"The Real Karl Marx" by Jonathan Sperber

In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today:

The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it. Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable, even irrelevant. Claiming that Marx was in some way “intellectually responsible” for twentieth-century communism will appear thoroughly misguided; but so will the defense of Marx as a radical democrat, since both views “project back onto the nineteenth century controversies of later times.”

Certainly Marx understood crucial features of capitalism; but they were “those of the capitalism that existed in the early decades of the nineteenth century,” rather than the very different capitalism that exists at the start of the twenty-first century. Again, while he looked ahead to a new kind of human society that would come into being after capitalism had collapsed, Marx had no settled conception of what such a society would be like. Turning to him for a vision of our future, for Sperber, is as misconceived as blaming him for our past.

John Gray knows this very well. I don’t know why he would write such nonsense.

Most likely you're right about Marx and the Paris Commune. Gray is also writing about an earlier period of Marx's life, though, when he was writing for a liberal paper against communism. Marx proved to be too liberal for the Prussian authorities who exiled him. Life among radical exiles radicalized Marx. If they hadn't exiled Marx, he might not have become what he became.

Marx's first entry into the field was written in 1848. From a modern perspective that's an eon ago - late Industrial Revolution, railroads only beginning to establish themselves, most armies still shooting muzzle-loaders, factories that really were slave pits staffed by illiterate ex-farmers come to the city for work. You can absolutely see why his model was constructed the way it was.

But it didn't work. For starters, it was only a descriptive model that failed at being a predictive model. His predictions, for example, that profit levels would fall and that the proletariat would become increasingly immiserated, increasingly illiterate; none of that came to pass, quite the contrary.

And there's a real problem when you try to take a failed predictive model and turn it into a normative model, which is what you do when you try to run an economy on its precepts. Failure is predictable, it followed, and what followed that was a scrambling to explain away the failures rather than simply discarding the model. The model is still with us, no longer an economic model but a religion.

I always smile a little when I hear the Constitution denigrated as the product of kept white males and Marx, who really was one, celebrated as some sort of liberator from all that. It isn't a laughing matter though - so much pain for so much time and still they believe.

A belated thank you for this post. I have just found my gift certificate for Indigo/Chapters Books from my liberal spouse. Hot foot tomorrow to order it. My about page indicates that I do order books on recommendation by Freepers.

I hope to be excused about my sort of sneaking sympathy for Marx. This is because my knowledge of what it was like to try to live in old London Town, during the Victorian era. Pretty extensive knowledge. I agree that Marx and his brilliant intellect did not allow him to face reality.

Today such as Marx would wallow in government grants. Perhaps if he was affluent he could not have written Das Kapital. I would use the great works of Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth on survival in Victorian London. "London Labour and London Poor is a classic work. Marx cursed "the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker". They were tradespeople who badgered him for their debts.

If one was poor in my native city of "foggy old London Town" it was an unmitigated hell. My own criticism of Marx, is that he had rejected the brutal fact that one HAD to earn money, the man HAD to provide. He lost children through lack of the necessary upkeep. He lived in squalor, as did many others and they worked.

Finally his friend Engels managed to give him a weekly stipend. Yet his friend was the son of a cotton manufacturer. The cotton operative had a life span expectancy of half of that of a middle class person. Another Victorian horror story, that of child labour in the cotton mills etc.

All this is a bit of a ramble, but the personal history is what fascinates me- what made the man? I shall find out more when I get that book.

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