Following my interest in Marx, I’ve been looking for a good biography for quite some time. This proved impossible in Japan, and even in the US it takes a bit of searching. Try out this experiment the next time you’re in a good-sized bookstore: Walk around the biography section, and check out the rows and rows of books about just about everyone you can imagine, and try to find a biography of Karl Marx. I’m guessing there won’t be one. Given Marx’s huge influence on history, isn’t that a little strange? I mean I know Karl Marx was never very popular in heartland America, but then neither were Hitler, Stalin, or Che Guevara, and you never have any trouble finding their biographies.
Anyway, just a little question for you to ponder....Onto the book itself...
Francis Wheen’s book is highly readable, and serves as an excellent introduction to Marx’s life. Wheen writes for the general public, and has a good eye for picking out the interesting antidotes and leaving out the boring stuff.
Marx lived during very interesting and revolutionary times with the Revolutions of 1848 and later the Paris Commune. And yet Marx himself never fought on a barricade. (Wheen suggests that one of the reasons Marx was so prickly in regards to his fellow revolutionary exiles is that he felt inadequate compared to their genuine experiences in revolutions). Although in his younger days, Marx was expelled from one European country to another, once he settled in London his travels were done.
So, since there are no stories of revolutionary bravado to tell, Wheen instead chooses to focus in all the juicy Victorian gossip. Such as the Marx’s illegitimate child with his housekeeper. Or the time Marx wrote a thoughtless condolence letter to Engels, and almost ruined their friendship. Or the duel Marx fought in his younger days. Or his family squabbles with his parents, and then later in life with son-in-laws. Lots of very interesting tidbits about Marx’s life are included.
Wheen’s writing style is very refreshing as well. He doesn’t get bogged down in academic writing, and there’s a lot of dry humor mixed into his prose. He’s not above poking a bit of fun at his subject, and one of his favorite techniques is to quote a letter from Marx, and then comment ironically after it. At times he brings in pop culture references like Monty Python to illustrate his point.
This book is meant mainly as an introduction to Marx, although occasionally Wheen will take digressions away from his narrative to correct what he views as false assumptions. This book is generally a very easy read, although the sections explaining Marx’s philosophy I had to take a little slower. To be honest I was hoping for a book that was almost all about Marx’s life and none about his philosophy, but maybe it’s impossible to write a biography of a philosopher and completely ignore his ideas. I suppose it would be a little strange to read, “Oh, and by the way, also that year Marx published ‘Capital’.”
Wheen makes a lot of fun at Marx, such as his tendency to write long polemics against his personal rivals when he should have been doing more productive work, or his lifelong inability to make his finances balance even with his ample support from Engels. However on most serious philosophical matters Wheen is usually sympathetic to Marx and seeks to rescue him from his critics. Of particular interest to me was Wheen’s account of the Marx/Bakunin rivalry. Wheen paints a very ugly picture of Bakunin (the father of modern anarchism) which was at odds with most of what I had previously read about the man.
All in all, a fascinating read even if I didn’t agree with every word of it. If you’re looking for a good biography, and you want to know more about the man who shaped so much of world history, this is a good book for you. (Check the internet or your library. I doubt your bookstore would have it).
Useless Wikipedia Fact
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Karl Marx: A Life by Francis Wheen: Book Review (Scripted)
6 comments:
I love Wheen's book "Mumbo Jumbo" due to its hilarious sense of humor. The stuff he touched on was interesting too. His commentaries are not particularly insightful (I see other reviews mention this) but that's not really what people should read the book for.
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There's some boring stories I can tell about my journey with Marxism - mostly because all the Vietnamese materials are incomprehensible so I thought people in the West had a much better idea of it, and it doesn't seem to be totally meaningless as Vietnamese culture loves to make it out. Well, plot twist: my countrymen happened to be right, as they have always been with many stuff I have always been petulant against (and love to dismiss their opinions, thinking they are primitive and backwards). Anyway...
I shall repeat this dictum again and again: the destructive ideas are never explicitly said, but implicitly said.
Of course I shall not repeat criticisms of Marxism here, but on some nicher stuff throughout my journey of trying to read these works. Say there was some forum that curated a "the right way to read and actually understand Marx", I tried to follow it...
The very first work is his thesis on Feuerbach. I don't remember it had anything good to say other than some trivialities or pedantries. So it doesn't seem to be enlightening, okay...
But the worst thing is the last sentence, which says: philosophers have always tried to understand the world, it's time to change it.
Let's have some claps for the worst is-ought inference that has ever existed in the entire history of philosophy!!! *clap clap*
I'm sorry Marx, but since when did you think your favorite philosophers ever managed to have a basic grasp of reality, let alone knowing jack about the world?
