In the Sep­tem­ber 2000 issue of In These Times, Howard Zinn wrote this review of a book about the life of Karl Marx by Fran­cis Wheen. On the 200th anniver­sary of Marx’s birth, we present Zinn’s review in full, in which he dis­cuss­es how ​“Marx pre­dict­ed the world of today, with ever increas­ing con­cen­tra­tions of wealth in few­er and few­er hands, with cap­i­tal­ism roam­ing the globe in search of prof­its, with a deep­en­ing con­tra­dic­tion between the colos­sal growth of pro­duc­tion and the fail­ure to dis­trib­ute its fruits justly.”

To his daughter Eleanor, Marx was "the cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brimming over with humor."

It takes some courage to write still anoth­er biog­ra­phy of Karl Marx, espe­cial­ly if the writer has dared to go through the 40 vol­umes of his writ­ings and his cor­re­spon­dence. Fran­cis Wheen seems to have done that research scrupu­lous­ly, open to both col­or­ful sto­ries and thun­der­ous ideas.

The time is right for a new appraisal of Marx because igno­ra­mus­es and shit­heads (the spellcheck on my com­put­er reject­ed this, sug­gest­ing instead ​“hot­heads, cat­heads, white­heads, skin­heads”) on all parts of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum have dis­tort­ed his ideas in ridicu­lous ways. For­give me, but I want to give you the fla­vor of Marx’s per­son­al­i­ty, which includ­ed fre­quent insults direct­ed at those, whether bour­geois or left intel­lec­tu­als, who drove him to dis­trac­tion by dis­agree­ing with him — not, I agree, an admirable trait, but we must be hon­est about peo­ple we oth­er­wise admire.

Marx has been stu­pid­ly (there, I’ve caught the virus of vir­u­lence again) linked with Stal­in, by both Stal­in­ists and apol­o­gists for cap­i­tal­ism. So this is a good time to set the record straight. The review­er of Wheen’s book in the New York Times Book Review seemed to think that the lack of Marx­ists in depart­ments of eco­nom­ics, his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy is some­how proof of the inad­e­qua­cy of Marx’s the­o­ries and, absurd­ly, won­ders ​“why the rest of us should both­er with Marx’s ideas now that the Berlin Wall has fallen.”

Wheen lets you know imme­di­ate­ly where he stands on this mat­ter: ​“Only a fool could hold Marx respon­si­ble for the Gulag; but there is, alas, a ready sup­ply of fools.” Marx ​“would have been appalled by the crimes com­mit­ted in his name.” He has been ​“calami­tous­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed.” And the mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion has been bipar­ti­san, as ​“all these bloody blem­ish­es on the his­to­ry of the 20th cen­tu­ry were jus­ti­fied in the name of Marx­ism or anti-Marxism.”

This is a wor­thy enter­prise, to dis­tin­guish Marx him­self from the actions of the so-called Marx­ists (who led an exas­per­at­ed Marx at one time to say: ​“I am not a Marx­ist.”), as well as to keep alive his still-accu­rate cri­tique of capitalism.

Wheen pro­vides a col­or­ful romp through Marx’s life. Marx grew up in a mid­dle-class Ger­man fam­i­ly, with rab­bi ances­tors on both sides, but his father con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty for prac­ti­cal rea­sons. (Karl in fact was bap­tized at the age of six.) At 18 he was engaged to the beau­ti­ful Jen­ny von West­phalen, whose aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly admired the young Karl for his remark­able intel­lect, and whose father took long walks with him, recit­ing Homer and Shakespeare.

Marx stud­ied first at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bonn and then the Uni­ver­si­ty of Berlin, as a rather wild and fun-lov­ing stu­dent even while seri­ous­ly pur­su­ing the teach­ings of Hegel and writ­ing a doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion on Greek phi­los­o­phy. His the­sis, com­par­ing the ideas of Dem­ocri­tus and Epi­cu­rus, is a ring­ing dec­la­ra­tion of free­dom from false author­i­ty, insist­ing that the true pur­pose of phi­los­o­phy was to deny ​“all gods of heav­en and earth who do not rec­og­nize man’s self-con­scious­ness was the high­est divinity.”

Hegel also saw the his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment of man’s self-con­scious­ness as the human march toward free­dom. But Marx was soon to go beyond that, to turn Hegel ​“on his head,” to see free­dom as requir­ing, not sim­ply a change in con­scious­ness, but a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions of life. Ear­ly on, Marx’s extra­or­di­nary intel­lec­tu­al pow­er was evi­dent. His friend Moses Hess said that Marx ​“com­bines the deep­est philo­soph­i­cal seri­ous­ness with the most bit­ing wit. Imag­ine Rousseau, Voltaire, Hol­bach, Less­ing, Heine and Hegel fused into one man, and you have Dr. Marx.”

