Thomas, Paul Karl Marx (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 765 Metternich scholars and historians of Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Levant will derive considerable profit from this book, even if the general reader would be well advised to steer clear of its trackless wastes. University of Exeter Ian D. Armour Thomas, Paul. Karl Marx. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2012. 189 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Further Reading. £10.95: $16.95 (paperback). This is a brief introduction to the life and thought of Karl Marx in Reaktion’s ‘Critical Lives’ series. Thomas nevertheless claims originality. His investigation stands out in that it examines Marx’s life and work in their interconnections, whereas previous studies separate out the theory from the lived context of its production: ‘This book then concerns itself with how Karl Marx’s work relates to his works, how his life relates to his scholarly output or intellectual and political legacy’ (p. 27). Thomas admits that this approach will not produce the ‘tidiest of pictures’ (ibid). However, in what is clearly an engaged and passionate book, Thomas’s idiosyncratic obsessions may obscure more than they enlighten. The lengthy attention given to Marx’s various addresses in London, and the author’s evident anger at what he sees as the false claim that Marx fathered an illegitimate child (pp. 106–22) does not seem to relate the ‘work to the works’. Thomas wishes to locate Marx in his ‘time and place’ (p. 27), but the discussion of individual works does not always achieve this. Of the famous Manifesto, for example, Thomas claims: ‘The Manifesto reads as though it could sweep everything before it. It reads this way because it was designed to read this way: as a document ambitious enough to bring about the conditions of its own successful implementation’ (p. 92). Indeed, on the Manifesto Thomas concludes that it ‘changed the rules of the game once and for all’ (p. 99). There is no evidence that Marx and Engels wrote each section of the Manifesto as claimed, nor is it clear what rules to what game had been altered. In this context one should note that Helen Macfarlane’s first English translation was in 1850 and not in 1848 as claimed (p. 97). Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in the links between Marx and Russia. Thomas notes that Marx made extensive notes on the condition of Russian agriculture (p. 162), but he does not examine the impact of these studies on Marx’s general analysis of capitalism, most notably how Marx removed the statement that the advanced countries show to the less advanced only the mirror image of their own future development (Capital, 1, 1867) in subsequent editions. Marx gave considerable thought to the possibility of a revolution based on the peasant commune that would enable Russia to bypass SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 766 capitalism, so it is not quite right for Thomas to claim that the ‘solitary success of a beleaguered Russian Revolution laying claim to his mantle was to Marx the least likely of scenarios’ (p. 166). In so short a book each author will focus on what for them is the essential Marx. Thomas captures Marx the theorist and Marx the revolutionist, although I think he has an overly harsh reading of a phrase from McLellan (cited p. 23) that Marx made slow progress of Capital because of the work he undertook for the First International that was ‘forced upon him’. One can accept tasks voluntarily and still note the impact of the commitment and this is how I read McLellan’s remark. I would not make it a major point of attack to be returned to (p. 164). Marx was clearly a revolutionary politician and a theoretician. Here I would have included my favourite sentence from Marx but absent from this book: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.’ Ulster University Coleraine Ian D. Thatcher Sunderland, Willard. The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2014. xv + 344 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00:£21.50. In his preface, Willard Sunderland gives an interesting account of the genesis...