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WORK TITLE: A World to Win
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/1/1939
WEBSITE: http://sven-eric.liedman.net/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Sweden
NATIONALITY: Swedish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 1, 1939, in Karlskrona, Sweden; married: children: three.
EDUCATION:Lund University, B.A., 1959; University of Gothenburg, Ph.D., 1966.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Editor, writer, professor. Sydsvenskan, Malmö, Sweden, arts editor, 1966-68; University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, professor of history of ideas and science, 1979-2006.
AWARDS:August Award for Best Professional Book, 1997, for In the Shadow of the Future: The History of Modernity; Kellgren Prize, 2002; Wettergrens bokollon, 2004; Lotten von Kræmer Prize from Samfundet De Nio, 2005; Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, 2008.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Sven-Eric Liedman, professor emeritus of the history of ideas and science at the University of Gothenburg, is a prolific writer in his native Swedish and has written extensively on the life of Karl Marx. Born in Karlskrona, Sweden, Liedman earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. He worked as the arts editor for the daily paper, Sydsvenskan, then as a professor at the University of Gothenburg from 1979 until his retirement in 2006. He has published newspaper articles, essays, books, and scholarly publications, including the first Swedish translation of selected works by Karl Marx and a well-known Swedish textbook on the history of political ideas that has been reprinted many times, originally titled From Plato to Lenin in 1972, then called From Plato to the War Against Terrorism in 2014.
Liedman published In the Shadow of the Future: The History of Modernity, in which he analyzes the definition of modernity compared to past eras. His study moves through the enlightenment, changes in Europe, learning and storytelling, revolution, the human perspective, and issues of politics, science, economics, and religion. Awarded the August Award for Best Professional Book in 1997, the book spans the world in recent centuries deciphering the development of modern ideas and processes from various points of view.
Liedman’s 2018 A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx is an epic new biography on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Liedman explores both Karl Marx’s (1818-83) life and work in the context of the nineteenth century, Marx’s contribution to the way the world understands itself, his influences, political and intellectual interventions, and his legacy. Liedman illuminates Marx’s Capital and connects it with today’s world of excessive wealth and grinding poverty. Liedman contends that despite the totalitarian ideas introduced into the Marxist doctrine from the Stalin and Mao eras, as well as the anti-Semitism, Marx’s ideas are relevant today. “This book makes clear that Marx’s ideas, going on two centuries old, still have meaning in the present,” noted a writer in Kirkus Reviews. According to Adam Tooze on the Financial Times Online, Liedman’s “narrative is pitched in a more upbeat key. His Marx is not a historical relic … He is the initiator and inspirer of a live intellectual tradition and a model of the kind of capacious thought that is necessary to grasp contemporary modernity. Liedman’s strength is as a political philosopher and he is superbly well-equipped to take us on a tour of Marx’s intellectual workshop.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (May 4, 2018), Adam Tooze, review of A World to Win.
Sven-Eric Liedman, Professor Emeritus of the History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg, has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years. His textbook on political ideologies (originally titled From Plato to Lenin in 1972, rechristened From Plato to the War Against Terrorism in 2014) has been through fourteen editions.
Sven-Eric Liedman
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Sven-Eric Liedman.
Sven-Eric Liedman (born 1939) is a Swedish author and Professor Emeritus of History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Theoretical Philosophy at Lund University in 1959. In 1961 he received a Licentiate of Philosophy degree in the same subject. His most important teacher in Lund was Gunnar Aspelin. He then moved to the University of Gothenburg where he received his Ph.D. in History of Ideas in 1966.[1]
In 1966-1968 he worked at Sydsvenskan, a major newspaper in southern Sweden. In 1968 he held a temporary position at Lund University. In 1979 he was appointed Professor of History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg, where he remained until his retirement in 2006.[1]
Sven-Eric Liedman is the author of a well-known Swedish textbook on the history of political ideas, with the prefix "Från Platon till..." in its title. The textbook has since its first edition in 1972 been updated many times. The title has also changed to reflect the changes. The first edition was called "Från Platon till Lenin" (from Plato to Lenin). The last edition is called "Från Platon till kriget mot terrorismen" (from Plato to the War against terrorism).
Awards[edit]
August Prize, 1997.
Kellgren Prize, 2002.
Wettergrens bokollon, 2004.
Lotten von Kræmer Prize from Samfundet De Nio, 2005.
Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, 2008.
Sven-Eric Liedman, year of birth 1939, place of birth Karlskrona, Sweden.
I grew up in the countryside in southern Sweden. My father was a clergyman in the Swedish Lutheran church, a well-read man of humble origins, my mother a hospitable housewife. During my formative years between 1942 and 1950, we lived in a large parsonage in the small parish of farming estates known as Vittskövle. My schooling was erratic. Having left secondary school before the age of fourteen, I went on to complete my upper secondary education by correspondence when I was seventeen, a couple of years earlier than normal.
