Marx's Das Kapital

A Biography (A Book that Shook the World)

Francis Wheen

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781843544012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782392163
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it, ' wrote Karl Marx in 1845. This is the essence of Das Kapital, a blazing expose of the new capitalist world of the Victorian era, whose ideas would affect the lives of millions, and alter the course of world history.
In vivid detail, Francis Wheen tells the story of Marx's twenty-year fight to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Das Kapital was born in a two-room flat in Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy. The first volume was published in 1867, to muted praise, but, after Marx's death, went on to influence thinkers, writers and revolutionaries, from George Bernard Shaw to Lenin. Wheen's brilliant and accessible book shows that, far from being a dry economic treatise, Das Kapital is like a vast Gothic novel, whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created: capitalism. Furthermore, Wheen argues, as long as capitalism endures, Das Kapital demands to be read and understood.

CHAPTER 1

Gestation

Although Das Kapital is usually categorized as a work of economics, Karl Marx turned to the study of political economy only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual foundations that underpin the project, and it is his personal experience of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic system which estranges people from one another and from the world they inhabit – a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of inanimate capital and commodities.

Marx himself was an outsider from the moment of his birth, on 5 May 1818 – a Jewish boy in a predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a Prussian state whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Although the Rhineland had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic wars, three years before his birth it was reincorporated into Imperial Prussia and the Jews of Trier thus became subject to an edict banning them from practising in the professions: Karl’s father, Heinrich Marx, had to convert to Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. No wonder the young Karl Marx began to brood upon alienation. ‘We cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called,’ he wrote in a schoolboy essay, at the age of seventeen. ‘Our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them.’

His father encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The years of annexation had given Heinrich a taste for French flavours in politics, religion, life and art: one of his grandchildren described him as ‘a real eighteenth-century “Frenchman” who knew his Voltaire and his Rousseau by heart’. The boy’s other intellectual mentor was Heinrich’s friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured and liberal government official who introduced Karl to poetry and music (and to his daughter Jenny von Westphalen, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks together the Baron would recite passages from Homer and Shakespeare, which his young companion learned by heart – and later used as the essential seasonings in his own writings. In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes with von Westphalen by declaiming scenes from Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. As Professor S. S. Prawer has written, anyone in Karl Marx’s household was obliged to live ‘in a perpetual flurry of allusions to English literature’. There was a quotation for every occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an emotion – or breathe life into an inanimate abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the voice of Shylock (in Volume I of Das Kapital) to justify the exploitation of child labour in factories.

Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:

My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,

The penalty and forfeit of my bond.

To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from Timon of Athens on money as the ‘common whore of mankind’, followed by another from Sophocles’ Antigone (‘Money! Money’s the curse of man, none greater!/That’s what wrecks cities, banishes men from home,/Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul,/Pointing out the way to infamy and shame…’). Economists with anachronistic models and categories are likened to Don Quixote, who ‘paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all economic forms of society’.

Marx’s earliest ambitions were literary. As a law student at the University of Berlin he wrote a book of poetry, a verse drama and even a novel, Scorpion and Felix, which was dashed off in a fit of intoxicated whimsy while under the spell of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. After these experiments, he admitted defeat: ‘Suddenly, as if by a magic touch – oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow – I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing… A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.’ Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to retreat to the countryside for a long rest – whereupon he at last succumbed to the siren voice of G. W. F. Hegel, the recently deceased professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy was the subject of intense dispute among fellow students and lecturers. In his youth Hegel had been an idealistic supporter of the French Revolution, but by middle age he had become comfortable and complaisant, believing that a truly mature man should recognize ‘the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it’. According to Hegel, ‘All that is real is rational,’ and since the Prussian state was undoubtedly real, in the sense that it existed, his conservative supporters argued that it must therefore be rational and above reproach. Those who championed his more subversive early work – the Young Hegelians – preferred to quote the second half of that dictum: ‘All that is rational is real.’ An absolute monarchy, buttressed by censors and secret police, was palpably irrational and therefore unreal, a mirage that would disappear as soon as anyone dared touch it.

At university, Marx ‘adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read’ – a habit he never lost. A reading list from this period shows the precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While writing a paper on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of Winckelmann’s History of Art, started to teach himself English and Italian, translated Tacitus’s Germania and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and ‘spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight’. This is the same eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference. The description of Democritus in Marx’s doctoral thesis, on ‘The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy’, looks remarkably like a self-portrait: ‘Cicero calls him a vir eruditus. He is competent in physics, ethics, mathematics, in the encyclopaedic disciplines, in every art.’

For a while, Marx seemed uncertain how best to use all that erudition. After gaining his doctorate he thought of becoming a philosophy lecturer, but then decided that daily proximity to professors would be intolerable. ‘Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!’ Besides, since leaving university Marx had been turning his thoughts from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual. ‘Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time,’ he wrote in 1842, ‘the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.’ That spring he began writing for a new liberal newspaper in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung; within six months he had been appointed editor.

Marx’s journalism is characterized by a reckless belligerence which explains why he spent most of his adult life in exile and political isolation. His very first article for the Rheinische Zeitung was a lacerating assault on both the intolerance of Prussian absolutism and the feeble-mindedness of its liberal opponents. Not content with making enemies of the government and opposition simultaneously, he turned against his own comrades as well, denouncing the Young Hegelians for ‘rowdiness and blackguardism’. Only two months after Marx’s assumption of editorial responsibility, the provincial governor asked the censorship ministers in Berlin to prosecute him for ‘impudent and disrespectful criticism’. No less a figure than Tsar Nicholas of Russia also begged the Prussian king to suppress the Rheinische Zeitung, having taken umbrage at an anti-Russian diatribe. The paper was duly closed in March 1843: at the age of twenty-four, Marx was already wielding a pen that could terrify and infuriate the crowned heads of Europe. Realizing that he had no future in Prussia, he accepted an invitation to move to Paris as co-editor of a new journal-in-exile for Germans, the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. There was only one caveat: ‘I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not and will not leave Germany without my fiancée.’

Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in June 1843. For the rest of the summer, while awaiting their summons to Paris, he and his new bride enjoyed an extended honeymoon in the fashionable spa resort of Kreuznach. When not walking by the river he shut himself away in a workroom, reading and writing with furious intensity. Marx always liked to work out his ideas on paper, and a surviving page from the Kreuznach notebooks shows the process in action:

Note. Under Louis XVIII, the constitution by grace of the king (Charter imposed by the king); under Louis Philippe, the king by grace of the constitution (imposed kingship). In general we can note that the conversion of the subject into the predicate, and of the predicate into the subject, the exchange of that which determines for that which is determined, is always the most immediate revolution… The king makes the law (old monarchy), the law makes the king (new monarchy).

This simple grammatical inversion also disclosed the flaw in German philosophy. Hegel had assumed that ‘the Idea of the State’ was the subject, with society as its object, whereas history showed the opposite. Turn Hegel upside down and the problem was solved: religion does not make man, man makes religion; the constitution does not create the people, but the people create the constitution. Although he took the idea from Ludwig Feuerbach, who in a recent book had argued that ‘thought arises from being, not being from thought’, Marx extended its logic from abstract philosophy to the material world. As he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, published in 1845, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Here, still in the womb, is the essential thesis of Das Kapital. However glorious its apparent economic triumphs, capitalism remains a disaster since it turns people into commodities, exchangeable for other commodities. Until humans can assert themselves as the subjects of history rather than its objects, there is no escape from this tyranny.

The presiding triumvirate of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher – Karl Marx, the journalist Arnold Ruge, the poet Georg Herwegh – arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1843 and set up a ‘phalanstery’ or commune in the Rue Vanneau, inspired by the utopian ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier. The experiment in communal living was short-lived, as was the journal itself: only one issue appeared before the editors fell out. Marx then took up an offer to write for Vorwärts, a bi-weekly Communist newspaper published by German exiles, in which he first outlined his conviction that class consciousness was the fertilizer of revolution. ‘The German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat, just as the English proletariat is its economist, and the French proletariat its politician,’ he wrote, prefiguring a later assessment by Engels that Marxism itself was a hybrid of these three bloodlines. Marx was already well versed in German philosophy and French politics; now he set about educating himself in British economics, reading his way systematically through the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and James Mill, scribbling a running commentary as he went along. These notes, commonly known as the Paris manuscripts, are an early rough draft of what eventually became Das Kapital.

The first manuscript begins with this straightforward assertion: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him.’ If capital is nothing more than the accumulated fruits of the worker’s labour, then a country’s capitals and revenues grow only when ‘more and more of the worker’s products are being taken from him, when his own labour increasingly confronts him as alien property and the means of his existence and of his activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist’. Even in the most propitious economic conditions, the worker’s fate is inevitably ‘overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital’. His labour becomes an external being which ‘exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien’. This image comes from one of Marx’s favourite books, Frankenstein, the tale of a monster that turns against its creator. Although some scholars claim that there is a ‘radical break’ between the thought of the young Marx and the mature Marx, both the analysis and its ghoulish expression are manifestly the work of the same man who argued in Das Kapital, more than twenty years later, that the means by which capitalism raises its productivity ‘distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process… they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the juggernaut of capital’.

In August 1844, while Jenny Marx was visiting her mother in Trier, the twenty-three-year-old Friedrich Engels came to call on Karl at his Parisian apartment. They had met once before, fleetingly, at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung, and more recently Marx had been profoundly impressed by a ‘Critique of Political Economy’ which Engels submitted to the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. One can see why: though he now believed that social and economic forces drove the engine of history, he had no direct knowledge of capitalism in practice. Engels was well placed to enlighten him, as the son and heir of a German cotton manufacturer who owned mills in Manchester – heartland of the Industrial Revolution and birthplace of the Anti-Corn Law League, a city teeming with Chartists, Owenists and socialist agitators of every kind. Engels had moved to Lancashire in the autumn of 1842, ostensibly to learn about the family business but actually with the intention of observing the human consequences of Victorian capitalism. By day he was a diligent young manager at the Cotton Exchange; after hours he changed sides, exploring the city’s proletarian streets and slums to gather material for his early masterpiece, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

Although Marx and Engels spent ten days together in Paris, the only account of their epic conversation comes in a single sentence written by Engels more than forty years later: ‘When I visited Marx in Paris in the summer of 1844, our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time.’ They complemented each other perfectly – Marx with his wealth of knowledge, Engels with his knowledge of wealth. Marx wrote slowly and painfully, with countless inky deletions and emendations, while Engels’s manuscripts are neat, businesslike and elegant. Marx lived in chaos and penury for most of his life; Engels held down a full-time job while also maintaining a formidable output of books, letters and journalism – and still found the time to enjoy the pleasures of high bourgeois life, with horses in his stables and plenty of wine in his cellars. Yet despite his obvious advantages, Engels knew from the outset that he would never be the dominant partner. He accepted, without complaint or jealousy, that his duty was to give the intellectual and financial support that made Marx’s work possible. ‘I simply cannot understand,’ he wrote, ‘how anyone can be envious of genius; it’s something so very special that we who have not got it know it to be unattainable right from the start; but to be envious of anything like that one must have to be frightfully small-minded.’

They had no secrets from each other, no taboos: their correspondence is a pungent stew of history and gossip, arcane economics and schoolboy jokes. Engels also served as a kind of substitute mother to Marx – despatching pocket money, fussing over his health and continually warning him not to neglect his studies. In the earliest surviving letter, from October 1844, he was already urging Marx to turn his political and economic notes into a book without delay: ‘See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’ Three months later his impatience was growing: ‘Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron’s hot… So try and finish before April, do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly.’ A forlorn hope: more than two decades passed before the first volume of Das Kapital was at last delivered to the presses.

Engels himself is not entirely blameless here. Soon after meeting Marx in Paris he proposed that they collaborate on a short pamphlet – forty pages at most – criticizing the more excitable Young Hegelians. Having finished his own portion of twenty pages within a few days, Engels was ‘not a little surprised’ several months later to learn that the pamphlet had now swollen to 300 pages. Marx was the kind of writer who could never resist a distraction, preferring the immediate gratification of pamphlets and articles to the mute inglorious toil required for his magnum opus, then provisionally titled A Critique of Economics and Politics. Despite having promised to deliver the economic manuscript to the German publisher Karl Leske by the end of summer 1845, he set it aside after writing no more than a table of contents. ‘It seemed to me very important,’ he explained to Leske, ‘to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present… If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.’ A likely story: the book in question, The German Ideology, didn’t find a publisher until 1932. ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ Marx wrote, ‘all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.’

Yet he was still unable or unwilling to give the economic work his fu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• A Note on Translations
• Introduction: The Unknown Masterpiece
• 1. Gestation
• 2. Birth
• 3. Afterlife
• Index
• Copyright