, the Prussian authorities, and the “influential inhabitants of Cologne.” Granted this was an upstart newspaper (with a circulation of 1,027 by the end of the third quarter of 1842, short of the breakeven 2,500 subscriptions) and a position held at a relatively young age – but that trifecta feels about right all the way up through: radicals, readership, and authorities.
To say he was marginal isn’t to say he was unknown, as Serber notes: “in the years 1853-62, he put his journalist experience to good use, writing for six different newspapers, in England, the United States, Prussia, Austria, and even South Africa.”
But even here I think the point holds. Take his time at the New York Tribune, where the majority of his journalist was printed: first, “busy with polemics against his fellow refugees, and his book on political economy, still very unsure of his English, Marx turned the writing over to Engels” who, over the course of the decade (starting in 1852), ghostwrote about a quarter of the pieces; second, these were not the disquisitions of the radical who know, rather they were reports on European affairs.
This brings me to that asteroid in my future: Capital, in which I think we can see his ideas as both wrong when they were written, and shown to be so before the century ended.
Let’s demonstrate this with a known problem.
In his foundations, Marx first asserted, as detailed by Serber, that “the price of commodities, and the wages of labor (the price of the commodity labor power), resulted from the socially necessary labor time required for their production and reproduction”. Later in Capital he described the logic of the capitalist system:
Capitalists, driven by competition in the market, were fighting to increase or at least maintain their profits; and given the origin of profit in surplus value, Marx perceived two ways they could do so. One he called the “extraction of absolute surplus value,” by which he meant the lengthening of the working day, so that workers would devote a greater proportion of their labor time to producing profits for their capitalist employer and a lesser proportion to producing goods that, when sold, would pay their wages.
Additionally, capitalists could extract “relative surplus value” further by making labor more productive through capital accumulation. But this has a catch:
Yet the very same process leading to the production of ever greater societal wealth was producing ever greater immiseration. As production became steadily more mechanized, capitalists’ demand for labor decreased, driving down wages for regularly employed workers, and creating a growing number of workers who were irregularly employed or completely unemployed.
This drop in required labor, the source of value, would then eventually lead to a falling average rate of profit if demand remained the same.
There are several implications here, but with his labor theory we have what is perhaps the most significant issue in Marx’s economic program: because profits derive from surplus value of labor, profit rates will be higher in labor intensive industries than more heavily capitalized ones. But Marx himself recognized that profit rates tend to equalize across sectors because capital flows to relatively profitable ventures from less profitable ones.
As the great Austrian Economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk noted in a work published the year after Marx died, “Marx himself became aware of the fact that there was a contradiction here, and found it necessary for the sake of his solution to promise to deal with it later on. But the promise was never kept, and indeed could not be kept.”
Marx’s attempted solution came in the later published Volume III of Capital edited by Engels. The solution, which reverts to basic Ricardian theory, doesn’t work. And as Serber notes, it “seems to be very strongly at odds with his observations about the central features of an industrial and capitalist economy.” This volume itself was criticized by Böhm-Bawerk in a still excellent and standing extended essay titled Karl Marx and the Close of his System.
In short, there is a contradiction at the heart of Marx’s theory, he saw it and in reverting to Ricardian theory he gave up the program, and soon after he gave up the ghost, leaving generations of Marxists to wrestle with the problem.
The issues with Marx’s Capital start on the first page and end with the final one so I’ll cut myself short there – you’re welcome. But this does bring me to another component of Serber’s book: he goes easy on him. Of course I would say this, I’m no more a fan of the man than his work. Serber doesn’t ignore much in this book, but time and time again it feels he is playing down Marx’s considerable faults.
After exposing, in gentle terms, the “transformation problem” of value into price we’re told it ends up “raising still more questions about his entire vision of the future of capitalism.” Right, he was wrong. Can we say that?
This continues when dealing with Marx’s personal life. Months after his wife, Jenny, gave birth to their daughter Franziska, their maid, Helene Demuth, gave birth to Marx’s illegitimate son, Henry Fredrick (“Freddy”). Marx convinced Engels to say the child was his, they both treated him poorly, and Engels was stuck paying for Freddy’s education. The invidiousness here is not at all communicated - not to mention Engel’s being made the sucker and then resentful.
And on the subject of Engels, Marx continually manipulated him for money. This is, to me, plain in the letters, but mostly discerned here by reading between the lines – sure, we get the difficulties in the two’s relationship that resulted, but I don’t think it’s an accurate portrayal of how Marx treated Engels.
That segues nicely to his impossible relationship with money, a constant in the book. Take this paragraph:
Unlike the long-awaited inheritance from his mother, the second was quite unexpected. Marx’s close friend and political ally Wihelm Wolff passed away in his Manchester exile on May 9, 1864, leaving Marx some £700, the bulk of his assets. The influx of funds enabled Marx to pay off his debts and the family to move into a new, larger, and more luxurious house (each of the daughters had her own room). . .Biographers wag their fingers at this aggressive spending when the financial future was so insecure, but even a more careful husbanding of the two windfalls would not have resolved the basic problem of the lack of steady income.
Maybe that last part if correct, let’s say it is. It still isn’t a corrective to previous biographers. Marx was a reckless spender of money, his own, sure, but especially others’, and this was often on extravagant or unnecessary purchases.
Marx, the manipulative sponge is not the Marx in this biography. Also not included is this passage from Marx himself on Money:
If money is the bond which ties me to human life and society to me, which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds? Can it not bind and loose all bonds? Is it therefore not the universal means of separation? It is the true agent of separation and the true cementing agent, it is the chemical power of society.
Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular:
(1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of things; it brings together impossibilities.
(2) It is the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples.
The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities, the bringing together of impossibilities, the divine power of money lies in its nature as the estranged and alienating species-essence of man which alienates itself by selling itself. It is the alienated capacity of mankind.
[bolding mine]. I think you get the point.
Finally, there’s Marx’s anti-Semitic comments. For example, in On the Jewish Question Marx wrote:
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.
We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.
He goes on at some length. These sorts of comments pop up throughout the book, and I wouldn’t say Serber gives him a pass, but he does sort of explain it away:
First, context,
Understanding what Marx had in mind when writing the piece means removing it from the twentieth century’s totalitarian regimes, mass murders, and racial anti-Semitism, and putting it back into its original context of the 1840s. . .
Second explaining,
Marx did use his negative picture of the Jews as a way to attack capitalism. He did not, as would be the case with most anti-semites, identify capitalism or the worst aspects of capitalism with the Jews; but he did perceive capitalism arising out of Jewish economic practices.
Finally ameliorating,
Marx believed that Jews should have equality of rights as citizens. Their emancipation was a goal worth fighting for, and an important indicator of a democratic political order.
I’ve seen this before, and at some point the work you put in to clean it up just proves the point.
Still, despite my issues I wouldn’t turn you away from this book. For such a polarizing figure, this is a soberly done biography that competently covers a huge amount of material – no small thing when dealing with Marx. Just read it skeptically.