At Lund University, I completed an undergraduate degree with an emphasis on literature and philosophy in 1959. The teacher who contributed most to my development was Gunnar Aspelin, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy. With his retirement, the history of philosophy, which was my field of study and his speciality, was no longer represented at any department of philosophy in Sweden. I therefore changed departmental affiliation for my continued studies, to the history of ideas and science, a discipline not offered in Lund, but available at the University of Gothenburg. In 1966 I defended my doctoral thesis there, on the interface between philosophy and biology in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century.
As there were no positions open in the history of ideas and science in all of Sweden, I accepted the post of arts editor of a Malmö daily paper, Sydsvenskan. Being a newspaper editor was a new world for me, marked by its fast pace. I stayed on as arts editor for two and a half years, stepping down as a result of a conflict with the management of the newspaper. This was in 1968, and my politics were too far to the left for them. After returning to university life, I earned a professorial chair in Gothenburg in 1979, and remained in that position until retirement. In my capacity as Professor of History of Ideas and Science, I have had the privilege of seeing a large number of gifted students through to university positions and other key posts in society.
I have been writing newspaper articles, essays, books and scholarly publications since my earliest working years. In 1965 my translation of a selection of works by the young Karl Marx was published. These works had not previously been available in Swedish. In 1968 I completed a monograph on the young Marx. My research over the years has covered many other subjects as well, ranging from the development of eighteenth and nineteenth century history of ideas and science, to a volume on the political history of ideas, which is now in its fourteenth edition, has had numerous reprintings and has been translated into various languages, although not yet into English.
Between 1997 and 2006 I completed an extensive trilogy, the first volume of which was a study of the history of ideas and science in the modern era and the second of the history of human knowledge, while the final volume dealt with the concepts of form, and matter, concepts with the aid of which mankind has been creating a picture of the world since time immemorial. I have, furthermore, written a number of shorter books on, for example, the concepts of solidarity and freedom.
My comprehensive biography of Karl Marx was published in Swedish in 2015. It is forthcoming in English translation in 2018 as A World to Win (London & New York: Verso).
I have been the recipient of a number of prestigious literary awards in Sweden, including the August prize(1997), the Kjellgren prize (2002), Swedish Academy Nordic prize (2008) and the Rettig prize (2018).
I am married and have three children.
Liedman, Sven-Eric: A WORLD TO WIN
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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Liedman, Sven-Eric A WORLD TO WIN Verso (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-78663-504-4
Readers of all nations, get to work: Swedish scholar Liedman (Emeritus, History of Ideas/Univ. of Gothenburg) turns in a study worthy of Isaiah Berlin of communism's most influential theoretician.
According to conventional wisdom, Karl Marx (1818-1883) was right about everything but communism. Yet, as Liedman writes toward the end of this long, overstuffed history, his ideas remain relevant. "It is the Marx of the nineteenth century, not the twentieth, who can attract the people of the twenty-first," he writes, meaning that despite the deformities introduced to Marxist doctrine by way of the practical--and totalitarian--politics of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, there are still good bones in the house that Marx built. Liedman examines the man and his ideas alike, sometimes finding unpleasant moments in both--for instance, the ugly anti-Semitism and more-than-casual racism of his essay "On the Jewish Question," which manifested in a dark tradition of anti-Semitism among "various socialist and communist traditions." Marx was also famously fractious, and in some instances even his closest collaborators found themselves targets of his mouth and pen. Even when he was not aroused to anger, he found constant reason to take up contrary positions, so that within the pages of the Communist Manifesto, one finds both Friedrich Engels' attack on and Marx's defense of marriage. Throughout, Liedman notes, Marx remained true to his Hegelian roots, making particular use of the concept of sublation, meaning, perhaps confusingly, that "something was both abolished and raised to a higher level," whether marriage or private property or, to name a darker instance, the state. Some readers may wish that Marx had gone with his earlier desire to become a poet instead of a philosopher of such matters, but this book makes clear that Marx's ideas, going on two centuries old, still have meaning in the present.
Outstanding. Not the book for a budding Marxist to start with, but certainly one to turn to for reference and deeper insight.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Liedman, Sven-Eric: A WORLD TO WIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e53766b7. Accessed 7 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650880
May 8, 2018
Marxism
Book review: Sven-Eric Liedman – A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
Posted by Carlos Martinez on Tuesday, May 8, 2018
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A slightly modified version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star on 05 May 2018 (the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth).
