Today’s economic history: Richard J. Evans reviews ‘Karl Marx’ by Jonathan Sperber
Myself, I would translate ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft’ as “All the established estates and orders of society are steamed away”…
(2013): Review of ‘Karl Marx’ by Jonathan Sperber: “Marx v. The Rest…. Previous accounts of Marx’s life have gone one of two ways…
…Either he is seen as a prophet… or… a misguided and misguiding ideologue…. This book aims to scrape away the patina of retrospective polemic to reveal Marx in the context of his own times…. Sperber provides a new translation of the much discussed sentence in the Manifesto, ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft’: ‘All that is solid melts into air’ in the standard English version but rendered by Sperber as ‘Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate.’ What Marx had in mind was not some mystical process of transformation, but the dissolution of hierarchical Prussian society by the steam-power of industry. Political revolution leading to a communist regime… would be achieved on the lines of the French Revolution’s… Jacobin phase, from 1792 to 1794….
The problem for Marx was that his anti-Prussian campaign required the co-operation of left-wing liberals and democrats, while his championing of the class struggle meant turning against them. While Marx vacillated, the workers lost interest in the former campaign and the democrats were alienated by the latter….
The exiles meanwhile accused each other of hypocrisy and embezzlement, taking each other to court and resorting to fisticuffs; two of them even fought a duel. Although this dire situation has often been blamed on Marx, he had previously been quite capable of working amicably with his associates, including the democrats of Cologne, and Sperber is more inclined to blame Engels, whose tactless and bullying personality he repeatedly criticises. The situation was made worse by scurrilous rumours spread by German and Austrian police spies, who swarmed around them like flies around a corpse….
Marx withdrew from politics and devoted himself to forging a new career as a journalist, writing articles for the New York Tribune, commissioned by an American working on the paper who had met him in Cologne. He published 487 articles in all, about a quarter of them ghostwritten by Engels when Marx was ill. They amounted to more, in sheer volume, than the sum total of everything else Marx published in his lifetime, and while many biographers pass over them silently, Sperber does a good job of analysing their content, particularly Marx’s extensive commentaries on the Crimean War. The fiasco of the British conduct of the war convinced him that the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was a paid agent of the Russians, whom Marx had long loathed as ‘the gendarme of Europe’…. The money he got for his journalism, together with subsidies from the prosperous Engels, enabled his family to rent a house in Kentish Town, in North London, to buy their own furniture for it, and to afford modest luxuries like picnics on Hampstead Heath….
Marx’s Herr Vogt is usually ignored as a ‘non-canonical’ work, but Sperber shows that it was more influential and more widely read at the time than the subsequently canonical Eighteenth Brumaire. The charge that Vogt was a client of French imperialist designs on the Rhineland was vindicated when Napoleon III fell in 1870…. At the time, Vogt won the argument, but the dispute brought Marx new political allies, notably the revolutionary socialist Ferdinand Lassalle…. Marx and Engels did not entirely trust the flamboyant Lassalle, and they peppered their letters about him with anti-semitic invective, painting him as a vulgar, pushy parvenu, ‘Isidor Berlin Blue Dye’, ‘the little Yid Braun’. Lassalle invited Marx to Berlin, where he threw dinner parties for him and took him to the opera, cheekily finding him a seat next to the royal box. Marx visited old friends in Cologne and family in Trier, where his mother graciously cancelled his debts to her….
It was Marx’s ‘passionately irreconcilable, uncompromising and intransigent nature’ that had ‘the deepest and most resonant appeal, and has generated the sharpest rebukes and opposition, down to the present day’, Sperber writes, while downplaying the legacy of his ideas. He has given us a Marx for the post-Marxist age, a superb 21st-century biography that sets its subject firmly in his 19th-century context but also explains why his legacy continues to be fought over.