Karl Marx: A Life
Karl Marx: A Life. Francis Wheen. New York: Norton, 1999. 431ppThere were only 11 mourners at Karl Marx's funeral in Highgate cemetery on March 17th 1883, but within a hundred years of his death governments that professed Marxism as their guiding faith ruled half the world's population. "Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion - or so been so calamitously misinterpreted."(p.1) It is easy to forget that Marx was also human. Neither his enemies nor his disciples have been willing to admit as much: in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin he was declared a saint, while the West demonized him as the father of all evil. In Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life he presents Marx as an intricate and vulnerable figure, a Prussian refugee who, in Wheen's words, "became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes." He was a prodigal son to whom his mother said, "I wish you would make some capital instead of just wr
Marx was the central figure of the International until its demise following the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871. He frolicked and picnicked with his daughters, read and declaimed to them his favorite passages from Shakespeare, and was genuinely concerned about their well-being. Wheen does succeed in painting Marx vividly human in some ways. Marx is caricatured as either a wild eyed revolutionary lunatic or a dry academic who spent his life in the British Museum. The Marx family was constantly in debt and hiding from its creditors. Yes, it is good to remind people that the class struggle still exists, but then you only have to take a look at what is going on in the current world to see that. ' When Marx's children submitted him to a parlor game questionnaire, he responded that his idea of happiness was to fight, his idea of misery was submission and the vice he most detested was servility. ' Wheen is less good when explaining Marx's ideas. They are all too often trivialized instead of seriously examined. Two wrongs may make a right, but, soon after its birth, that right becomes another wrong which must be subjected to the same intimate scrutiny as its forebears, and thus we go forward. Yet he had no regard at all for his own mother, brothers, or sisters, whom he publicly ignored and privately derided. Wheen basically tried to give an insight to Marx that had not been written about yet: Marx as a human being. As it was a biography on Marx, it is understandable that the reader would come to expect an explanation. But he's far too preoccupied with frivolity, with recounting Marx's alcoholic high jinks, discoursing on his flatulence and boil-ridden penis. The fact that the Communist Manifesto is only referred to passively throughout the entire text was a large stain on the biography.
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