Sven-Eric Liedman’s new biography of Karl Marx aims to provide the reader with a nuanced and detailed account of the intellectual giant’s life and thought. Beyond the biographical outline and the coverage of the best-known aspects of Marx’s work (Capital, and The Communist Manifesto), Liedman also gives a fairly detailed description of Marx’s explorations in philosophy and the trajectory of his theoretical ideas. This, along with an examination of the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels and an interesting analysis of the fate of Marxist thought in the decades after Marx’s death, mean that Liedman’s book can justify a place in the crowded shelf devoted to the study of Marx.
Liedman is nothing if not erudite, and his meticulous coverage of Marx’s changing opinions on philosophy is interesting and important, although it makes for slow and difficult reading for anyone not well-versed in the subtleties of Hegelian logic (the present reviewer included). For the newer reader, A World to Win usefully explains many of the key ideas and phrases of Marxism – such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transformation of quantity into quality, commodity fetishism – and describes the evolution of these ideas over the course of Marx’s life.
The greatest achievement of the book lies in its compelling demonstration of the continued relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism. In a post-Soviet era where capitalist liberalism is supposed to have triumphed for once and for all, and where bourgeois economists and politicians routinely label Marxism as obscure and antiquated, Liedman is able to show that the contradictions of capitalism identified by Marx are as present as ever. The working class – those that rely on selling their labour power in order to survive – continues to grow; exploitation and poverty are rampant; crises are acute. Marx didn’t prescribe the dimensions of a new society, but he concluded that the liberation of humanity would come through the liberation of the working class. Liedman demonstrates that this conclusion is still valid.
Another key point that Liedman emphasises is that Marx didn’t really set out to build ‘Marxism’; he delved into numerous areas of knowledge and developed several important theses, but he “never arrived at any summation of his work, much less any system.” The -ism was added to Marx by his followers after his death. This insight is helpful as a warning against dogma; as a reminder that Marx’s work was not ‘complete’ and that socialism is not a closed book but a living science in need of constant development.
However, Liedman’s objections to ‘system-building’ come across as being rooted in a rather stuffy academic perspective that has limited interest in the practical, real-world application of Marx’s analysis. After Engels and Kautsky, Lenin is the chief culprit in terms of turning Marx into Marxism and elaborating a clear ideological system. Was he wrong to do so? Lenin’s Marxism incorporated Marx’s most important formulations and synthesised and simplified them such that they could form a firm ideological basis for a mass political party capable of establishing working class power and building a new social order. That is to say, Lenin – and other great Marxists after him – took Marx’s ideas and method and leveraged them towards a programme of political action. The alternative was humble acceptance of a vicious imperialist status quo.
Consistent with his disdain for systematising Marx, Liedman has no time at all for the socialist experiments in the Soviet Union, China or Cuba (Vietnam, Laos, Korea, Grenada and elsewhere don’t get a mention). The USSR from the 1920s onwards “had no connection with Karl Marx”. Cuba showed some early promise but “gradually became more and more like other Soviet-supported regimes, with food shortages and political dissidents in prison”. No words about extraordinary social welfare, highly educated people or beautiful internationalism. Marx analysed the two-month Paris Commune in great detail, drawing lessons from it that he incorporated into his overall political understanding. Would he really have dismissed workers’ states that had to make compromises in order to defend themselves from old ruling classes and relentless external pressure?
Modern China is dismissed by Liedman as “the most expansive capitalist economy of the twenty-first century”, a “more than sixty year dictatorship” with a “neoliberal economic policy.” For Marx, apparently, “it would have been inconceivable that a country that quotes him would drive capitalism to its utmost extremes”. It’s generally best not to project one’s opinions onto the deceased Marx, but it’s not so difficult to imagine him being cheered and astounded by the emergence of China – a country that during his lifetime endured the most awful poverty and colonial humiliation – as an advanced industrial power at the cutting edge of science and technology, with an enormous working class and a standard of living approaching that of Western Europe.
Defects notwithstanding, Liedman’s book is a thorough, well-researched and valuable contribution to the literature on Marx’s thought. It will also inspire readers to go direct to the source and study Marx for themselves.
6th May
Sunday Herald book review – A World To Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
Brian Morton
karl marx.
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A World To Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
by Sven-Eric Liedman
translated by Jeffrey N. Skinner
Verso, £35
Review by Brian Morton
Karl Marx was no more a “Marxist” than Jesus of Nazareth was a “Christian”, and yet we persist in talking about “Marxism” as if it were a fixed system of values and instructions, and “the Dialectic” as if it were reified, too; in a satirical playlet for Partisan Review, Edmund Wilson revealed it as a pistol in the hand of Joseph Stalin. One reason for the continuing incomprehension and distrust is that we don’t read Marx any more. We really should. He was one of the great prose stylists of the 19th century. For all its occasional lapses into vagueness or lack of clear detail, the Communist Manifesto is one of that era’s great books. There is a tendency to assume that any failings, of style or substance, were to be laid at Friedrich Engels’s feet, in the way that dodgy bits of Shakespeare were always assumed to be the work of a named or unnamed collaborator. The nature and outcome of the collaboration between Marx and Engels is, of course, one of the most important stories told in Sven-Eric Liedman’s hefty – 700-plus pages – new biography, but still more important and still lesser known is the contribution of Marx’s aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen to his work.
