A decent overview, but not for beginners
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| Karl Marx |
You can’t really read a great deal of literature and history published in the last 150 years without coming across Marxist themes and ideas. Love it or hate it, Marx’s philosophy was a world-changing event, the effects of which still persist to this day. For all his monumental influence, however, American students are unlikely to encounter anything but the most cursory mention of Marx in school, unless you majored in philosophy or economics. The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Friedrich Engels is brief and pretty easy to follow, but it seems a rather incomplete expression of Marx’s philosophy, more propaganda than treatise. If you really want to know what Marx is all about, you’ve got to read Capital, which is hardly a book for novices. Unwilling to invest the time and effort necessary to tackle that intimidating tome, I was hoping to find an intelligent primer that would give me an overview of the main components of Marx’s philosophical system. This led me to The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx, a 1921 publication by Austrian Marxist scholar Max Beer.
The contents of the book are definitely more Teaching than Life. Beer devotes few pages to biography and chooses to focus primarily on Marx’s writings. Before he even gets into Marx, however, Beer first provides an introduction to the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx was a follower of Hegel, and a grasp of Hegel’s concept of the dialectic is integral to an understanding of Marx’s work. Beer also goes into a lengthy synopsis of the philosophy of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French Socialist philosopher who sparred with Marx over a number of intellectual issues. Though I suppose this overview of Proudhon may be necessary for clarifying the finer points of Marx’s thought, it feels a bit tangential. Likewise, it seems a strange choice by Beer to devote a large portion of the book’s conclusion to the economic theory of David Ricardo, as opposed to handling that earlier in the book. The most bothersome part about these side trips is not so much that they distract from Marx but rather that Beer writes about his subjects as if he assumes you’ve already read their work. In fact, it is difficult to determine who exactly Beer wrote this book for, as it doesn’t read so much like an introduction to Marxist thought as it does a recap, a sort of postgraduate cheat sheet. Beer includes too many extended quotes from Marx’s works in the text when that space would have been better occupied by more summation and explanation.
Thankfully, there is still room for Beer to outline the fundamental concepts of Marxism, as I had hoped. Chapter IV: The Marxian System takes up the entire second half of the book, and for the most part delivered the overview I was hoping for. Again, it is not written for the philosophical rookie, so Beer’s text is not always easy to follow. Some of the more mathematical economic theory, like the calculation of surplus value, is written out in paragraph form, when simple equations or charts would have been much more helpful.
Admittedly, one of the qualities that attracted me to this work is its brevity. The printed edition was only 130 pages long. Once I got into the ebook, however, I realized those must have been some pretty dense pages because this work is by no means a brief, easy read. In some respects, Beer succeeded in answering my questions about Marx, but in others he still left me scratching my head. This work is likely too elementary for real graduate students of philosophy, but I would only recommend it to those lay readers who have a serious interest and considerable experience in reading philosophical texts.
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A must read, but not necessarily a must like
Though originally written in 1848, The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels ended up exerting its greatest influence in the following century. No other book had a more profound effect on 20th-century history in terms of lives affected, governments overthrown, nations transformed, people killed or displaced, and the expenditure of time, money, and energy either for or against it. Given the fact that America was so preoccupied with the threat of Communism for decades, it’s surprising how few Americans ever took the time to read the actual battle cry of their nemesis. Due to its historical importance, Communism is a political philosophy that must either be accepted or refuted, but cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, my intention here is not to critique Communism as a philosophy but rather to critique the Manifesto as a book.
A common misconception is that this book is the founding document of Communism, but in reality Communism was well-known as an active political school in Europe at the time the Manifesto was published. The purpose of the Manifesto was to ignite and unite the faithful, recruit the curious, and frighten the bourgeoisie. The authors assumed a prior knowledge of Communism on the part of the reader, and as such the text spends more time clarifying the doctrine of Communism than it does declaring it outright. Because it’s a manifesto rather than a full-fledged philosophical treatise, it’s full of bold, undefended statements. Here you won’t find well-reasoned arguments extolling the virtues of Communism, nor detailed explanations as to how exactly the world would be run following the triumph of the Revolution. For that you’ll have to look elsewhere in Marx’s oeuvre. The subject matter of the Manifesto is restricted to a description of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, along with some general statements about the abolition of private property. There’s also some discussion of how Communism differs from earlier forms of Socialism, and the state of its activity in Europe in the mid-19th century.
The Kindle file that’s offered for free on Amazon was originally created by Project Gutenberg. It’s a very short file, and one-fifth of it is taken up by the Project Gutenberg license agreement. The entire Manifesto can be read in under an hour. This is a no-frills file; it contains no introduction, commentary, or footnotes. There’s no table of contents, but a file this small doesn’t really need one. The English translation is from the 1888 edition edited by Engels. For the modern audience it’s a bit of a clunky read. There are a few grammatical errors, subject-verb disagreements for example. Absent from this volume, however, are the annoying typographical errors often found in Project Gutenberg files created by optical character recognition of scanned books. In that respect the text is clean and user-friendly.
As a historical document, The Communist Manifesto is an invaluable artifact. As a philosophical text, it’s brevity undermines its necessity. For any in-depth knowledge of the subject, you’ll have to dive into Marx’s Das Kapital.
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