A Polemical Life
Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Allen Lane, 768pp, £35.00, ISBN 9780713999044
reviewed by James Heartfield
In the middle of the 19th century a German student who had been arguing over the latest ideas about the reform of philosophy and the possibilities of putting man at the centre of creation, was swept up in the revolutions that shook Europe. Karl Marx took part in the debates and meetings of different continental movements in Brussels, Paris, London and Cologne, and was, for a while, the editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper that argued for democracy, and often against the threatened censorship. It was his good luck to master the latest in German philosophy, which was a critical reappraisal of the great idealistic system of Georg Hegel, undertaken by Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, aiming to turn Hegel’s theory of the progress of the Spirit in the world into a humanistic philosophy of man’s historical progress. Marx reworked the Hegelian Spirit, realised in the world, as a theory of the way that humanity was alienated from itself, which he connected to the modern commercial system, and to a State which stands above us. These thoughts were written up in a book, The Holy Family (1845), and an article, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1844).
Marx took Feuerbach’s argument that God was just a projection of human powers, misunderstood as something outside of us, like an idol we worshipped. Later he would re-work that idea to show how the market economy itself was human cooperation, but in an alienated form, so that things – commodities – that men made came to rule over them. Marx was inspired by the recent irruption of workers’ movements in France, German and Britain and began to think of them as the vehicle for revolutionary change that would overcome the alienation of modern life. His friend Friedrich Engels, who had also been a follower of the ‘young Hegelians’ before moving to Manchester to manage a business owned by his father, had pointed out the great corpus of ideas in the school of ‘political economy’, which Marx critically examined, as way to understand the emerging capitalist order.
Much of the rest of Marx’s life, and Engels’, was taken up with what they came to call the ‘critical analysis of capitalist production’, which Marx thought of as the key to the changes in the State and ideology that had preoccupied his life in the 1840s. A sketch outline of his thinking was written up for the Brussels-based Communist League, and titled the Manifesto of the Communist Party, distilled all the experiences of the revolutions of 1848, the year of its publication (though the movement itself was, by this point, already waning). The Manifesto saw class struggle as the motor of history, framing the clash between proletarians and bourgeois as the mark of the new era, as the struggle between feudal and bourgeois had led to the democratic revolutions of the 18th century. The working people have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, the Manifesto thundered.
Marx elaborated his criticism of capitalism in pamphlets like Wage Labour and Capital (1849) and 1847’s The Poverty of Philosophy (a rather sharp criticism of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty). These polemics drew both on the mainstream economic thinking of the day, which was mostly derived from Adam Smith, his great champion David Ricardo, and those that followed them, and also upon the incipient working class Chartists and socialists. From the latter Marx got the idea that Capital was domination, and that working for an employer could be slavery: Yorkshire slavery, or ‘wage slavery’, as the Chartists called it. From his background in German philosophy Marx got a good understanding of the way that things could change, overthrowing our certainties and expectations, and that this change, however alien it felt, was, in the end, the result of human actions – which meant that it could, and should, be guided towards a better outcome. Marx wrote and polemicised on political questions of the day, and wrote important books such as the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Revelations from the Cologne Trial (1853), mostly recounting the story of the equivocations of the middle class reform movement in the face of working class democracy, and how they defeated the revolutions of 1848.
It was his longer-term ambition to develop the critique of capitalism into a longer, more systematic work. That was no easy task, and resulted, eventually, in three volumes of the book titled Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, the first, published in 1867, and the next two only published after his death, edited by Engels. The first volume shows how trade, while seeming to be the natural way that things get made and shared, only recently came to be the dominant social order, wherein relations between people become relations between things. Capital, says Marx, is just value that begets more value, and to do that it has to find a commodity that is cheaper to buy than the value it creates, which is to say, the labour-power of workers, forced to work for others because they have no means of subsistence for themselves. The surplus value that labour creates becomes the new capital that goes on to exploit those same labourers, leading to an accumulation of capital. In the second volume, Marx deals with the circulation of capital, its necessary proportions and the possibility of an expanding production that itself creates new markets for the additional goods – this was an argument against those, like Sisimondi, and later, Rosa Luxemburg, who thought that the barrier to capitalist expansion was that you would run out of markets. In the third volume Marx explains how capitalists’ profits increase but not as fast as capital accumulates, so that over time the ratio of profit to investment tends to fall, creating crashes and recessions, which is to say that he finds the ‘barrier to capital accumulation is capital itself’.