Needless to say, “the shadow of actually existing socialism” falls over Marx’s reputation, and over much of the biographical work done on him to date. And yet, far worse than the deeds ostensibly done in his name, are the atrocities inflicted on language by many of Marx’s followers, people who use words like “reified” and “objectively”, when they mean no such thing. Despite a lifetime swimming in this sometimes toxic sea, Liedman has surfaced still able to write with all the clarity and percipience of his subject. The original was in Swedish, and while most of the specifically Swedish quotes and sources have been removed from this edition, a quick-eyed reader would sense an unusual emphasis on Scandinavian commentators. The provenance might explain a few peculiarities of translation, but they’re tiny nods in a magnificently concentrated effort.
Almost as little is known about Marx’s childhood and youth as about those of Shakespeare or Jesus of Nazareth, so after dealing with a few misconceptions about the young Karl’s relations with his father, Liedman is able to pick up the story in his student years, and with his first skirmishes with Hegelian philosophy and its guiding principle of “spirit”. This is a “life and works” biography, and while it details the Marxes family life (which included an affair with a family maid), and its movements – from his birthplace Trier, through university in Berlin, to exile in Paris, Brussels and ultimately London – the bulk of the attention falls on his writings. Sometimes, as in an extended discussion of Marx’s and Engels’s extended discussion of ‘Max Stirner’’s The Ego and Its Own, the focus might be too close for most general readers.
I was fortunate enough to encounter Marx when the required reading wasn’t Capital, but the early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the astounding Grundrisse. At no time in his life did Marx wield the Dialectic like a pistol. On the contrary, his writing has an almost improvisational freedom, particularly in the early work. It also has a journalist’s gift for polemic. The young Marx stood up stoutly for journalism: “The press is the most general way by which individuals can communicate their intellectual being. It knows no respect for persons, but only respect for intelligence”. The older man was sometimes bogged down in lengthy manuscripts that he failed to see into print. Liedman more than once concedes that Marx could be harsh and excessively personal in his criticisms, but he could also pull off some magnificent rhetorical flourishes that are even more crushing than ad hominem attack. Here’s how he demolishes the unsecured fantasies of the “true socialists”: “They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated ‘phlanasteres’, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up ‘Little Icaria’ – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem”. That “duodecimo” would have been as cutting to his readers as a front row scowl by Anna Wintour. The parallel isn’t entirely unwarranted. Marx was greatly concerned with style, even bourgeois style, and saw no conflict between it and calling on the proletariat to rise up.
He lived through exciting times, of course. This is his bicentenary year, which means that he was thirty, and already established, when Europe started to smoulder with revolution. The events of 1848 are not very fully covered here, even as they affect Marx, and sometimes the text presupposes a working knowledge of economic history. There, Marx is always ahead of us. Liedman describes him as a “one-man university”, which is one reason why he found it easier to write in shorter, more spontaneous forms and harder to finish large-scale projects like Capital, whose completion fell to Engels.
This is the rub. Liedman does not go as far as some in “locating a border” between Marx and his followers, but he does so in the case of his main collaborator: “what is called Marxism, I argue, should by rights be called Engelsism. Marx did not create a system. As a scholar and author he is more of a Faustian figure, constantly on the way deeper into the endless world of knowledge”. Trier was one of the locations associated with the Faust legend, so that connection sticks as well. The hunger to move forward, absorb more and deeper knowledge, is always there, but the diablerie is not. It is a mistake to connect Marx to, or hold him responsible for, V I Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Enver Hoxha, Pol Pot or Kim Il-sung. It makes more sense to view him and his vision of humanity from the other direction, as “part of the great humanistic tradition from Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. In the Paris Manuscripts, “Marx succeeded in formulating a classic, and yet also modern, ideal of humanity in the merciless epoch of early industrialism”. Some of its terminology may now be as old-fashioned and irrelevant as spats, but Marx’s mode of thought applies just as much to the age of artificial intelligence and its lack of human mercy.
A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx
May 6, 2018 Sri Lanka Guardian Book Reviews, Education, Feature
“Marx can come almost painfully close to describing our current world. Today, a brutal economism dominates many minds to the extent that it has become invisible for them”
An edited excerpt from Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx.
