03 June 2013

Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: a 19th century life for 21st century readers

Is Karl Marx relevant today? Reviewers have acted on the assumption that Jonathan Sperber, Marx's latest English-language biographer, thinks not. The argument of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life is that, to truly understand Marx, you have to see his life and career in a historically specific context. Rather than see him as a prophet, Sperber regards Marx as a backward-looking thinker less concerned with the communist future than with recreating Europe's Jacobin past. Typical of Sperber's approach is his commentary on a famous passage of The Communist Manifesto. He claims that English translators have given the phrase rendered as "All that is solid melts into air..." too general a context. As a result, they make Marx a prophet of the perpetual "creative destruction" of capitalism, when in reality, Sperber argues by referring to the original German text, Marx more likely meant to suggest only that the feudal traditions of pre-modern Prussia and Germany would "evaporate" under pressure from capitalist development. Sperber's assumption that Marx did not intend a more general interpretation isn't especially convincing, but it's fair to note that he doesn't contextualize or historicize Marx in order to belittle or marginalize him. He uses the same approach to rescue Marx from what he considers ahistorical charges of anti-semitism. Of Jewish heritage but raised a Protestant, Marx had harsh things to say about Judaism, but Sperber regards "anti-semite" as an anachronistic label because Marx, like his contemporaries, did not think of the Jews primarily as a race. It may be small consolation to those who recall nearly two millennia of violent Jew-hatred to think that, for instance, the Crusaders who massacred Jews throughout Europe weren't "anti-semites," but Sperber's main point, that Marx was not out to persecute the Jews, still holds. Rather, Sperber shows how Marx cited Tocqueville to portray the 19th century  U.S. as a model of religious equality. There all religions could be equal because religion itself was separated from the state. Of course, Marx notoriously said that Jews eventually ought to emancipate themselves from their religion, but he felt the same way about all religions. He saw them as forms of "self-alienation" and impediments to the universal solidarity he considered mankind's rightful course, though he also saw the agitation of his generation's militant atheists as a distraction from the real work at hand. As Sperber argues, that "Jacobin" commitment predates Marx's commitment to the proletariat, which he may have seen mainly as a means to the higher end.

Political reform was Marx's first priority; labor came later. Many reviewers have noted with amusement the fact that, early in his career as a newspaper editor, Marx actually suggested the military suppression of communists. He did so while editing a paper dedicated to ending political tyranny in Germany, and Sperber suggests that Marx only embraced the proletariat once he realized that the bourgeoisie would not repeat in the German states the role he credited them with in the French Revolution.  Analyzing this, Marx determined that the bourgeoisie had supported the rights of man only to the point when they got what they wanted. In effect, they wanted rights specific to themselves, rights to conduct business and so forth that were irrelevant to the poor. By the 19th century European governments had given the bourgeois many if not all of the rights they demanded while remaining politically repressive. In effect, the bourgeoisie ultimately became a special-interest group, treating their rights as privileges, while Marx eventually insisted that the proletariat could never be seen that way. The proletariat couldn't be a special interest because they demanded rights, not privileges -- rights for themselves rather than rights for their property. Because they could not claim privileges, the proletariat were the class that was not a class. Thus they were humanity in its authentic form and the rightful, necessary instrument of the communist revolution that alone, Marx decided, could achieve the political reform he wanted in the first place.  Jacobinism strikes many observers today as a precursor of totalitarianism because it seems hostile to "civil society" or anything that gets in the way of citizens' complete identification with the state. But it isn't entirely wrong to worry that civil society, while providing a potential critical distance from the state, can turn into a network of privileges benefiting members only while excluding others from fulfilling their human potential. Marx certainly did not think he was proposing to limit anybody's individual potential. Instead, he insisted that under communism the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all -- and it's hard to be more individualist than that. The debate over what it means to be an individual and a citizen is ongoing, and whatever Sperber may think about Marx as an economist, I don't think he means to say that Marx has nothing more to say on the topic that may have meant the most to him. Most obsolete 19th century economists won't have biographies published this year. That Marx has a Sperber now suggests that his spirit still haunts our time. For some he's something out of Paranormal Activity, for others, something out of A Christmas Carol. Sperber's book is objective enough that readers can decide what they see for themselves.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

"...citizens' complete identification with the state."
If I may inquire: What, exactly, is the state without it's citizens? If one were to turn that phrase around to read "the states complete identification with its citizens." Would people still have a problem with it?
The fact that so many people can't seem to grasp that the people are the state; that the state is not somehow separate from the people tells me more about the mental problems of those people than about any real problem with the state. At least in a truly functional democracy.