There have been many biographies of Marx over the years, some by admirers, like Franz Mehring, David Riazonov and (somewhat critically) Otto Ruhle. In the long ‘cold war’ years when anti-communism was a key feature of official ideology, there were propagandistic attacks on Marx, like Isaiah Berlin’s. Since the Cold War ended it seemed that Marx might get a more balanced hearing. Recent biographies, like Francis Wheen’s, have looked wryly at the chaotic domestic life of the Marxes, and others in their circle have had their stories told, like Engels in Tristram Hunt’s 2009 biography, Eleanor Marx in Yvonne Kapp’s two-volume Life, and again in a more recent account by Rachael Holmes. Raoul Peck’s film The Young Marx, with August Diehl is awaiting release. Labour historian Gareth Stedman Jones’ new Marx biography promises much, in particular a strong focus on Marx’s ideas in their social setting. The book has a great deal of the social, political and intellectual background to Marx’s life and ideas. Stedman Jones has some interesting thoughts on the way that Marx’s work was received, and in particular how it was repackaged as ‘Marxism’ by those that came after him.
There are some problems, though. Throughout there is quite a lot of nit-picking and even waspish criticism, so that the book falls between two stools, being neither wholly a life, nor wholly a critique of Marx’s work and ideas, but perhaps the latter, masquerading as the former. The criticisms he makes are not stupid, but not that well-thought-out, either. Stedman Jones seems to convict the young Marx of first being too interested in economics, and not enough in politics, but then to switch around and condemn his ‘rigid application of his notion of democratic revolution’ – to support socialism and democracy strikes Stedman Jones as an ‘attempt to ride two horses’. But rather it was Marx’s dedication to both that made his intervention so productive. Part of Stedman Jones’ criticism of Marx is that he thinks of class too much of as an economic relationship – but this is largely to shoehorn Jones’ own work on class identity and the importance of politics into the debate. That work is valuable, but Jones’ attempt to find Marx at fault for understating the political self-development of working class identity is not justified. Indeed, as he himself shows, Marx both valued the political dimension of class consciousness, and actually contributed to it.
Jones is quite critical of Marx’s theory of capitalism, and his engagement with economic theory. He criticises Marx for thinking that the value of commodities is embodied labour, recommending instead Ricardo’s theory that value is determined by ‘socially necessary labour time’ – falsely attributing each of the two authors’ respective positions to each other. Jones mixes up Marx’s categories of ‘constant capital’ and ‘fixed capital’, which are not the same. This might well sound like Marx-nerdism, which it is, but if Stedman Jones is going to criticise Marx’s ideas, he really ought to make sure he understands them. Stedman Jones generally thinks that Marx’s theory that profits would tend to fall is a mess, objecting that the third volume amends the theory of value set out in the first, by saying that commodities’ values are dependent not on the labour expended in their making alone, but also on the capital expended in their production (‘prices of production’, Marx calls these, to distinguish them from their value). Indeed, Jones argues that the reason that Marx did not finish the last two volumes and left them to Engels to tidy up is because he knew at some level that they did not work. This is an assertion on Jones’ part, and one that is hard to square with the fact that Marx had already worked out the basic argument in the Rough Draft of 1857.
Stedman Jones’ struggle with the difference between the first and third volume of Capital has taxed wiser men, so it is understandable, but still an error, arising out of a failure to understand Marx’s method. The difference between the first and third volume is to do with the level of abstraction that Marx is working in. In the first volume Marx is writing about ‘capital-in-general’, letting a single factory stand for the whole economy. That way he can look at the relationship between labour and capital, and how the exchange between them, while observing the law of equal exchange, still gives rise to a surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The third volume looks at a higher level of abstraction, at the distribution between different companies, so not ‘capital-in-general’, but many capitals. Marx amends his account of goods changing hands at their value, to take into account the fact that different companies are more, or less, labour intensive, and for these differences to be reflected in the prices of the goods, they must reflect the capital as well as the labour input.
