Karl Marx: His Life and Environment

Book Review

Title: Karl Marx: His Life and Environment Author: Isaiah Berlin Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996, New York.

By Leo Kee Chye

No thinker had a more profound and direct effect on mankind in the Twentieth century than Karl Marx whose philosophy “Marxism” gave rise to Communism, a socio-political system which once governed nearly half of the world’s population. To understand the appeal of “Marxism”, it is essential to know about the man: his life, thoughts and his times. Isaiah Berlin’s “Karl Marx” did just that. This review has the details.

Among the several biographies on Marx I have read, Berlin’s stands out prominently from the rest. He is the only author who is capable of painting with such vividness the socio-economical and political conditions during Marx’s times that I thought he had personally lived through them. Despite the confusion and confluence of disparate ideologies and events at that period, Berlin manages to thread them into a coherent whole to explain how Marx came to conceive, then develop, and finally materialise his unique brand of philosophy, Marxism.

Though Berlin wrote lucidly, his style is somewhat unconventional. I needed to digest a couple of pages before getting into his mode of thinking. Many of his paragraphs are exceedingly long that I lost track of when one idea ends and another starts. After groping through the tens of pages, I realised he used a conversational or monologue style by which he conveyed his thoughts. Then, my reading became fluid.

All in all, Berlin’s Marx is a brilliant book that offers a compelling portrait of the father of modern Communism, vividly depicting the socio-political atmosphere during when Marx wrote his definitive work, Das Kapital.

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Comments and summary

With the tearing down of Berlin Wall, the spectacular collapse of Soviet Union, and the embracement of capitalism by China and Vietnam; Karl Marx and his Das Kapital could not have been more wrong. Communism, the political system once governed half of the world’s population, has now reduced to a last bastion in North Korea and a mere nominal title in China.

Clearly, the verdict is out. Marx blundered. Or did he? In hindsight, it seems that he did. But hindsight is 20/20 vision. Let’s look at the historical setting during when Marx worked out his idea of Marxism.

Early 19th century Europe was a highly-charged place. Social and political ideas of every kind were developed and applied, with violence at times, much to the displeasure of the ruling classes. Suppression, censorship and secret police were therefore the tools by which the ruling classes employed, exerted and maintained their influence, but only to foment even more radical ideas and actions.

Karl Marx, a radical thinker of his time, believed that antagonism between the capitalist (bourgeois) and working class (proletarian) would inevitably lead to a violent world revolution to end capitalism and in its place a classless and stateless society “Communism” would emerge.

If Marx has seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Isaac Newton. Whether Marx had indeed seen further is a matter of opinion but beyond doubt he owed a large portion of his intellectual debt to Georg Wilhelm Friedrick Hegel, the German philosopher who greatly influenced the intellectual scene in 18th and 19th century continental Europe.

Hegel sees the world as a constant progress of transformation from lower to higher order of existence. The order can mean anything: a type of political system, a social movement, a mode of thinking. Each new order emerge as an idea or thesis. This thesis carries with it the seed of its destruction, an opposing thesis or anti-thesis. Out of the thesis and anti-thesis, a new order or synthesis emerges which seeks to reconcile and preserve some aspects of the previous two conflicting forces. Every synthesis functions as a new thesis, with its anti-thesis or anti-synthesis, which will give rise to another order. The cycle repeats itself until an ultimate order, the realisation of the world spirit is reached. In Hegel’s words, “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom”. Such transition is by no means smooth and orderly but can be extremely violent. For example, the ancient world gave way to the medieval, slavery to feudalism, and feudalism to industrial bourgeois.

Marx shared the same optimism with Hegel that the world would work towards a positive order. But he hated the abstract theorising of Hegelian philosophy which was completely divorce from reality. Nor did Marx like those philosophers that followed Hegel to further mystify and justify some religious orders. Marx was an atheist and regarded “Religion…is the opium of the masses”. He wanted to ground Hegel’s philosophy with something tangible like economics. And the outcome was material dialecticism.

Unlike hard sciences, the subject of study of social sciences is human beings which proves difficult to quantify and almost impossible to experiment. Isaac Newton, allegedly said: “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies. But not the madness of people!”, an understandable remark from a man who lost quite a fortune during the burst of the South Sea Bubble.

Economics then, however, was the most “scientific” and most successful among the social sciences. It dealt with concrete prevailing conditions of human beings rather than flirting with some abstract unpractical concepts.

After years of investigation and studying the principles of economics, he noticed that the average manual worker then received a minimum wage, just enough for subsistence, was less than what the product was selling at the market price. The surplus value, after deducting the organising ability and risk taken by the capitalist, was shared not by the society but among the bourgeois, the capitalists. Intense competition would only lead to a monopolistic condition whereby the workers would be further exploited. Marx concluded that capitalism, the mode of production then, was untenable and would ultimately collapse when the proletarian revolt against the bourgeois.

Though what Marx had deduced seems alien and absurd at our times, it accurately reflects the hard economic situation prevalent in the 19th century. Frederick Engels, Marx’s collaborator, saw and wrote about the pathetic conditions of the English working class who lived in abject poverty with no rights or welfare whatsoever, totally at the mercy of their employer class. No English author have better described these appalling conditions than Charles Dickens in “Hard Times” and “Oliver Twist”.

Of course, in hindsight, it is easy to see where Marx had gone wrong.

Labour supply is not unlimited Labour is indeed like a commodity and its price or wage is determined by supply and demand. With increasing demand and limited supply, wages will be squeezed up, in a perfect or near perfect competitive environment. This explanation, however, partly explains the improvement of the working class in developed nations. The economic exploitations have in fact been transplanted into the “sweatshops” of many Third World countries, producing cheap goods for consumption in developed nations.

Human capital and universal suffrage Marx did not anticipate the universal and egalitarian education system would churn out workers capable of producing goods and services using, other than manual labour, their human capital. This has increased the value of the products without worsening the economic conditions of the workers. Universal suffrage allows everyone, including the working class, to choose a political system that protects and provides for them in jobs and livelihoods. J. F. Kennedy once said: “If you cannot save the many who are poor; then God save the few who are rich”. A democratic system cannot afford not to listen to its citizens.

Sharing of wealth creation An interesting offshoot of capitalism is the stock market, which allow anyone, for a small portion of money, to own the means of production and share Marx’s surplus value. Everyone can be a capitalist nowadays.

Capitalism in the modern context is extremely unlike those during Marx’s time. Many nations embrace the efficiency of the capitalism without alienating the working class from a share of the resulting profits. Now, it is no unusual to hear about welfare system, unemployment benefits, free education and so on within a capitalistic framework. Perhaps, this is the synthesis of the thesis of extreme capitalism and anti-thesis of communism of the 19th century.