Karl Marx: His Life and Thought

The 1st edition of David McLellan’s Karl Marx: His Life & Thought was published in 1973. For the 4th edition McLellan updated the detailed footnotes at the end of each chapter, as well as the extensive annotated bibliography at the end.
McLellan’s biography has stood the test of time. Despite the much-publicised & over-hyped publication of Francis Wheen’s biography of Marx in 1999, McLellan’s book remains by far the best biography of Marx in English. Unlike Wheen, McLellan has an encyclopedic knowledge of Marx’s publications & pulls off the feat of interweaving exposition of his works with a detailed & sympathetic account of his public & private life.
McLellan’s biography also compares well to some of the classic biographies. Franz Mehring’s Karl Marx: The Story of His Life is still worth a read, especially for the clear chapter on the 2nd & 3rd volumes of Capital, which Mehring tells us was written as a favor to Rosa Luxemburg. However, Mehring’s book was written in 1918, predating the publication in the 1930s of such works as the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 & the Grundrisse of 1857-8, as well as much correspondence.
Boris Nicolaievsky & Otto Maenchen-Helfen’s Karl Marx: Man & Fighter, completed under Hitler’s shadow in Berlin in 1933 but not published until 1936, is another classic. However, as the authors make clear in their foreword, it doesn’t aspire to be a full intellectual biography, but concentrates primarily on his political activity, especially around the periods of the 1848 revolutions & the years of the 1st International from the mid-1860s to early 1870s.
McLellan’s book thus remains the best, most up-to-date biography of Marx covering the full range of his activities, both practical & intellectual. Readers leave McLellan’s volume with an appetite to read Marx’s works for themselves–the best sign of success in an intellectual biography.
However, the volume is more than simply an intellectual biography. McLellan seamlessly integrates his account of Marx’s writings with the story of his sometimes tempestuously chaotic life, giving detailed accounts of his activities as a revolutionary in both continental Europe & in London, to which Marx was permanently exiled following the defeatd of 1848.
Marx’s most important works—the Grundrisse & Capital among them—were written in extremely difficult conditions, conditions that would surely have silenced many a lesser human. Marx was living in London, with a family to care for & no regular source of income except journalistic commissions from the NY Daily Tribune. McLellan gives a vivid picture of the poverty & privations that the family suffered, privations that would surely have defeated even him had it not been for the generosity of Friedrich Engels, who selflessly subsidised them for almost all of their quarter-century in London. Engels—these days unjustly maligned as a crude simplifier of Marx’s thinking—in many ways emerges as the real hero of the story.
Perhaps the most harrowing episodes in Marx’s life were the premature deaths of his children. His son, Edgar, died in 1855 at 8 while the family was living in a squalid two-roomed flat in Soho. Marx wrote to Engels on April 6th: “Poor Edgar is no more. He went to sleep (literally) in my arms today between 5 & 6”. Wm Leibknecht, a family friend, wrote of what he saw: “The mother silently weeping, bent over the dead child, Lenchen sobbing beside her, Marx in a terrible agitation vehemently, almost angrily, rejecting all consolation, the two girls clinging to their mother crying quietly, the mother clasping them convulsively as if to hold them & defend them against Death that had robbed her of her boy.” A few months later, Marx wrote to Lassalle: “Bacon says that really important men have so many relations with nature & the world that they recover easily from every loss. I do not belong to these important men. The death of my child has deeply shaken my heart & mind & I still feel the loss as freshly as on the 1st day. My poor wife is also completely broken down.”
Despite these setbacks & grinding poverty—Marx worked hard, regularly researching in the British Museum from 9am to 7pm & then staying up late writing. But there are lighter moments, including one hilarious episode in which Wm Leibknecht, Edgar Bauer & Marx get drunk on a pub-crawl on the Tottenham Court Rd.
The short concluding chapter on Marx’s legacy is in many ways the weakest part of this otherwise fine volume. For example, he accuses Marx of “shallow optimism” & cites the environmental crisis as a problem for Marx’s world outlook. However, in many ways the global environmental crisis is an illustration of Marx’s idea—outlined in the famous Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, which McLellan earlier quotes—that the capitalist system of production relations, like the feudal system of production relations that preceded it, at a certain stage begins to fetter the development of the productive forces, the things necessary for the satisfaction of human needs. As well as fettering the development of the productive forces, the capitalist system of production relations, in which every aspect of life is subjected to the demands of the market & the pursuit of private profit, makes dealing with the problem of climate change effectively impossible, threatening all life on the planet. Only planned production on a global scale can begin to address the challenge of climate change; but planned production requires cooperation between the owners of productive units, & the major players in the global capitalist system can no more cooperate to save the environment than a pack of wolves can cooperate to protect a baby lamb. It simply cannot happen: cooperation at the level of the economy can happen only on the basis of collective ownership of the productive forces on a global scale.
Despite this & other weaknesses in the concluding chapter, McLellan’s book remains the standard biography of Marx, scholarly & well informed, but at the same time enjoyable & compelling reading.
Marx had an enormous sense of humor, so this review ends on a light-hearted note. In the later years of life he attained a certain degree of notoriety due to his association with the International & was referred to in polite circles as “the red terror doctor”. But he also gained a degree of grudging respect. In 1867 he was elected by his respectable English neighbors to the prestigious post of “Constable of the sinecure of St. Pancras”. Marx declined the invitation with the comment “I should tell them that I was a foreigner & that they should kiss me on the arse.” His last recorded words on Britain were: “To the devil with the British.”–Alex Miller (edited)