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The Economist May 5th 2018 79
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1
AGOOD subtitle for a biography of Karl
Marx would be “a study in failure”.
Marx claimed that the point of philosophy
was not just tounderstand theworldbut to
improve it. Yet his philosophy changed it
largely for the worst: the 40% of humanity
who lived underMarxist regimes formuch
of the 20th century endured famines, gu-
lags and party dictatorships. Marx thought
his new dialectical science would allow
him to predict the future as well as under-
stand the present. Yet he failed to antici-
pate two of the biggest developments of
the 20th century—the rise of fascism and
the welfare state—and wrongly believed
communism would take root in the most
advanced economies. Today’s only suc-
cessful self-styled Marxist regime is an en-
thusiastic practitioner ofcapitalism(or “so-
cialismwith Chinese characteristics”).
Yet for all his oversights, Marx remains
a monumental figure. At the 200th anni-
versaryofhis birth, which falls onMay 5th,
interest in him is as lively as ever. Jean-
Claude Juncker, the president of the Euro-
pean Commission, is visiting Trier, Marx’s
birthplace, where a statue of Marx do-
nated by the Chinese government will be
unveiled. The British Library, where he did
the research for “Das Kapital”, is putting on
a series of exhibitions and talks. And pub-
lishers are producing a cascade of books
on his life and thought, from“Das Kapital”-
sized doorstops (Sven-Eric Liedman’s “A
A second reason is the power of his per-
sonality. Marxwas inmanyways an awful
human being. He spent his life sponging
off Friedrich Engels. He was such an invet-
erate racist, includingabout his own group,
the Jews, that even in the 1910s, when toler-
ance for such prejudices was higher, the
editors of his letters felt obliged to censor
them. He got his maid pregnant and dis-
patched the child to foster parents. Mikhail
Bakunin described him as “ambitious and
vain, quarrelsome, intolerant and absolu-
te…vengeful to the point ofmadness”.
But combine egomania with genius
and you have a formidable force. He be-
lieved absolutely that he was right; that he
had discovered a key to history that had
eluded earlierphilosophers. He insistedon
promoting his beliefs whatever obstacles
fate (or the authorities) put in his way. His
notion ofhappinesswas “to fight”; his con-
cept of misery was “to submit”, a trait he
sharedwith FriedrichNietzsche.
The third reason is a paradox: the very
failure of his ideas to change the world for
the better is ensuring them a new lease of
life. After Marx’s death in 1883 his follow-
ers—particularly Engels—worked hard to
turn his theories into a closed system. The
pursuit ofpurity involvedvicious factional
fights as “real” Marxists drove out rene-
gades, revisionists and heretics. It eventu-
ally led to the monstrosity of Marxism-Le-
ninism, with its pretensions to infallibility
(“scientific socialism”), its delight in obfus-
cation (“dialectical materialism”) and its
cult of personality (those giant statues of
Marx and Lenin).
The collapse ofthis petrified orthodoxy
has revealed that Marx was a much more
interesting man than his interpreters have
implied. His grand certainties were a re-
sponse to grand doubts. His sweeping the-
ories were the result of endless reversals.
World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl
Marx”), to Communist Manifesto-slim
pamphlets (a second edition of Peter Sing-
er’s “Marx: AVery Short Introduction”).
None of these bicentennial books is
outstanding. The best short introduction is
still Isaiah Berlin’s “Karl Marx”, whichwas
published in 1939. But the sheer volume of
commentary is evidence of something im-
portant. Why does the world remain fixat-
ed on the ideas of a man who helped to
produce somuch suffering?
The point ofmadness
The obvious reason is the sheer power of
those ideas. Marx may not have been the
scientist that he thought he was. But he
was a brilliant thinker: he developed a the-
ory of society driven forward by economic
forces—not just by the means of produc-
tion but by the relationship between own-
ers and workers—and destined to pass
through certain developmental stages. He
was also a brilliant writer. Who can forget
his observation that history repeats itself,
“the first time as tragedy, the second as
farce”? His ideas were as much religious as
scientific—you might even call them reli-
gion repackaged for a secular age. Hewas a
latter-day prophet describing the march of
GodonEarth. The fall fromgrace is embod-
ied in capitalism; man is redeemed as the
proletariat rises up against its exploiters
and creates a communist utopia.
Reconsidering Marx
Second time, farce
Two hundred years afterhis birthKarlMarxremains surprisingly relevant
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