Karl Marx: His Life & Thought

Of all the people who have provided the intellectual justification for mass movements over history, Karl Marx is one of the most misunderstood. His ideas have been co-opted by people such as V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong, where they used his ideas to justify a violent revolution and the oppression of millions of people. Both men led movements where millions of people were killed in order to sustain them. As a consequence of the decades-long ideological struggle between the communist and capitalist blocks, people in the capitalist block have been conditioned to consider the Marxist philosophy evil. However, Karl Marx himself was somewhat ambiguous in his writings and there is little doubt that he would not have condoned many of the brutal actions performed in the name of his philosophy. He was a powerful thinker and his writings must also be interpreted in the climate of the times. This short book describes many of the ideas of Marx, giving them a balanced hearing and explanation. In only 93 pages, McLellan distills down the essence of Marx and his thought, pointing out some of the best and worst aspects of his ideas. From this book, it is possible to gain a bit of a balanced perspective of Marx's ideas devoid of much of the cloud of history. This is a book that should be widely read by people in the west who automatically link Karl Marx with those who usurped his ideas as a justification for their brutal desire to gain and maintain political power.

Although there have been more recent biographies of Marx this one still endures with its combination of simple narrative spiced with acute observations and comment. The lives and work of Marx and Engels constitutes one the great tales of world history and one is surprised noone has seen the Hollywood movie (seriously) in the extraordinary period leading up to 1848, and beyond. In fact, this early period, clearer to us now, shows a side of Marx and his thinking that was not properly understood as the Communist tragedy unfolded on the basis of the later Marxism, whose theoretical constructs bore the seeds of great confusion. Sometimes this is pinned on Engels and the crystallization of doctrine that arose in the time of Kautsky and Bernstein. But the problems finally stand at Marx's doorstep and looking at his life as a whole one sees the incoherence of his basic project, mixing Hegel and economic theory, catching up with him. The obsessive endless 'extra study in depth', writer's block and nervous delay, the inability to complete Capital, are a puzzle of the later Marx after the brilliant period of the forties and the Left Hegelians. It is therefore frustrating to see how his contribution has been effectively lost, and nearly impossible to get straight. It is worth remembering that at the time of Marx's starting point the American political system looked like it would never be able to abolish slavery, and that without the intervention of the left economic society as we know it now would never have happened. And as the post-Communist era has dawned we can see exactly what happens as the pigheaded rightwing bougreoisie gets free reign without opposition in the neo-liberalism running amok that we see in the American system. So the future of this corpus of Marx remains always in the background as a wild card of social theory, and unfortunately the dangers of bad theories leading to opposite results.

Karl Marx's contribution to modern social thought is so immense it is now difficult to understand the profound degree to which much of what he thought and wrote has been almost totally discredited and discounted. This is not to deny the fact that his social theory is indeed quite essentially flawed, but rather to suggest that given the relative proportions of his contribution to sociology, economics, and cultural critique, one tends to throw out the baby with the bath water in summarily rejecting all that this intellectual genius had to offer regarding the nature of modern capitalistic society. No book does a better job of presenting the broad sweep of Marx's remarkable critical contributions than this wonderful and quite comprehensive biography of Marx by renowned psychologist and academic David McLellan. With painstaking care and meticulus attention to detail, McLellan places Marx's life in context, showing how the multitude of social, cultural, and economic issues that formed him and scarred him early in life carried with them a most urgent message regarding the nature of modern society. Growing up a secular Jew in Germany, the phenomenally gifted young academic found himself barred from teaching based both on virulent anti-Semitism within the academic community and the fact that he was indeed correctly perceived as a radical thinker and political dissident from the beginning in the truculent and suffocating political environment within the society itself. Yet there was no denying either his intellectual brilliance or his charismatic abilities to fan the flames of political discontent almost everywhere he went over his sixty some years. The son of a comfortable Jewish professional who had adopted the Protestant faith for secular convenience, Marx found himself set adrift within currents that his own proclivities toward radical social, economic, and political analysis forced him to often flee one step ahead of arresting authorities. Marx finally settled into London, surviving through a combination of writing short newspaper articles and through the largesse and generosity of his long-time confidant and erstwhile ally in arms, Freidrich Engels, the scion of a quite prosperous industrial family who incessantly came to the aid of Marx and his perpetually destitute family. McLellan helps us to see how all the elements of the times and the sweep of historical circumstances sped Marx along toward political involvement in one of the most important social developments of the twentieth century. My own personal opinion is that a careful reading of Marx leads one to the conclusion that his observations are still strikingly accurate in terms of his prognostications regarding the destiny of capitalism and I remind the prospective reader that the jury is yet out, time still marches on, and that what is going on now around us can be quite persuasively interpreted in elegant Marxian terms. Enjoy!