Samuel Wilson said...

Part of the problem, I think, is that too many people can only imagine this as a rationale for a sacrifice of individuals and individuality to a state with which they obviously don't identify fully. This is the sort of alienation that Marx believed only communism could rectify. From what I understand, he didn't think most people could figure this out so long as material conditions alienated them from their own everyday work. That's why he accepted that revolution would be a long struggle, and it's probably why people like Lenin thought a vanguard party necessary to kick people into line. Marx seemed to think that all you needed was a proletariat with nothing to lose but chains and a world to win. The genius of capitalism is that it can convince even the poor that they do have something to lose to communism.

Anonymous said...

The state is the nation is the people. If they don't or can't identify with that, they have no reason to be a part of the state (citizen) and there is no reason to for the state (and it's citizenry) to tolerate them within it's borders.

Samuel Wilson said...

But if the people are the state yet people don't identify with it, does the state really exist? Marx often didn't identify with whatever state he was living in because, in practice, those states weren't equivalent to their people but existed to benefit ruling classes. If a Marxist today feels the same way about the U.S., our boasts of democracy notwithstanding, would you throw him out?

Of course, I understand that you're thinking of those people who refuse to identify with the state under any circumstances, but they aren't the only ones who might refuse unconditional identification with actually-existing states.

Anonymous said...

I'm mainly thinking in terms of hypotheticals (sic). That is to say, a state doesn't just randomly occur when a critical mass of individuals come to live in a predetermined area. A state occurs when people of the same mind form that state - in our case, the founding fathers. The mistake they made was in not creating a true nation, but rather a (more-or-less) loose federation of states, each with their own government, set of laws, mores, etc.
Ultimately this led to the civil war. If there had been no separate states, there could have been no secession. Therefore our "nation" is weakened because of the way it is formed. But I digress.

My main point being that a "state" does not exist without it's citizens. Then land may be there, but it is just land. You may draw borders on a map, but that proves nothing. The people MAKE the state and those who are malcontent with what the state is or is becoming have (as I see it) four choices:
1) Accept it as it is, like it or not.
2) Attempt to convince the majority to change in accordance with their own personal views.
3) Pack their bags and leave.
4) Attempt an insurrection and accept the possibility of their death in the doing so.

But if a person simply cannot accept the idea that their personal "individuality" is meaningless to the state, then they cannot live in a state and the onus is and should be on THEM to leave the borders of the state and find another "state" that is more to their liking.

Samuel Wilson said...

re: the U.S. Given the Southerners' dependence on and commitment to slavery, the real choice was between civil war sooner or civil war later. The Federalists wanted the Southern states in the Union because they didn't want the land divided into multiple nations that could be manipulated by the European powers. They preferred to compromise on slavery rather than form the union by conquest, but ended up having to conquer anyway. It might have been less bloody to do so in 1787, but foreign interference may have been more likely.

On individuality, I don't think Marx would have said that anyone's individuality was meaningless to a communist society. But he would have suggested a difference between one's true individuality, which might only flourish under communism, and the bourgeois self-alienating individualism that resists communism. In simpler terms, communists need to tell people that they can be happier under communism than they tell themselves they are now.

Anonymous said...

What I'm saying here is that any given individual is unimportant to the whole of the state. People in this country die every day, but the country doesn't cease to be. To the state, individuality is meaningless because individuality does not create the state - united individuals who set that "individuality" aside in the interest of common goals and the common good are what matter to the state.

Anonymous said...

I think the real problem here are the people who insist it's an either/or proposition. That one cannot maintain one's sense of individuality within the framework of a unified state. To me, those people simply have a learning disability.