( May 6, 2018, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) When I was young, it was my good fortune to make the acquaintance of an old German Jew who was dying, here in London, from the effects of long hardship and privation, of overwork and poverty. I did what I could to save, to prolong his life. I got him sent to Algeria, to the south of France, and got the most brilliant young physician on Harley Street to look after him. But it was too late. In the short time I knew him, he taught me more than all other teachers, dead or living. He saw more clearly than any other man the disease that was killing the world. His name was Karl Marx.
The man who spoke these words was named E. Ray Lankester. He was one of Great Britain’s foremost biologists at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of the few present at Marx’s funeral.
Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. By the autumn of 1850, half of his life had passed. He was truly a man of the 1800s, rooted in his century. Today he belongs to the distant past, yet his name constantly crops up.
The collapse of the Soviet Empire at rst appeared to bury him in its rubble, in the oblivion that surrounds the hopelessly obso- lete. Marx was only the rst in a series of repugnant gures who now, fortunately, had been consigned to the history books: every- thing that had been realized in the Soviet Union and China had been designed rst in Marx’s imagination.
This is a notion that is still widely prevalent. But it soon turned out that Marx had an active afterlife, independent of the disinte- gration of empires. More than a few regretted his demise.
The most in uential of these was Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, who played an important role in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. In 1993, he published Specters of Marx, in which he conceded that Marx was indeed dead, but neverthe- less haunted a world of growing injustices like a ghost.
Another French philosopher, Étienne Balibar, also published an ingenious little book in which he asserted that Marx’s thought was extremely relevant to today’s world, while the philosophy trumpeted from the Soviet Union had no actual connection with Marx.
A few years later, around the turn of the century, Marx became topical in a more spectacular fashion. The New Yorker named him the most important thinker of the coming century, and in a vote organized by the BBC, he came out top among philosophers as the greatest thinker of the last millennium. In his last book, How to Change the World (2011), the great Austro-British historian Eric Hobsbawm spoke about a meeting with George Soros, the famous investor. Soros asked him about his position on Marx; anxious to avoid a quarrel, Hobsbawm responded evasively, whereupon Soros replied: ‘That man discovered something about capitalism 150 years ago that we need to take advantage of.’
These anecdotes may seem trivial. Someone who is a celebrity, a public gure people readily refer to, does not need to be in u- ential in a serious sense. It is more telling that Marx is constantly part of the discussion of the fateful questions of our time. When French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in 2013 with his voluminous Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Marx’s name dominated the ood of commentary the book gave rise to. Traditional economists ascribed to Piketty all the sins for which they routinely blame Marx, and enthusiasts took the promise in the book’s punning title quite literally: a new Capital for the twenty-first century. In fact, the distance between Piketty and Marx is quite large. Piketty is not interested in the duel between labour and capital; his focus is on finance capital. The similarity lies in the long historical perspective, as well as in the attention paid to the growing – and in the long run catastrophic – division between the few who hold more and more power through their riches, and the many who are thereby rendered powerless. Piketty himself is eager to emphasize Marx’s significance. Marx’s thesis on the unending accumulation of capital is as fundamental for economic analysis in the twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth, Piketty says.
Sociologist Göran Therborn attacks the growing division in the world from another direction in his 2013 book, The Killing Fields of Inequality. He points out that the growing inequality cannot be measured only by widening gaps in income and wealth. Differences in health and lifespan – and people’s opportunities in general to develop in an adequate manner – are also appearing. Therborn perceives a particular existential inequalty that concerns rights, dignity, respect, and degrees of freedom, for example. It turns out that this inequality, in all its aspects, is now rapidly accelerating even in Europe, especially in the Nordic countries.
Therborn himself has a background in Marxism and, by all appearances, now considers himself a post-Marxist – that is, remaining in the tradition but free from all ties to previous groups. Indeed, one of his later books, from 2008, is titled From Marxism to Post-Marxism?
In the face of another fateful question of the age – the environmental crisis in general and the climate crisis in particular – Marx’s name sometimes comes up. This may seem surprising: the empire that had its ideological origins in Marx – the Soviet Union – caused unparalleled environmental destruction. But those who go directly to Marx without detouring through Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev nd that he certainly cared about the environment. Material production for him was an interaction between nature and humanity that had been eliminated as a result of capitalism. The person who has most emphasized this (and to some extent overemphasized it) is American sociologist John Bellamy Foster, above all in his 2000 book Marx’s Ecology. Foster’s perspective turns up in Naomi Klein’s 2014 grand general scrutiny of the relationship between capitalism and climate, This Changes Everything.