Marx was 24 when he moved to Cologne, as edi­tor of the Rheinis­che Zeitung. He soon began chal­leng­ing the sacred laws of pri­vate prop­er­ty, denounc­ing the arrest of peas­ants who were using fire­wood from pri­vate forests, and writ­ing edi­to­ri­als against the Pruss­ian cen­sors. What can be more infu­ri­at­ing to cen­sors than to rail against cen­sor­ship? They cas­ti­gat­ed the Zeitung for ​“impu­dent and dis­re­spect­ful crit­i­cism of the exist­ing gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions.” And proved it right by shut­ting it down.

Wheen enjoys show­ing the inani­ty of Marx’s detrac­tors, as when they reduce his com­plex view of reli­gion to uncon­di­tion­al hos­til­i­ty, quot­ing repeat­ed­ly his state­ment that reli­gion is ​“the opi­um of the peo­ple.” The full quo­ta­tion, from his 1843 essay, ​“Toward a Cri­tique of Hegel’s Phi­los­o­phy of Right,” shows a more nuanced and sym­pa­thet­ic under­stand­ing of the social role of reli­gion: ​“Reli­gion is the sigh of the oppressed crea­ture, the heart of a heart­less world, the soul of soul­less con­di­tions, it is the opi­um of the people.”

Dri­ven from Ger­many, Marx went to Paris, where he and Jen­ny found a lit­tle flat on the Left Bank, and where their first child, Jen­nichen, was born in 1844. It was in the cafes of Paris that Marx met an extra­or­di­nary group of oth­er young rad­i­cals: Proud­hon (“prop­er­ty is theft”); Heine, the bril­liant poet; Bakunin, the wild man of anar­chism and spon­ta­neous rev­o­lu­tion; Stirn­er, the supreme indi­vid­u­al­ist; and, most impor­tant of all, Fred­er­ick Engels.

Engels was two years younger than Marx, but already more aware of class oppres­sion and class strug­gle, hav­ing wit­nessed a gen­er­al strike in Man­ches­ter, Eng­land, where his father owned tex­tile mills. In 1845, at 25, Engels would write elo­quent­ly and pow­er­ful­ly of work­ing-class lives in his book The Con­di­tion of the Work­ing Class in Eng­land. He described one Man­ches­ter slum as fol­lows: ​“Mass­es of refuse, offal and sick­en­ing filth lie among stand­ing pools in all direc­tions; the atmos­phere is poi­soned by the efflu­via from these, and laden and dark­ened by the smoke of a dozen tall fac­to­ry chim­neys. A horde of ragged women and chil­dren swarm about here.”

Marx and Engels, meet­ing for the first time in August of 1844 in the Café de la Regence (Voltaire, Diderot and Ben­jamin Franklin were among its famous patrons), hit it off from the start, intel­lec­tu­al­ly and per­son­al­ly. Engels then vis­it­ed Marx’s flat, and there fol­lowed 10 days of intense and wide-rang­ing dis­cus­sion, which Wheen, see­ing this as the begin­ning of an extra­or­di­nary rela­tion­ship, with immense his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance, calls ​“ten days that shook the world.”

It was in Paris, at the age of 26, that Marx wrote his famous ​“Eco­nom­ic and Philo­soph­i­cal Man­u­scripts,” which remained unpub­lished until the 1930s, but which con­tain some of his most pro­found ideas. The cen­tral con­cept was alien­ation, but Marx saw the source of this alien­ation not as a prob­lem of con­scious­ness, as Hegel put it, but in the mate­r­i­al con­di­tions of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. Under cap­i­tal­ism, human beings led a non­hu­man exis­tence, being alien­at­ed from their work, from the prod­uct of their labor, from one anoth­er, from nature, from their own true selves. The solu­tion was not in the realm of ideas, but in action to over­turn these conditions.

Dri­ven from Paris, Marx met Engels again in Brus­sels, and, com­mis­sioned by the Com­mu­nist League of Lon­don, they (most­ly Marx, it seems) fash­ioned one of the most influ­en­tial doc­u­ments of mod­ern his­to­ry, The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo. It appeared in French just before the 1848 rev­o­lu­tion. The first Eng­lish edi­tion, in 1850, start­ed with the sen­tence: ​“A fright­ful hob­gob­lin stalks through Europe.” In the 1888 trans­la­tion that became: ​“A spec­tre is haunt­ing Europe— the spec­tre of Communism.”

The Man­i­festo demol­ished the idea that cap­i­tal­ism was a nat­ur­al and eter­nal con­di­tion. It was a stage in his­to­ry, which came out of feu­dal­ism and would give way to a more humane soci­ety. Cap­i­tal­ism brought about an enor­mous devel­op­ment in tech­nol­o­gy and pro­duc­tion: ​“The bour­geoisie has cre­at­ed more mas­sive and more colos­sal pro­duc­tive forces than have all pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tions togeth­er.” But work­ers were now noth­ing more than com­modi­ties, their lives sub­ject to the dom­i­na­tion of the mar­ket. And as cap­i­tal­ism becomes more and more obvi­ous­ly inad­e­quate to con­trol its own enor­mous growth, the work­ing class will become the instru­ment for its replacement.

