Greatness and illusion, by Karl Marx, Gareth Stedman Jones

In the run-up to the bicentenary Marx celebrations, Gareth Stedman Jones has produced a rich and deeply researched intellectual biography of Karl Marx. Its declared objective is the dismantling of the iconographic image of Marx as a “forbidding bearded patriarch and lawgiver” and as a first-rank “thinker of merciless consistency with a commanding vision of the future” (5). Stedman Jones argues that, in order to arrive at a realistic picture of the man and his scientific achievements, one must first dissociate him from twentieth-century Marxism and from the untainted image of his character, political judgement, and scientific contributions that his self-declared Marxist heirs, Engels foremost amongst them, have deemed it necessary to create in order to protect his legacy. Stedman Jones therefore suggests, much like Jonathan Sperber (2013), that Marx be put “back in his nineteenth-century surroundings,” but he warns against depicting him as “just the product of the culture into which he was born” (5). While tracing in detail the political, cultural, and philosophical influences on him, and the various twists and turns in Marx's intellectual development, Stedman Jones does not, like Sperber, end up with downgrading Marx's writings as little more than reactions to particular historical circumstances and some late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophical currents, combined with a failed attempt to revive an outdated approach to economic theory. The “Entzauberung,” the demystification of Marx that informs Stedman Jones’ narrative, involves not only the “admission of Marx's failings, whether political or personal” (3) and the unsparing critical re-examination of his scientific achievements, but also the attempt to pin down where exactly he has made significant contributions. This self-imposed task is, of course, a formidable one, given the range and scope of his subject's intellectual interests and scholarly pre-occupations, and the enormously intensive debates triggered by his oeuvre. In order not to get entangled in the latter, Stedman Jones seeks to avoid as far as possible any references to alternative readings and interpretations of Marx's texts, which gives his book a somewhat apodictic tone.

However, readers will not find in this book the easily accessible “BBC documentary” style of Francis Wheen's Marx biography (1999), or of Tristram Hunt's recent biography of Friedrich Engels (2009), because Stedman Jones takes his readers much more deeply into the intricacies of nineteenth-century European history and politics, and of French, British, and German philosophical, economic, and political thought. They also will not find many novelties about Marx's personality and private life. Compared to the “classic” accounts provided by Mehring ([1918] 1936), Nicolaevsky and Maenchen-Helfen ([1937] 1963), Berlin ([1939] 1996), or McLellan (1973), there is more emphasis, of course, on Marx's character defects, including his “anti-semitism,” “racism,” and “visceral Russophobia”; his “arrogance” and “obsessive desire to differentiate himself” from those he admired the most; his penchant for “excessive criticism” and “out-of-proportion ridicules” of former-heroes-turned-opponents (like the Bauer brothers, Feuerbach, or Proudhon); his continuous attempts to “outmanoeuvre” his comrades-in-arms and seize control of the party; his “concern for social status” and “bourgeois” disdain for Engels’ companions; or his notorious proclivity for engaging in “diversions” from the task at hand in the face of impending deadlines (and related worsening of his health problems). Relatively little space is devoted to Jenny Marx and almost none to Marx's daughters (as perhaps befits an intellectual biography), but Stedman Jones informs us at some length about Marx's family background; his youthful romanticism, poetry, and love letters; and his singular adultery (and related paternity of Frederick Demuth). Despite his rather odd use of the literary device of calling his subject “Karl” throughout (in order to distinguish it from the mythical figure of “Marx”), Stedman Jones retains a fairly reserved, but not unsympathetic, tone towards his subject.

The long list of “Karl's” political failings, which emerges from Stedman Jones’ account, relates partly to the personal ones noted above, as for instance his perception of Tsarist Russia as a serious threat to revolutionary Europe (and related endorsement of David Urquhart's political campaign against Lord Palmerston's foreign policy in the 1850s), or his image of Asia as stationary and without a history. But there is also Marx's “zigzagging” with regard to the strategy to be adopted by the Communist League in 1848–1849, which Stedman Jones attributes to “the inherent volatility of his theoretical position” (297); his “flawed” political vision in the 1850s, when he “failed to listen to the discourse of the workers themselves,” and therefore did not notice “that exclusion and lack of recognition rather than exploitation were the prime precipitants of the insurrectionary sentiments of the peoples in 1848” (312–313); or his “inept” defence of the Communards’ atrocities in 1871. Further examples could be provided, but the above perhaps sufficiently demonstrates that readers interested in Marx's political vision and his reactions to, and involvement in, nineteenth-century political events will find much food for thought in Stedman Jones’ book.