Marx is also present in discussions about the new class society that developed in the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century. British economist Guy Standing perceived a new social class in the world of that era. He published a widely discussed book about it in 2011: The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. He considers people of today who are living in an incessantly uncertain nancial situation as belonging to the precariat. He perceives three different layers: workers who, through de-industrialization, have lost their jobs and have no prospect for employment; refugees from the world’s hotbeds of crisis who have been forced out into the margins of society; and, nally, well-educated people who are reduced to temporary, equally uncertain, positions that are interspersed with periods of unemployment. This is a diversity that is perhaps entirely too large for the term to be manageable. But there is an important unifying link here that has to do with the labour market and the conditions of employment. More and more people are relegated to a diffuse borderland between temporary jobs and no jobs at all. The relative security that the workers’ movement fought for is becoming more and more restricted, and the social safety net is growing thinner or being torn to shreds in recurring crises.
It is natural that the crisis that crossed the world in 2008 and 2009 aroused a new interest in Marx, and for Capital in particular. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said with pleasure that not only the Soviet Empire, but Karl Marx too would thereby lose all relevance they had had so far. It is fitting that the Soviet Union was sent to the past once and for all after 1991, but not Marx. And why not Marx?
To approach the question, we must first take a step back. The societal change that characterized Marx’s work more than any other was industrialization, and with it the development of a workers’ movement. Today, those developments appear distant and close at the same time. In countries where mass production once began, we have entered into a post-industrial society. The nineteenth-century sweatshops that Marx had in mind are now found chiefly in countries such as China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In Europe and the United States, other class divisions than those of the 1800s and 1900s are getting wider and deeper.
A large number of economists who portray the reality of the early twenty-first century as the best – indeed, the only natural – one are doing everything they can to convince ordinary people that they belong to the great capitalist community of interest. ‘It’s everyone’s money that’s at stake,’ they chant. Their own theory is built on the notion of an eternal equilibrium in a world of restless change. We could call it a new kind of more prosaic Platonism. Something eternal exists beyond the chaotic diversity that the senses (and the charts) bear witness to.
What could be more natural in a situation like this than to summon Karl Marx back from the shadows? No social theory is more dynamic than his. No one speaks more clearly about widening class divisions than he does.
It is impossible to read the introductory, stylistically razor-sharp and rhetorically perfect first pages of the Communist Manifesto without recognizing the society that is ours. The bourgeoisie ‘has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation’.
Are we not again living in that society? Have we not come back to the reality of the 1840s, even if more globalized and technologically more advanced? The free flow of commodities is the norm that forces other norms to shrink into insignificance.
Marx can, sometimes, come almost painfully close to describing our current world. Today, a brutal economism dominates many minds to the extent that it has become invisible for them. It is often called neoliberalism, after the school that Milton Friedman became the symbol of in the 1970s. But the name does not matter. The important thing is that many of Friedman’s ideas have become everyday life; the market dominates every detail, and even states and municipalities are run like businesses.
Friedman’s spiritual forefathers – the representatives of the Manchester School – lived in Marx’s time, with John Bright and Richard Cobden leading the way. For them too, free trade would solve all problems. Marx harboured a reluctant admiration for the Manchester liberals, seeing them as heralds for a development that had to precede the society he himself was ghting for. At the same time, he attacked them heatedly when they claimed to represent the whole of the people – the workers as well – against the aristocracy.
Marx wrote much about Cobden and Bright and their followers, especially in his articles in the New York Daily Tribune.
The Marx of the twenty- rst century must brace himself against the reality that has been created since the 1980s.
Today, Marx may be discussed and often cited, but he has only a fraction of the influence he – apparently, at least – had fifty or a hundred years ago. In a way, this is paradoxical. His vision of society would seem to appear less pertinent then than it does now. The Soviet Union, which was supposed to be following in his footsteps, was characterized by many things, from censorship, forced labour camps, and rule by the bosses to schools and univer- sities for everyone and guaranteed support for a non-modernistic culture – indeed, a ‘philistine sentimentalism’, to use the words of the Manifesto. In the other Europe, where Marx is also found in the family tree, certain politicians could talk about democratic socialism, and there – despite many shortcomings and injus- tices – moderate social security prevailed for most. The economy blossomed, preparing the ground for reforms that made life more tolerable for ordinary folk. Of course, there were still class divisions, but not as precipitous as a hundred years earlier.
Marx’s analysis of his time thus makes better sense today than it did fifty years ago. Its accuracy applies, above all, to the way capitalism works.
But Marx had not counted on capitalism’s ability to constantly renew itself and develop new productive forces. Today, capitalism appears more dominant than ever. In the only large country where Marx still has a place of honour – China – he has to put up with constantly being drenched in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’. Communism has become the ‘Sunday best’, tight as a straitjacket. Everyday life is marked by a race for market shares, as ruthless as it is successful. Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is being brilliantly confirmed. But for him, it would have been inconceivable that a country that quotes him would drive capitalism to its utmost extremes.
It is in this paradoxical situation that entering deep into the study of Marx becomes important.