As work­ers become ​“a rul­ing class,” rep­re­sent­ing the vast major­i­ty of the nation, they will sweep away the con­di­tions for the exis­tence of all class­es, ​“and will there­fore have abol­ished its own suprema­cy as a class.” The cli­mac­tic sen­tence of the first part of the Man­i­festo is pro­found­ly impor­tant, repu­di­at­ing any notion of a police state, and insist­ing on the ulti­mate goal of indi­vid­ual free­dom: ​“In place of the old bour­geois soci­ety, with its class­es and class antag­o­nisms, we shall have an asso­ci­a­tion, in which the free devel­op­ment of each is the con­di­tion for the free devel­op­ment of all.”

Expelled from the con­ti­nent and find­ing refuge final­ly in Lon­don, Marx labored for years in the library of the British Muse­um on his epic work, Cap­i­tal. All this, while liv­ing with Jen­ny in the mis­er­able con­di­tions of Soho, and griev­ing as three of their chil­dren, two boys and a girl, died in the first years of life. Two girls, their first-born Jen­nichen and Lau­ra, had sur­vived, and a third, Eleanor, was born in Lon­don. (Eleanor was a remark­able child, polit­i­cal­ly pre­co­cious at the age of 8; Yvonne Kap­p’s two-vol­ume biog­ra­phy of Eleanor Marx is a won­der­ful descrip­tion of the life of the Marx fam­i­ly in London.)

Wheen is unspar­ing in his depic­tion of Marx’s nas­ti­ness, direct­ed against Fer­di­nand Las­salle (includ­ing anti-Semit­ic barbs, although anti-Semi­tism was not part of Marx’s phi­los­o­phy or polit­i­cal behav­ior), Proud­hon and oth­er intel­lec­tu­als of the left. He was unmoved by Proud­hon’s plea that they should not become ​“the lead­ers of a new intol­er­ance” and respond­ed caus­ti­cal­ly to Proud­hon’s The Phi­los­o­phy of Pover­ty with his own dia­tribe, The Pover­ty of Phi­los­o­phy. He referred to anoth­er refugee from the 1848 rev­o­lu­tion in Ger­many, one August Willich, as ​“an une­d­u­cat­ed, four times-cuck­old­ed jack­ass.” Willich chal­lenged him to a duel, which he wise­ly declined.

Yet Wheen also rec­og­nizes that Marx was a lov­ing hus­band and deeply affec­tion­ate father who, despite being unable to pay bills and depend­ing on Engels for finan­cial sup­port, bought a piano for his daugh­ters and sent them to the seashore to get them away from the ran­cid air of Soho. He read Dante, Shake­speare and Cer­vantes to Eleanor, whose love and devo­tion to him were expressed through­out her life. His ene­mies may have seen him dif­fer­ent­ly, but her father, Eleanor said, was ​“the cheeri­est, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brim­ming over with humor.”

It is to Wheen’s cred­it that, despite his some­times obses­sive atten­tion to the com­ic ele­ments in Marx’s life, he treats the man’s ideas with great respect. He does­n’t insist that Marx’s analy­sis in Cap­i­tal is flaw­less, but sees it as ​“a work of the imag­i­na­tion,” its pur­pose ​“an iron­ic one, jux­ta­posed with grim, well-doc­u­ment­ed por­traits of the mis­ery and filth which cap­i­tal­ist laws cre­ate in practice.”

He points out how Marx pre­dict­ed the world of today, with ever increas­ing con­cen­tra­tions of wealth in few­er and few­er hands, with cap­i­tal­ism roam­ing the globe in search of prof­its, with a deep­en­ing con­tra­dic­tion between the colos­sal growth of pro­duc­tion and the fail­ure to dis­trib­ute its fruits just­ly. Wheen says that ​“the more I stud­ied Marx, the more astound­ing­ly top­i­cal he seemed to be.”

Those who would doubt Marx’s com­mit­ment to a tru­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety should study his elo­quent (sec­ond in lit­er­ary bril­liance only to his The Eigh­teenth Bru­maire of Louis Bona­parte) descrip­tion of the 1871 Paris Com­mune. The Com­mune abol­ished rents and debts, equal­ized wages, hailed cul­ture and edu­ca­tion, made lead­ers sub­ject to imme­di­ate recall by the peo­ple, destroyed the guil­lo­tine. Women played a cru­cial role in all of its activ­i­ties (see Gay Gul­lick­son, The Unruly Women of Paris). It was, Marx said, ​“the most glo­ri­ous achieve­ment of our time.”