All those old men touched on stuff that is pertaining to what happen inside your own head after all. Or the more abstract aspects of reality, but ultimately they still are the aspects of reality as perceived to your brain, so it's not far-fetched to reduce philosophy to the 'science of thoughts inside your head'.
So how do you think those philosophers ever know jack about what reality on a practical level is like?
Marx and co make his philosophy as if it is any materialist. It's not. I don't see a lot of wrong to say Marxism basically is just German Idealism with the mystical terminology thrown out and the materialist-sounding terms thrown in.
Erratum:
>implicitly said.
implicitly assumed.
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Gauss said when a philosopher says something true it's trivial, and if it's untrivial then they are flipping burgers in McDonalds.
That is very much true about Engels' works on 'Scientific Socialism'.
It basically just says: well there's a philosophical worldview that can explain how sh1ts happen or go through the process of life. Anyway you don't need to conjure the spirit or the soul or God, basically anything can be explained materialistically.
Sound great, but who called for it?
You do realize deep down most of the humanity have never believed in God (just say so out of fear of persecution) and when they do they mostly don't believe in any religious philosophy right, Engels? (well this is actually my armchair take but I doubt it's much wrong) They didn't think deeply whether God willed the process of some wood being burned to ashes since without him there wouldn't have been the transformation from the wood to the ashes. They just thought there were 12 angels that would contact the Department of Raining to drop some of that blessing if they prayed enough in their own intuition.
You see a lot of obstinate philosophers or authors (namely Tolstoy) who insist on some idealist philosophy. They however have never done a single scientific work, why does it matter what they think?
And besides, Scientific Socialism is just way too cheap. I studied this again and again throughout my schools and again in university. But it basically just says: things have quality, quantity, when the quantity reach a point they shall transform their quality.
The task of refuting idealism has never been so easy. If not outright saying it's just attacking straw men. Not saying that those idealist philosophies were much better, but well...
Another fault: obscurantist writing. A good thing about Marx is he uses barely any if not none insider philosophical terminology. The bad thing is his writing is so turgid what he wants to say are never straightforward.
You really have to wonder if he has anything powerful to even say - if he has to... you know.
Historical Materialism is just common sense, and something that attacks straw men.
All of the Marxian ideas are just common sensical, that's why most people have them even when they have never read Marx or are hostile against Marxism.
Even Greg Mankiw, a libertarian economist seems to take implicitly the belief that if it's not productive, then it must be poised to fail. I mean he predicts that Bitcoin shall fail all the time, it doesn't seem to ever occur in his mind that Casinos are never productive but they have never collapsed en masse.
There's just nothing special about Marx, except for obscurantism.
I think Marx just happens to be popular since his writings resonate well with the universal human attitude that is against human materialism, the attitude that "money is everything".
His obscuratism gives people the myth that his works have some penetrative power to understand some intriguing things that could remedy life.
None of these is any special thing to say.
Nor do I even have any good reason to read Marx's stuff, other than:
- perhaps Marx does have some good ideas I glossed over
- I have nothing better to do in my life anyway
I think those two reasons are common among most readers of Marx.
Well, armchair psychoanalyzing time:
Back in the days of Marx, then Lenin, there weren't any Kairakuten magazines to read some h*ntai. There wasn't anything to do in those days.
However the culture was just the same as it is now: some people love to mess around against their own government, out of self-righteousness since there shall be stuff one own's government fails short of, or simply because they had nothing to do.
Lenin just happened to be one of those jackasses that preferred to do what he did, not because he cared at all for his countrymen (who likely were too illiterate back then for him not to looked down on), but because it was... fun.
Thus he came back from Europe, having mingled with European jackasses who loved to rebel against their own governments. He thought he was too educated for Russia's own good, so no matter how he ruled it would have been good for Russia anyway. So among the provisional government, perhaps only half of them cared seriously for actual governing, they couldn't resist Lenin and co with his penchant for pushing away anybody on his way - modernization was happening just way too fast for Russia which was way too slow and rigid, thus a handful of radical intellectuals (who likely didn't take their studies seriously to be called "intellectual") took control of the country.
Another notable dark horse was Stalin, he just happened to be the last winner out of the internal political infightings - seriously has anybody ever wondered if the very same disasters could have happened even if some other random Russian was in power rather than Stalin? (I do suspect yes). Given that he has always got used to violence where else, he just doesn't bat an eye when he imposes himself on the entire country. It's not so much systematic or out of careful planning (to even be called paranoiac). What brought Lenin and him in could easily just bring him out, thus led to stuff like the Great Purge or countless other things. Perhaps the question shouldn't be whether Stalin has abandoned communism or not, but whether he keeps spouting communistic jargons out of bureaucratic habits or fear that once he stopped some other internal members shall bring him down (even though he has got rid of most of them already).
Oh god I spammed way too much nonsense. And even irrelevant. As typically of my comments recently, please feel free to ignore these.
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