Marx

Marx

Vincent Barnett

* * * * *

Routledge, 2009

270 pages, £14.99

ISBN 978-0-415-43592

Far too often Marx has been assessed in almost religious terms. For followers he has frequently been a god, his works treated uncritically as the beginning and end of the search for the truth. For opponents, his writing has sometimes been treated as a closed fantasy world where the seeds of every totalitarian excess of twentieth century communist regimes can be found. Vincent Barnett’s Marx is a powerful and in places amusing attack on these equally unbalanced assessments.

Unlike more reverential accounts the book discusses Marx’s aliments from carbuncles to sciatica, his personal life from financial turmoil to infidelity and characteristics such as his prickly reaction to criticism. These provide not just interesting background stories but, when taken alongside the turbulent political events of the time from the revolutions of 1848, through the American Civil War to the Paris Commune, are crucial to understanding his character and the changing direction of his arguments across his life. Certainly Marx had ideas which are worth us thinking about, but to understand what they were the man has to be placed in context; treated very much as a human being.

Barnett then uses these accounts of personal and political events as part of providing the material for a balanced assessment of what really matters: Marx’s thought. He describes these ideas from the early days of his doctoral thesis right through to speculations about mathematics and differential calculus shortly before his death. However, the focus is on understanding the development of Marx’s economic thought. The book provides an outline of Marx’s economics largely by looking at the structure of his major works. This approach has the advantage of bringing out relatively clearly his main emphases and is particularly useful in showing how these changed and developed over time. The book also provides more detailed descriptions of key aspects of Marx’s economic ideas, which are presented in a clear and understandable manner. The logics of these arguments are also developed and Barnett is commendably explicit in identifying those aspects of Marx’s thought which he regards as plain wrong. Even if some of Barnett’s judgements appear a little quick, his approach will serve to counteract some of the fear with which students sometimes approach his work. The stress throughout is on the underlying unity of method, rooted in his early appreciation of Hegel, which underpins all of his thinking.

The book finishes appropriately enough with an assessment that claims, rather controversially, to be able to be both sympathetic and hostile to Marx in equal measure. Substantively this assessment looks at his wider influence. The Russian Revolution is briefly examined, but although he finishes the book by identifying in Hegelian terms the crimes of communism as Marx’s ‘negative “Nothing”’, wisely enough Barnett broadly keeps this discussion brief and separates out arguments about the validity of Marx’s idea from debates about the conduct of the Soviet Union. More importantly his arguments bear in mind Marx’s strictures about the relationship between thought and political action while attempting to locate those aspects of thought which have had the greatest intellectual resonances. Given the aim of the book, it is notable that in this section relatively little positive long-term relevance is found in Marx’s economics. This is not surprising. In terms of pure economics Marx’s impact was indeed, by his own standards, somewhat peripheral. As the book shows Marx never achieved his goal of setting out a complete economic system. In any case his work in this respect is usually felt to have been superseded by the ‘marginal revolution’ in economics which took place in the final years of his life. Nevertheless, as Barnett quotes Marx as saying, what a writer considers ‘the cornerstone of his system, and what actually constitutes that cornerstone are two entirely different things’. Intellectually Marx has had much greater impact outside economics, most notably in political economy where his thought continues to provide an influential critique of mainstream economics and also in the study of history, where his materialist conception of history continues to inspire writers. Perhaps for more advanced students this work will not replace the more detailed accounts of the man and his works. However, the book certainly puts the thinker in context. For those wanting a introduction to Karl Marx and his economic writings, the book provide an excellent, clear and accessible introduction.

Gideon Cohen is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Durham.

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