Karl Marx: A Life

If you want the best inside look of the man,Karl Marx, this is it.There are no weighty theories or politicial axioms edified in this cornerstone book.One book-example given is of Marx's young daughter,Eleanor,giving him a personal quiz.What is your favorite colour? (Answer-)Red! What is your favorite past-time? (Answer-)Book-Worming! etc.etc. Years later,after Eleanor got into a tense arguement with her husband ,she committed suicide.Gray-haired Marx ,the rebarbative rebel and Mary Burns the Irish red-head firebrand, had a son together,who later become an auto mechanic. -Yet,Marx was a sinecure thinker,thanks to Engles.Marx rather liked to play the part of the agent provocateur.He miasmatically smoked black cigars ,lazily reading the afternoon London newspapers,on his Soho couch. He was an arm-chair philosopher,and not an active participant in storming the governmental offices of repression.This book is the best personal portrait of a very complex and mysterious historical thinker .An excellent biograghy !

There are many, many books about Karl Marx and Marxism. But none brings out the complicated, tragi-comic life of this revolutionary. Francis Wheen serves up a masterly biographery of Marx, carbuncles and all. It is obvious from the writing that he is a fan of Marx and is very protective of him. Wheen paints a portrait of a man who put the revolution often ahead of his own family. He lived in grinding poverty, supported by his rich comrade Engels for years. Poverty and disease killing off his children one by one.Wheen does a magnificent job outlining the petty internecine sniping and fighting that went on in the nascent communist movement. Its seems that Engels and Marx spent a lot of time gossiping about other revolutionaries, wasting energy in forging a communist vanguard.I loved this book. It is funny, sad, and moving. And despite all of his pettiness and foibles, Marx comes across as a loveable rogue, who, in his heart never forgot the revolution.

Karl Marx has gained fame in large measure as an "ism" rather than a man, with little focus being generated about the fascinating and complex individual who lived between 1818 and 1883. He is brought to life in all his myriad complexities by sagacious and colorful Guardian columnist Francis Wheen, whose extensive research has resulted in a comprehensive study of Karl Marx as opposed to Marxism.Wheen is at an advantage being a knowledgeable British analyst of lives and politics. His readers benefit from his Britishness as well since he is able to provide profound insight on the period in which Marx lived in London as well as the mindset of British thinkers, so often a problem for the German born revolutionary since his intellectual underpinnings remained basically in Europe. A writer from another country would be unlikely to provide the kind of unique sociological insight which Wheen provides in this informative as well as readable work.Wheen points out early in the book that London was the inevitable stopping point and permanent base for Marx since it was a melting pot of disparate viewpoints embraced by revolutionary thinkers throughout the world. Many, like Marx, were banished from many nations. Marx was evicted from his native Germany, but never stopped thinking European and interacting with Europeans whenever possible.The London in which Marx did his studying and writing is described by Wheen in Dickensian terms. The author notes the high degree of childbirth death and paints a picture correlative with Dickens' "Bleak House." In addition to experiencing numerous health problems, enduring particularly painful carbuncles, his life was shrouded in sadness over the four children who predeceased him. The Marx tragedy continued after his 1883 death with the suicides of his only surviving offspring, daughters Eleanor and Laura. The only child who endured over an entire life cycle was an illegitimate son, Freddy Demuth, who lived and worked quietly in East London and died of cardiac failure in 1929 at the age of 77.Marx's hatred for Russia is noted, a sore point with Communist adherents of Marxism-Leninism. An interesting element of Wheen's work is his focus on Marx the determined bourgeois figure. Despite his intellectual concern for the working classes and loathing of the bourgeoisie, which he insisted in his works needed to be overthrown, through his friend and faithful associate Friedrich Engels' money, he hired servants and managed to maintain living quarters well beyond his means. This occurred due to Engels' devotion to him and his cause. Engels worked for over 20 years at his father's Manchester factory. In addition to being a free-spirited advocate of free love, Engels also preferred the bourgeois social existence, leading an active social life in Manchester that included a vigorous devotion to the aristocratic sport of fox hunting.Wheen points out that Marx miscalculated on the subject of proletarian revolt in England, ironica

This is a rambunctious and vivid portrait of Marx the man, too often Marx the myth, as an extended snapshot of the individuality of his achievement, no force of history, a man. There is something awesome in the challenge of two men, Marx and Engels, to the unfolding of the capitalist juggernaut in its steamroller immensity of industrial transformation, imperialism and violence, as the disappointment and disillusion of the hopes of the French revolution turn into the malformation of the liberal modernist age. What is to be done? Can such a vast system change course, is there a fix, can anyone be heard in the din of social mechanization? It is testimony to some weakness in the all-powerful system, that a great underswell rose from these men to tidal wave proportions. There is something more than brilliant in Marx's downfield razzledazzle through the ruins of the Hegelian system, encountering the world of Ricardo, to conceive a universal history in this hybrid of material and ideal concepts. The meaning of democracy is in the balance in the rushing years before 1848, after which the quaint hope universal suffrage might create a socialism by the vote of workers is met with the rigged plebiscite dictatorship of the last of the phantom Napoleons, in the litany of cooptations that greet all efforts to make the triad of liberty, fraternity, and equality more than a slogan. Cf, also, Isaiah Berlin's Karl Marx, and Jerold Seigel's Marx's Fate.

This is the first book to describe Marx as a person, a father, husband, friend and individual. Previous books have focused on his theories and/or philosophy. Thus they describe him as a genius or a devil depending on the author's political persausion. Well worth reading. Full of humour, and interesting anecdotes. Marx comes across as being very much more a man than a monster!