An epic new biography of Karl Marx for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Building on the work of previous biographers, Liedman employs a commanding knowledge of the nineteenth century to create a definitive portrait of Marx and his vast contribution to the way the world understands itself. He shines a light on Marx’s influences, explains his political and intellectual interventions, and builds on the legacy of his thought. Liedman shows how Marx’s masterpiece, Capital, illuminates the essential logic of a system that drives dizzying wealth, grinding poverty, and awesome technological innovation to this day.
https://www.ft.com/content/cf6532dc-4c67-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4
Why Karl Marx is more relevant than ever
An upbeat biography places the great thinker in his 19th-century context
Workers manoeuvre into place a statue of Karl Marx in Trier, Germany © Harald Tittel/dpa
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Adam Tooze
May 4, 2018
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On August 24 1857 the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed. Within months, more than 1,400 banks had collapsed across America and the shockwave spread outwards to Liverpool and London. By the end of the year it had reached continental Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and Asia. In London, where the suspension of the Bank Charter Act of 1844 had freed the Bank of England to take whatever emergency action was necessary, an obscure German exile was fired into intellectual action. He set himself to diagnosing a new phenomenon, a global economic crisis. Over the previous millennium the world had been swept by religious movements, political upheavals, plagues and famines. 1857 was the first worldwide convulsion in the system of production, credit and exchange. From the efforts of this lonely scholar, known then only to a narrow circle, would emerge an intellectual tradition that would find its place alongside that of Darwin as one of the great legacies of the Victorian age. It would inspire a political movement that spanned the world.Karl Marx was born 200 years ago on May 5 1818 in the ancient Palatinate bishopric of Trier to a converted Jewish family. Growing up in the shadow of the French Revolution, religion and monarchy were the first targets of his youthful radicalism. But, in the 1840s, as industry spread across Europe, Marx took a further radical turn. Reading Friedrich Engels’s reportage on The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Marx glimpsed a new reality. He did not use the term capitalism — that would be later coined by his students — but there was no denying the massive dynamic resulting from the combination of competitive capital accumulation and technological change.As Sven-Eric Liedman shows in his landmark anniversary biography, A World to Win, the quest to understand contemporary reality by way of the forces of production, class relations, and the structures of politics, law and culture built on them would occupy Marx for the rest of his life. As Liedman shows, from the 1840s, these were the threads that Marx followed into “the labyrinths of the age he lived in”.Marx and Engels were far from alone in their criticism of the effects of the industrial revolution. But whereas many of their contemporaries reacted by opting out, seeking salvation in utopian communities, the two Germans remained true to their upbringing in Hegel’s philosophy: there was no escape from history and its logic. The two men wagered that the revolutionary transformation of capitalism would come not from without, but from within. For all its terrible side effects, the enormous dynamic of industrial development could not be suppressed or sidestepped. It would have to be transcended.© GettyWhen the revolutionary tocsin sounded across Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels were ready with The Communist Manifesto. The great French revolution of 1789, they announced, was just a stepping stone, a bourgeois revolt against feudalism. Capitalism had been unleashed across the world and now it was giving birth to its gravediggers in the form of the disenfranchised and propertyless industrial working class. Marx and Engels addressed themselves to the workers of the world not for sentimental or ethical reasons. Their impulse was not charitable. They spoke to the proletariat because they were destined to be the protagonists of the next great act in the history of class struggle.The Manifesto offers an astonishing glimpse of a future to come. But Marx and Engels were thinking on their feet. In the heat of 1848 they had no time for in-depth analysis. Marx was already a marked man, exiled both from Prussia and France. The failure of the revolution in France forced him to move once more, this time to London. There he first set himself to diagnosing what had gone wrong. How had the promising revolutionary uprising of 1848 ended three years later in the seizure of power by the upstart nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte? 1848, it turned out, was not a genuine revolution. It was history as farcical repetition. The real drama of world history was the epic of capitalist development. In particular, Marx was fascinated by the spectacle of America’s relentless expansion. The really decisive event in 1848 was the conquest of California and the ensuing gold rush that promised to reorient not just the American but the world economy towards the Pacific. It was both dazzlingly dynamic and terrifyingly unstable. Nine years later, the crisis of 1857 revealed how connected the world had become. News of a financial failure in the Missouri river valley sent markets in Britain crashing. Would this be the “big one”, the crisis that threw open the door to the new type of revolution?Marx would surely have insisted on the need to stare the full drama of our current situation in the faceDespite Marx’s feverish activity in the reading room of the British Museum, the pace of events outran him. By 1858 the rebound was already in full swing. His effort to grasp in real time the first crisis of global capitalism