As regards the separation of Marx from basic tenets of Marxism, there is first of all Stedman Jones’ unequivocal rejection of the claim that Marx advocated, and indeed had developed already in 1844–1846, a “materialist conception of history”: “During his years in Paris and Brussels,” Stedman Jones argues, “Karl's ambition … was not to develop a ʻmaterialist conception,ʼ but rather to construct a philosophical system that reconciled materialism and idealism, and incorporated nature and mind without assigning primacy to the one or the other” (193). From the idea in the Grundrisse that historical development could be conceived as a complex dialectical interplay between matter and form, Marx is then said to have gradually moved towards picturing these development processes as “impersonal and inevitable processes, detached from the actions of human agents” in Volume 1 of Capital, mainly because he tried to eliminate the Hegelian roots he no longer considered apposite to stress in the changed intellectual climate of the 1860s. The existence of the famous passage in the Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations…”), Stedman Jones seeks to explain by pointing out that, first, it possibly “owed something to Engels”, and, second, that in the absence of the (originally planned) chapter on capital, Marx had to introduce the book without mentioning the “value form”, which “meant that the complex dialectical relationship between matter and form was replaced by a crude and mechanical relationship of determination between base and superstructure” (409). But this is still a far cry from the “historical materialism” that was posthumously attributed to him by Engels and Plekhanov, Stedman Jones insists, because the latter misinterpreted him as having endorsed the “Anglo-French materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” while the former sought to associate him “with post-Darwinian materialism premised on the primacy of nature” (192). The final step in the creation of the “myth” of Marx's advocacy and early endorsement of the “materialist conception of history” was taken, Stedman Jones suggests, when David Riazanov and his associates in the 1920s “factitiously” put together an assortment of 1845–1846 manuscripts by Marx and Engels under the title The German Ideology (192). This is an interesting line of argument, which deserves to be taken seriously.

Much less convincing is what Stedman Jones offers on the development of Marx's critique of political economy, and in particular on his theory of value and surplus value. He argues that when Marx adopted the labour theory of value from his reading of Smith and Ricardo in 1844, he failed to notice the qualifications Ricardo had introduced in ed. 3 of the Principles (because he at first read only the French translation of ed. 1), and that he continued to ignore those qualifications in his writings from 1845 to 1847 through to the early 1850s. These were first acknowledged, but not addressed, only in the Grundrisse manuscript, whereas:

Later, in Capital, Karl's answer to the qualifications made by Ricardo was that the question did not concern the deviation of value from socially necessary labour time, but that of equilibrium price from value. But he had already defined value as socially necessary labour time. In other words, he had conceded Ricardo's point without appearing to do so. (399)

In Stedman Jones view, the problem was that “Karl attempted to employ Ricardo's concept of value in the elaboration of a theory quite remote from anything which had concerned Ricardo himself”: while Ricardo's notion of value “was intended to be valid only in the aggregate … Karl … wanted to make the value of labour measurable and applicable to the individual enterprise” (379). Similarly confused is Stedman Jones’ account of Marx's theory of surplus value, which he simply dismisses, with reference to the relevant passage in the Grundrisse manuscript, as “no more than a piece of unsupported speculation” (401).

In this connection, it must also be pointed out that Stedman Jones devotes only a single paragraph (412–413) to the manuscripts later published as Theories of Surplus Value. That Marx worked on those manuscripts, rather than on Capital, during Lassalle's stay in his house in 1862 can be explained, he suggests, by his fear that the latter might steal his ideas – as if Marx's work on the history of economic thought was entirely unrelated to his work on Capital, and was pursued by him only as a pastime. Apparently, Stedman Jones fails to understand that Marx was concerned with reconstructing, and elaborating on, the surplus approach to the theory of value and distribution which he had encountered in the classical political economists from Petty and Boisguilbert up to Ricardo, and that he struggled with problems that Ricardo and his precursors had been unable to resolve. He therefore also fails to recognise that Marx did make some analytical progress, notwithstanding his insufficient tools, and that this is where, from the point of view of economic theory and of the history of economic thought, the “greatness” of his contributions lies. Interestingly, more than 50 years ago, when Theories of Surplus Value was first published in an English translation in 1952, Maurice Dobb noted:

Certainly a number of misinterpretations which have been current from time to time will be removed by a study of this work: in particular the view that Marx's theory of “prices of production” in Volume III was an afterthought, inconsistently imposed upon the theory of value of Volume I; since it will be seen that his discussion of Ricardo's theory of profit (written, be it noted, in the early ’60's) largely turns on how to explain the deviations of prices from values (when capitals are different in composition), and hence to answer Ricardo's special problem of the effects on prices of a rise of wages.… Finally, and of most interest for those concerned with the development of ideas, it should serve, more completely than anything else, to establish the precise nature of Marx's relationship to the Classical School – a relationship too often obscured by facile references to his cursory “misunderstandings of Ricardo”. (1952, 912; emphasis added)

Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital are evaluated by Stedman Jones by comparing the contents of the manuscripts produced by Marx in the 1860s, in broad outline, with the project which he had originally envisioned, and partly sketched out, in the Grundrisse manuscript of the late 1850s. On this basis, Marx's unfinished Magnum Opus is then declared to have been a “theoretical defeat”:

In the Grundrisse in the 1850s, Karl had put forward the idea of “the declining rate of profit” in relatively simplistic terms. But when he tried to write up the theory around 1864–5 … doubts were already crowding in upon him. The supposedly simple operation of this “law” was now so hedged in by “counteracting tendencies” that it was unclear how it could exercise any terminal effect. All that could be claimed was that “the law and its counteracting tendencies … breed overproduction, speculation, crises and surplus capital alongside surplus population.” It was also apparent that the processes of circulation and extended reproduction, which Karl had originally imagined in a form akin to the circular and spiral motions found in Hegel's Science of Logic, could no longer be employed without substantiation. Nor had he succeeded in refashioning and inserting these motions into an empirical narrative. (537–538)

In Stedman Jones’ reading, Marx was accordingly prevented from completing Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, not primarily because of his political commitments in the First International or his worsening health problems, but rather because he “could not find a way of reiterating his original theoretical position, but was equally resistant to any straightforward admission that he had changed his mind” (538).

What, then, remains of the supposed “greatness” of Marx's contributions to the analysis of the capitalist economic system? Stedman Jones, in his appraisal of the Communist Manifesto, praises Marx's vision of the long-term development and inherent dynamism of capitalism, and forcefully depicts him as a prophet of globalisation:

Marx was the first to evoke the seemingly limitless powers of the modern economy and its truly global reach. He was first to chart the staggering transformation produced in less than a century by the emergence of a world market and the unleashing of the unparalleled productive powers of modern industry. He also delineated the endlessly inchoate, incessantly restless and unfinished character of modern capitalism as a phenomenon. He emphasized its inherent tendency to invent new needs and the means to satisfy them, its subversion of all inherited cultural practices and beliefs, its disregard of all boundaries, whether sacred or secular, its destabilization of every hallowed hierarchy, whether of ruler and ruled, man and woman or parent and child, its turning of everything into an object for sale. (241; see also Stedman Jones 2002, 5)

While many would agree with this assessment (and not find it overly original), most commentators would probably have difficulty in sharing Stedman Jones’ overall appraisal of Capital. In his view, the “most distinctive and lasting qualities” of Capital (428) are not found in its theoretical constructions, but rather elsewhere:

If Capital became a landmark in nineteenth-century thought, it was not because it had succeeded in identifying the “laws of motion” of capital.… he did not succeed in producing an immanent critique of political economy as a whole.… Karl's achievement was precisely in the area for which he affected to have least regard.… he became one of the principal – if unwitting – founders of a new and important area of historical enquiry, the systematic study of social and economic history. (429–430)

To be extolled as a pioneering economic and social historian is faint praise indeed for somebody of Marx's theoretical ambition – and, to my mind, also a serious misjudgement of his place in the development of economic analysis.

In the final chapters of his book, Stedman Jones returns to the three main areas of dissent between Marx's views and the twentieth-century Marxism created by Engels and other “Marxists.” First, there were Marx's already mentioned doubts and reservations about the “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” Here, Stedman Jones surmises, and this seems indeed very plausible, that Engels’ editing procedures with regard to Volume 3 of Capital may deliberately have shifted the meaning of the text so as to lend support to a “collapse theory.” But he omits to substantiate this claim by showing the differences between the published version and Marx's original manuscripts, which have recently become available in the MEGA² edition. Second, he suggests that some basic tenets of Marxism, such as “historical materialism” and the parallels with Darwinian evolutionary theory, were largely also the creation of Engels. The third topic concerns Marx's changing views of village communities and traditional forms of communal agriculture. In his writings from the 1840s up to the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867, Marx had regarded village communes as embodiments of an archaic form of life which had no role to play in the establishment of socialism. Around 1868, however, he began to entertain and pursue the idea that those primeval forms of ownership in parts of Europe and Asia could have survived into the nineteenth century, and that therefore it was perhaps not necessary for all countries to first go through a phase of capitalistic development. After extensive studies on Western European, Asian, and Russian forms of village communities in the 1870s, he then urged the Russian émigré Marxists of the Geneva group around Plekhanov, in a letter to Vera Zasulich of 1881, to support the village communes and stated that a socialist revolution must be made before capitalist development in the countryside had destroyed them. Alas, the letter made no impact, and – as Stedman Jones shows – Marx had relied for his argument on historical studies of communal ownership systems that were irrevocably proved wrong already in the 1880s, around the time of his death.

Historians of economic thought interested in Marx, or in classical political economy more generally, will be able to learn much from this well-researched and provocative book. What Stedman Jones has to offer for the reconstruction of Marx's intellectual development on the German, French, and British history of political and philosophical ideas, and on nineteenth-century European history and policy, far exceeds in breadth and depth what can be found in other Marx biographies.