Many people have said that this was a cheat on Marx’s part, as Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk did when the third volume was first published. Still, there have been many rebuttals of Bohm-Bawerk’s argument since (notably by Isaac Ilyich Rubin and Roman Rosdolsky) which Stedman Jones seems not to know. It does not really make sense to be scandalised by the mismatch between the ‘values’ in volume one and the ‘prices of production’ in volume three, since the entire development of the argument involves many such mismatches, as between value and exchange value, between exchange value and price, between the value of labour power and the value labour creates. Marx’s whole point is that a static relation of equivalence on the surface of market exchanges disguises a great dynamic transformation working underneath the surface – and one that will eventually lead to the redundancy of the market system in its entirety. What strikes Stedman Jones as inconsistency is Marx’s attempt to describe change.
So, in particular, Jones thinks that Marx’s account of the way that profits tend to fall is a failure, because it is hedged with so many qualifications – what Marx called the ‘counter-acting tendencies’ that it does not justify Marx’s ‘expectations of capitalism’s approaching demise’, nor the rather more forceful heading that Engels gave it of ‘breakdown theory’. But Marx’s theory is not just a theory of crisis, it is a theory of growth. His point was that capital generated a surplus that would give rise to growth, or more precisely, capital accumulation. That expansionary dynamic would itself tend to throw up barriers to more growth, in the form of crises. The theory that capital would grow at a higher rate than the surplus value, would interrupt growth, as there would not be enough additional surplus value to meet the demands of each new round of accumulation. It was not Marx of course who first noticed the falling rate of profit, or what was sometimes called the ‘diminishing rate of return’. He just argues that it is a necessary facet of capital accumulation. He also shows that there are a number of moderating counter-tendency’s such as greater productivity, leading to cheaper means of subsistence and production, and further, that when there are market crashes, these in turn lead to devaluation of written of capital stock that is then bought up cheap.
All of these counter-acting tendencies are not put in to cheat the argument. They are there because Marx is trying to steer a course between the boosting Ricardians who think that growth can go on forever without interruption, and the miserablist Sismondians, who see collapse around the corner. Far from being a failure, Marx’s theory is a pretty good account of the trajectory of capital accumulation over the 150 years since the book was published. Growth, interrupted by crises of lesser or greater severity, declining profit rates, market gluts and capital droughts – these are all pretty much what has been happening in the markets.
‘If Capital became a landmark in nineteenth-century thought, it was not because it had succeeded in identifying the “laws of motion” of capital,’ claims Stedman Jones. That would be a disappointment to Marx, who thought that that was what he had done. Is there anything left? Jones thinks so, or says he does, making a case for the historical writing in Marx’s Capital, in particular the sections on the working day and exploitation, for their solid use of empirical research. That is to say that the labour historian Jones likes Marx the labour historian, but not Marx the economist or Marx the philosopher.
Jones makes a case for Marx, too, as a moderate reformer, against his wilder preoccupation with revolution. In the International Working Men’s Association, Jones shows, Marx had a big influence on the trade union leaders like Applegarth, Odger and Cremer, promoting the idea of agitation for democratic reform. That much is true. Indeed, Jones could give more credit to Marx for the role he played getting the London trade unionists to agitate for the Unionists in the American Civil War. Jones gives the leading role in the Union Emancipation Society to John Bright and John Stuart Mill, though in fact it was the Lancashire weavers JC Edwards and Ted Hooson that built the mass campaign. Jones is out of sympathy with Marx’s criticisms of the same union leaders for their turn towards the Liberal Party and a more subservient approach – though Marx was surely right that the years of union support for the Liberal Party limited the movement towards an independent working class party.