resulted in a mass of notes later known to aficionados as the Grundrisse or “Groundwork”, but no finished analysis. Marx knew that he would have to dig deeper. As revolutionary ardour dampened and in the 1860s, the world entered the age of Bismarck, blood and iron and realpolitik, Marx set himself to the analysis of capitalism’s inner workings, concocting a unique synthesis of economic theory, empirical data drawn from factory inspector reports and economic history all mixed with Hegel’s dialectical logic. The result was not economics as we know it, so much as an analysis of how capitalist production and exchange, down to the commodity form itself, gave rise to a world of appearances that conventional economics then sought more or less naively to explain.It was a mammoth intellectual effort undertaken in the face of considerable personal adversity. Marx’s doctorate in philosophy was a testament to his comfortable upbringing. His wife, Jenny von Westphalen, without whom his scrawled manuscripts would never have seen the light of day, was born an aristocrat. But Marx was no well-upholstered academic radical. Karl and Jenny paid for their political commitment. For years they eked out a living in a two-room slum dwelling in Soho, surviving from day to day on store credit and a diet of bread and potatoes. Four of their eight children died before they reached their teens. Only gifts from Engels and jobbing journalism kept them afloat. If Marx were transported across time to 21st-century London, the bedraggled, foreign-accented scholar in his ragged overcoat would be lucky to get past security at the British Library.The first volume of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, appeared in 1867 and was rapidly translated into English, Russian and French. In the wake of the shortlived uprising of the Paris Commune of 1871 Marx became notorious as the most dangerous thinker in Europe. Much of his time was taken up in political and intellectual arguments over the emerging socialist movement. Volumes II and III of Das Kapital were never completed and had to be edited by Engels after Marx’s death in 1883. Nevertheless, by the 1890s, Marxism was the official ideology of the largest mass party in the world, Germany’s Social Democrats. In the wake of Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution and the expansion of Soviet power under Stalin, statues of Marx were erected worldwide. In Cuba, China, Vietnam and North Korea they still stand today. In 2017, to the dismay of the locals, China paid for a giant 4.4-metre statue of Marx to be erected in Trier.Writing a biography of Marx is challenging. You have to braid history with philosophy, politics and economics. And then there is the question of the plot line. How do you tell the story of an acorn that grew into a mighty oak, an oak which was subsequently riven and split and a large part of which, in 1989, was blasted by the lightning of world history?The safest thing is to consign Marx to the 19th century. He was the acorn and nothing more. Others take a gloomier view. The seed was blighted from the start. The dismal end was foreseeable. It was not by coincidence that Marx could not finish Das Kapital. It was riddled with contradictions. His personal frustration anticipated that of the Soviet Union.Sven-Eric Liedman’s A World to Win narrative is pitched in a more upbeat key. His Marx is not a historical relic, nor is he the harbinger of a 20th-century shipwreck. He is the initiator and inspirer of a live intellectual tradition and a model of the kind of capacious thought that is necessary to grasp contemporary modernity. Liedman’s strength is as a political philosopher and he is superbly well-equipped to take us on a tour of Marx’s intellectual workshop. Rather than harping on the incomplete nature of much of Marx’s work, he exposes the richness to be found perhaps particularly in such unfinished works as Grundrisse and the early “Paris manuscripts” of 1844.An image of Karl Marx in a traffic light in Trier, Germany © ReutersWhat makes returning to the original Marx worthwhile for Liedman is the conceit that with the passing of the 20th-century era of welfare states and Soviet communism, the world of globalised free-market capitalism we inhabit today has much in common with the world about which Marx wrote in the mid-19th century. “It is the Marx of the 19th century,” he tells us, “who can attract the people of the twenty-first”. What speaks to us today is the true Marx of the mid-Victorian period, not the traduced Marx of the 20th-century state ideologies. This historical ellipse from the first, Victorian age of globalisation to the present is seductive, but it ignores the uncomfortable reality of the 20th century, whose legacies include not only the failure of Soviet communism, but also China’s formidable state capitalism, American hyperpower and the existential threat of climate change. It hardly seems likely that Marx would have approved of such a historical sleight of hand. Rather than relying on casual historical analogies, Marx would surely have insisted on the need to stare the full drama of our current situation in the face and in doing so we can indeed take inspiration from his pioneering effort to make sense of both the political failure of 1848 and the economic crisis of 1857.In 2013, in the wake of another global crisis of capitalism, another European economist published a comprehensive account of recent economic history. Thomas Piketty named his book Capital too. If you read Piketty and Marx back to back, you will not be surprised that generation after generation of readers have been drawn back to Marx. Even the best 21st-century social science pales beside the complexity and richness of Marx’s protean, 19th-century thought, to which Liedman’s readable biography provides a comprehensive and reliable guide.A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, by Sven-Eric Liedman, translated by Jeffrey N Skinner, Verso, RRP£35, 768 pagesAdam Tooze’s ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’ is published by Penguin in AugustJoin our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos