Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

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       Introduction

      There were only eleven mourners at Karl Marx’s funeral on 17 March 1883. ‘His name and work will endure through the ages,’ Friedrich Engels predicted in a graveside oration at Highgate cemetery. It seemed an unlikely boast, but he was right.

      The history of the twentieth century is Marx’s legacy. Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro – the icons and monsters of the modern age have all presented themselves as his heirs. Whether he would recognise them as such is quite another matter. Even in his lifetime, the antics of self-styled disciples often drove him to despair. On hearing that a new French party claimed to be Marxist, he replied that in that case ‘I, at least, am not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, within one hundred years of his death half the world’s population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism to be their guiding faith. His ideas have transformed the study of economics, history, geography, sociology and literature. Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion – or been so calamitously misinterpreted.

      It is time to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man. There have been thousands of books about Marxism, but almost all have been written by academics and zealots for whom it is a near-blasphemy to treat him as a figure of flesh and blood – a Prussian émigré who became a middle-class English gentleman; an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in the scholarly silence of the British Museum Reading Room; a gregarious and convivial host who fell out with almost all his friends; a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; and a deeply earnest philosopher who loved drink, cigars and jokes.

      For the West, during the Cold War, he was the demonic begetter of all evil, the founder of an awesomely sinister cult, the man whose baleful influence must be suppressed. In the Soviet Union of the 1950s he assumed the status of a secular God, with Lenin as John the Baptist and, of course, Comrade Stalin himself as the redeeming Messiah. This alone has been quite enough to convict Marx as an accomplice in the massacres and purges: had he lived a few years longer, by now some enterprising journalist would probably have fingered him as a prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders too. But why? Marx himself certainly never asked to be included in the Holy Trinity, and would have been appalled by the crimes committed in his name. The bastard creeds espoused by Stalin, Mao or Kim Il Sung treated his work rather as modern Christians use the Old Testament: much of it simply ignored or discarded, while a few resonant slogans (‘opium of the people’, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) are wrenched out of context, turned upside down and then cited as apparently divine justification for the most brutal inhumanities. Kipling, as so often, had the right phrase:

       He that has a Gospel

      To loose upon Mankind,

      Though he serve it utterly –

      Body, soul and mind –

      Though he go to Calvary

      Daily for its gain –

      It is his Disciple

      Shall make his labour vain.

      Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag; but there is, alas, a СКАЧАТЬ