Jones writes well on the importance of the Paris Commune and what the support for the Commune did for Marx’s stature in the labour movement. He takes less seriously the role that the three volumes of Capital played as a guide to working class militancy. Generally, he takes the view that Engels’ editing of the second two volumes, and the posthumous promotion of ‘Marxism’ by Kautsky and others was a kind of invention, or as he says ‘the Marx constructed in the 20th century bore only an accidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth’. The thousands of pages Marx wrote in his lifetime, those published in his lifetime and after his death, make this claim ring a bit hollow. There is an interesting challenge to reassess Marx’s legacy today, but it is not greatly helped by misrepresenting him. In holding up those passages in Marx that he thinks he agrees with, and taking those as a basis to strike down the other passages that he is less at ease with, Jones has produced an account that is perhaps too argumentative to stand as a biography.
Marx took Feuerbach’s argument that God was just a projection of human powers, misunderstood as something outside of us, like an idol we worshipped. Later he would re-work that idea to show how the market economy itself was human cooperation, but in an alienated form, so that things – commodities – that men made came to rule over them. Marx was inspired by the recent irruption of workers’ movements in France, German and Britain and began to think of them as the vehicle for revolutionary change that would overcome the alienation of modern life. His friend Friedrich Engels, who had also been a follower of the ‘young Hegelians’ before moving to Manchester to manage a business owned by his father, had pointed out the great corpus of ideas in the school of ‘political economy’, which Marx critically examined, as way to understand the emerging capitalist order.
Much of the rest of Marx’s life, and Engels’, was taken up with what they came to call the ‘critical analysis of capitalist production’, which Marx thought of as the key to the changes in the State and ideology that had preoccupied his life in the 1840s. A sketch outline of his thinking was written up for the Brussels-based Communist League, and titled the Manifesto of the Communist Party, distilled all the experiences of the revolutions of 1848, the year of its publication (though the movement itself was, by this point, already waning). The Manifesto saw class struggle as the motor of history, framing the clash between proletarians and bourgeois as the mark of the new era, as the struggle between feudal and bourgeois had led to the democratic revolutions of the 18th century. The working people have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, the Manifesto thundered.
Marx elaborated his criticism of capitalism in pamphlets like Wage Labour and Capital (1849) and 1847’s The Poverty of Philosophy (a rather sharp criticism of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty). These polemics drew both on the mainstream economic thinking of the day, which was mostly derived from Adam Smith, his great champion David Ricardo, and those that followed them, and also upon the incipient working class Chartists and socialists. From the latter Marx got the idea that Capital was domination, and that working for an employer could be slavery: Yorkshire slavery, or ‘wage slavery’, as the Chartists called it. From his background in German philosophy Marx got a good understanding of the way that things could change, overthrowing our certainties and expectations, and that this change, however alien it felt, was, in the end, the result of human actions – which meant that it could, and should, be guided towards a better outcome. Marx wrote and polemicised on political questions of the day, and wrote important books such as the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Revelations from the Cologne Trial (1853), mostly recounting the story of the equivocations of the middle class reform movement in the face of working class democracy, and how they defeated the revolutions of 1848.
It was his longer-term ambition to develop the critique of capitalism into a longer, more systematic work. That was no easy task, and resulted, eventually, in three volumes of the book titled Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, the first, published in 1867, and the next two only published after his death, edited by Engels. The first volume shows how trade, while seeming to be the natural way that things get made and shared, only recently came to be the dominant social order, wherein relations between people become relations between things. Capital, says Marx, is just value that begets more value, and to do that it has to find a commodity that is cheaper to buy than the value it creates, which is to say, the labour-power of workers, forced to work for others because they have no means of subsistence for themselves. The surplus value that labour creates becomes the new capital that goes on to exploit those same labourers, leading to an accumulation of capital. In the second volume, Marx deals with the circulation of capital, its necessary proportions and the possibility of an expanding production that itself creates new markets for the additional goods – this was an argument against those, like Sisimondi, and later, Rosa Luxemburg, who thought that the barrier to capitalist expansion was that you would run out of markets. In the third volume Marx explains how capitalists’ profits increase but not as fast as capital accumulates, so that over time the ratio of profit to investment tends to fall, creating crashes and recessions, which is to say that he finds the ‘barrier to capital accumulation is capital itself’.
