Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

Abstract

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. By Gareth Stedman Jones. London: Penguin Books, 2017, pp. 768. Paper Back. ISBN 978-0-141-02480-6.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. By Gareth Stedman Jones. London: Penguin Books, 2017, pp. 768. Paper Back. ISBN 978-0-141-02480-6.

As early as page 2 in Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, Stedman Jones boldly highlights that "(t)he invention of what came to be called as 'Marxism' was initially in large part the creation of Engels in his books and pamphlets, beginning with Anti-Dühring in 1878". He further adds, as keepers of Marx's works, the leaders ofthe German Social Democratic Party, including August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Franz Mehring, were also responsible for further mystifications of Marx by hiding the embarrassing gaps between the image and reality of Marx and his theory. This was ostensibly done in order to protect the party - which had Marx as its founding theorist - from being attacked and discredited by the ruling power which was the imperial government of Wilhelmine Germany (p. 2-3). Jones subsequently states, "From the beginning, what came to be called as 'Marxism' had been built upon an unambiguously selective view of what was to count as theory, not only in relation to would-be heretics, but also in relation to Marx himself' (p. 4). Afterwards he reveals a content from Bebel's letter to Kautsky: "By the way, I want to tell you - but please keep absolutely quiet about it - that some of the letters (Marx's) were not published, above all, because they were too strong for us" (p. 4). These punchlines are more than enough to shake the general understanding of Marx and "Marxism" to acclaiming Marxists and critical theorists alike.

The first chapter provides detailed descriptions of Marx's family background, starting from his father's career and, later about Marx himself as an enthusiastic young man who communicated with his father, who "knew Voltaire and Rousseau by heart" (p. 29), through letters reporting on his intellectual journey. It is also appealing to know that Marx in his youth had almost died due to pulmonary disease (p. 35). Then the chapter explains that the reasons for Marx's father's conversion to Christianity were due to suppression from the Prussian authority and for his family survival (p. 23). Simultaneously, Jones presents an exceptional account that contextualises Marx's life within 19th century Prussia. In this account, we could feel the Prussian polity at work, including rifts between liberals, radicals, republicans, constitutional monarchists, Bonapartists, nationalists, and democrats (p. 30) as well as international factors (post-French Revolution Europe) that shaped the cultural, political, and economics of the country at that time. It is also fascinating to know, via the second chapter entitled 'The Lawyer, the Poet and the Lover', that Marx as a young man was actually dedicated to become a poet. The chapter shares a few of Marx's romantic poems (p. 44-46).

In the following chapters, Jones displays Marx's strong passions in seeking knowledge. Marx is shown to have been constantly challenging his intellectual capability through meetings, learning, and debates with great scholars and his contemporaries, such as the Hegelians Eduard Gans (chapter 3, Bruno Bauer (chapter 4), Moses Hess (chapter 6), as well as the so-called "utopian" socialists like Ludwig Feuerbach and Charles Fourier (chapter 5), and Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Louis Blanc (chapter 6). Afterwards Marx's atheism takes centre stage, when Jones highlights Marx's concern with the degradation of men by religion as stated in the foreword section of his doctoral dissertation, "All heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human selfconsciousness as the highest divinity" (p. 92) as well as in 1844's On The Jewish Question, wherein he theorized Judaism: "Money was 'the worldly God' of the Jew, and 'huckstering' his 'worldly religion', since the secular basis of Judaism.. .was 'practical need' and self-interest'" (p. 151). Further, Jones shows that Marx in 1844 had concluded that to reconcile between reason and revelation is defective for human emancipation as opposed to the argument of Bauer, his former teacher (p. 132-135). Perhaps Marx, up to this stage, never had the chance to be acquainted with other religious traditions that were able to balance between rationality and faith.

In chapter 7, 'The Democratic Dictator', Jones provocatively portrays Marx's totalitarian tendencies. In 1846 in Brussels, Marx, together with Engels and Philippe Gigot, set up a Communist Correspondence Committee to supervise and "cut off" rival socialist popular writings so as to keep the German, English, and French socialists ideologically and organizationally intact. The same dictatorial image of Marx was projected by Jones in chapter eight, when Marx was the editor-in-chief for Neue Rheinische Zeitung (p. 263).

Further, in chapter 9, Jones suggests, rather indirectly, that Marx was anti-oriental, due to his antagonistic perception towards monarchical power that dominated India and China at that moment. Jones excerpts Marx's 1853 The British Rule in India, "Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history" (p. 357). Marx then degraded the ageold 'village system' in India and applauded British invasion of India. In addition, religion in India was, according to him, "at once a religion of sensualist exuberance and.self-torturing asceticism" (p. 358). When Marx came to know about Taiping Rebellion in China - the country he called "that living fossil" (p. 57) - Marx scoffed, "they are aware of no task except changing the dynasty. They have no slogans...destrnction without any nucleus of new construction" (p. 359).

Chapter 10 derides Grundrisse as having only a single paragraph - in addition to the word "if" as a starter - to hypothetically explain about "surplus value", the idea that has since became the article of faith of Marx's followers (p. 401). Chapter 11 accentuates that Marx's framework of analysis in Capital has actually come from the 'Provisional Rules' of the International, which was earlier drafted by the Owenites (John Weston and 'Major' Luigi Wolff) and a French republican by the name of Victor Le Lubez.

However provocative these anti-Semitic, anti-oriental, antireligion, pro-European colonization, and undemocratic images of Marx could be, in the last chapter entitled 'Back to the Future', Jones does highlight some reversals that were made by Marx. The chapter reserves some, yet important clues for future theoretical projects on Marx. Jones argues that in the last 15 years of his life, Marx started to cherish the social and political settings of "village community" that had traditions of communal ownership, democracy and liberty which existed in the ancient Europe as well as Asia particularly in Russia, China, and India. Marx also criticised European (French) colonization over Asia (Algeria), "To the extent that non-European, foreign law is "profitable" for them, the Europeans recognise it, as here they not only recognise the Muslim law - immediately! - but "misunderstand it" only to their profit, as here" (p. 583). To large extent Marx in his last years began to think like those whom he used to call as "utopian" socialists and Jones states Charles Fourier as one that he had come to agree with. Furthermore, in the epilogue, Jones claims that David Riazanov, the Marxist scholar, had disappeared into Stalinist purges for his research on Marx's 1881 letter which urged the Russian Group for the Emancipation of Labour to support the village community as opposed to the orthodox "Marxist" strategy in building an urban-based workers' social-democratic movement. As Jones has consistently argued throughout the book, "But this only reinforces the point that the Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth" (p. 595).

Previously having edited Marx's Communist Manifesto for the Penguin Classics, the New Left Review, and an authority in Victorian studies, Jones is another Marxist historian after the late Eric Hobsbawm that came from the King's College, Cambridge. Stedman Jones however, as we could see, appeared to be more transparent in tabling Marx's historical background including ignoble facts that may spoil the 'noble' image of and personality cult surrounding Marx compared to Hobsbawm, as the latter was criticised, for instance, for turning a blind eye on Stalin's terrors in his works. If Louis Althusser had stressed for the readings of the four volumes of Capital line by line at least ten times to really understand Marx's philosophy, it then should be done with the accompaniment of this definitive biography. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion thus leaves revisionists plenty of tasks ahead.