There have been many biographies of Marx over the years, some by admirers, like Franz Mehring, David Riazonov and (somewhat critically) Otto Ruhle. In the long ‘cold war’ years when anti-communism was a key feature of official ideology, there were propagandistic attacks on Marx, like Isaiah Berlin’s. Since the Cold War ended it seemed that Marx might get a more balanced hearing. Recent biographies, like Francis Wheen’s, have looked wryly at the chaotic domestic life of the Marxes, and others in their circle have had their stories told, like Engels in Tristram Hunt’s 2009 biography, Eleanor Marx in Yvonne Kapp’s two-volume Life, and again in a more recent account by Rachael Holmes. Raoul Peck’s film The Young Marx, with August Diehl is awaiting release. Labour historian Gareth Stedman Jones’ new Marx biography promises much, in particular a strong focus on Marx’s ideas in their social setting. The book has a great deal of the social, political and intellectual background to Marx’s life and ideas. Stedman Jones has some interesting thoughts on the way that Marx’s work was received, and in particular how it was repackaged as ‘Marxism’ by those that came after him.
There are some problems, though. Throughout there is quite a lot of nit-picking and even waspish criticism, so that the book falls between two stools, being neither wholly a life, nor wholly a critique of Marx’s work and ideas, but perhaps the latter, masquerading as the former. The criticisms he makes are not stupid, but not that well-thought-out, either. Stedman Jones seems to convict the young Marx of first being too interested in economics, and not enough in politics, but then to switch around and condemn his ‘rigid application of his notion of democratic revolution’ – to support socialism and democracy strikes Stedman Jones as an ‘attempt to ride two horses’. But rather it was Marx’s dedication to both that made his intervention so productive. Part of Stedman Jones’ criticism of Marx is that he thinks of class too much of as an economic relationship – but this is largely to shoehorn Jones’ own work on class identity and the importance of politics into the debate. That work is valuable, but Jones’ attempt to find Marx at fault for understating the political self-development of working class identity is not justified. Indeed, as he himself shows, Marx both valued the political dimension of class consciousness, and actually contributed to it.
Jones is quite critical of Marx’s theory of capitalism, and his engagement with economic theory. He criticises Marx for thinking that the value of commodities is embodied labour, recommending instead Ricardo’s theory that value is determined by ‘socially necessary labour time’ – falsely attributing each of the two authors’ respective positions to each other. Jones mixes up Marx’s categories of ‘constant capital’ and ‘fixed capital’, which are not the same. This might well sound like Marx-nerdism, which it is, but if Stedman Jones is going to criticise Marx’s ideas, he really ought to make sure he understands them. Stedman Jones generally thinks that Marx’s theory that profits would tend to fall is a mess, objecting that the third volume amends the theory of value set out in the first, by saying that commodities’ values are dependent not on the labour expended in their making alone, but also on the capital expended in their production (‘prices of production’, Marx calls these, to distinguish them from their value). Indeed, Jones argues that the reason that Marx did not finish the last two volumes and left them to Engels to tidy up is because he knew at some level that they did not work. This is an assertion on Jones’ part, and one that is hard to square with the fact that Marx had already worked out the basic argument in the Rough Draft of 1857.
Stedman Jones’ struggle with the difference between the first and third volume of Capital has taxed wiser men, so it is understandable, but still an error, arising out of a failure to understand Marx’s method. The difference between the first and third volume is to do with the level of abstraction that Marx is working in. In the first volume Marx is writing about ‘capital-in-general’, letting a single factory stand for the whole economy. That way he can look at the relationship between labour and capital, and how the exchange between them, while observing the law of equal exchange, still gives rise to a surplus value in the hands of the capitalist. The third volume looks at a higher level of abstraction, at the distribution between different companies, so not ‘capital-in-general’, but many capitals. Marx amends his account of goods changing hands at their value, to take into account the fact that different companies are more, or less, labour intensive, and for these differences to be reflected in the prices of the goods, they must reflect the capital as well as the labour input.
Many people have said that this was a cheat on Marx’s part, as Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk did when the third volume was first published. Still, there have been many rebuttals of Bohm-Bawerk’s argument since (notably by Isaac Ilyich Rubin and Roman Rosdolsky) which Stedman Jones seems not to know. It does not really make sense to be scandalised by the mismatch between the ‘values’ in volume one and the ‘prices of production’ in volume three, since the entire development of the argument involves many such mismatches, as between value and exchange value, between exchange value and price, between the value of labour power and the value labour creates. Marx’s whole point is that a static relation of equivalence on the surface of market exchanges disguises a great dynamic transformation working underneath the surface – and one that will eventually lead to the redundancy of the market system in its entirety. What strikes Stedman Jones as inconsistency is Marx’s attempt to describe change.
So, in particular, Jones thinks that Marx’s account of the way that profits tend to fall is a failure, because it is hedged with so many qualifications – what Marx called the ‘counter-acting tendencies’ that it does not justify Marx’s ‘expectations of capitalism’s approaching demise’, nor the rather more forceful heading that Engels gave it of ‘breakdown theory’. But Marx’s theory is not just a theory of crisis, it is a theory of growth. His point was that capital generated a surplus that would give rise to growth, or more precisely, capital accumulation. That expansionary dynamic would itself tend to throw up barriers to more growth, in the form of crises. The theory that capital would grow at a higher rate than the surplus value, would interrupt growth, as there would not be enough additional surplus value to meet the demands of each new round of accumulation. It was not Marx of course who first noticed the falling rate of profit, or what was sometimes called the ‘diminishing rate of return’. He just argues that it is a necessary facet of capital accumulation. He also shows that there are a number of moderating counter-tendency’s such as greater productivity, leading to cheaper means of subsistence and production, and further, that when there are market crashes, these in turn lead to devaluation of written of capital stock that is then bought up cheap.
All of these counter-acting tendencies are not put in to cheat the argument. They are there because Marx is trying to steer a course between the boosting Ricardians who think that growth can go on forever without interruption, and the miserablist Sismondians, who see collapse around the corner. Far from being a failure, Marx’s theory is a pretty good account of the trajectory of capital accumulation over the 150 years since the book was published. Growth, interrupted by crises of lesser or greater severity, declining profit rates, market gluts and capital droughts – these are all pretty much what has been happening in the markets.
‘If Capital became a landmark in nineteenth-century thought, it was not because it had succeeded in identifying the “laws of motion” of capital,’ claims Stedman Jones. That would be a disappointment to Marx, who thought that that was what he had done. Is there anything left? Jones thinks so, or says he does, making a case for the historical writing in Marx’s Capital, in particular the sections on the working day and exploitation, for their solid use of empirical research. That is to say that the labour historian Jones likes Marx the labour historian, but not Marx the economist or Marx the philosopher.
Jones makes a case for Marx, too, as a moderate reformer, against his wilder preoccupation with revolution. In the International Working Men’s Association, Jones shows, Marx had a big influence on the trade union leaders like Applegarth, Odger and Cremer, promoting the idea of agitation for democratic reform. That much is true. Indeed, Jones could give more credit to Marx for the role he played getting the London trade unionists to agitate for the Unionists in the American Civil War. Jones gives the leading role in the Union Emancipation Society to John Bright and John Stuart Mill, though in fact it was the Lancashire weavers JC Edwards and Ted Hooson that built the mass campaign. Jones is out of sympathy with Marx’s criticisms of the same union leaders for their turn towards the Liberal Party and a more subservient approach – though Marx was surely right that the years of union support for the Liberal Party limited the movement towards an independent working class party.
Jones writes well on the importance of the Paris Commune and what the support for the Commune did for Marx’s stature in the labour movement. He takes less seriously the role that the three volumes of Capital played as a guide to working class militancy. Generally, he takes the view that Engels’ editing of the second two volumes, and the posthumous promotion of ‘Marxism’ by Kautsky and others was a kind of invention, or as he says ‘the Marx constructed in the 20th century bore only an accidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth’. The thousands of pages Marx wrote in his lifetime, those published in his lifetime and after his death, make this claim ring a bit hollow. There is an interesting challenge to reassess Marx’s legacy today, but it is not greatly helped by misrepresenting him. In holding up those passages in Marx that he thinks he agrees with, and taking those as a basis to strike down the other passages that he is less at ease with, Jones has produced an account that is perhaps too argumentative to stand as a biography.