A Requiem for Karl Marx. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Eugene D. Genovese

A Requiem for Karl Marx, by Frank E. Manuel (Harvard, 255 pp., $24.95)

Although Frank Manuel stands out as the American Left's most erudite historian, he has made little impact on the left-wing historians who now control his profession. They choose to ignore him, for he has never pandered to fads or prostituted his work to partisan ends.

The contributions to scholarship in A Requiem for Karl Marx are large but largely hidden. Manuel has always demonstrated a mastery of secondary sources, but he has written his books out of the primary sources, which he impressively commands. Thus he here provides a searing, genuinely fresh biographical sketch of Marx, the man, the theorist, and the political activist.

Manuel moves from Marx to Marxism to the fruits of the movement he fathered. Marx suffered terrible pain from assorted ailments that frequently laid him low, and he and his family lived much of their lives as exiles close to poverty. Suffering may ennoble some saintly souls, but it tends to embitter and distort ordinary mortals. Manuel keeps clear of the mean-spirited jibes that some critics descend to. Instead, he weaves a story of personal suffering into a plausible explanation for the crude and even cruel behavior that Marx exhibited not only toward a vast array of enemies, real and imagined, but toward loyal friends who were rarely loyal enough to suit him. Yet, as Manuel forcefully argues, there were other sources of Marx's demons.

Marx was a man of strong hatreds and loves -- mostly hatreds -- which deeply conditioned his thought. The appallingly unattractive Marx who emerges from this book was consumed with a self-hatred that constantly threatened to pass into a Manichaeanism that, at his best, he manfully resisted, but often unsuccessfully. Manuel, finding the source of that self-hatred in Marx's inability to reconcile himself to his Jewish origins, makes a case, but he thereby muddies the waters. For Manuel demonstrates, with impressive argumentation, Marx's responsibility for much of the criminality that subsequently occurred in his name. In doing so, Manuel exposes self-hatred and projected hatreds as at the root of much of modern radicalism, Marxist and other. Hence, Manuel sheds light on the making of Marx the man and the icon of the movement that would march under his name, but he sheds less light than he might have on the roots of the hatreds that propelled a world-shaking political movement.

Marx knew a great deal about Christian as well as Jewish thought and history. "The movement to redeem mankind," Manuel writes, "needed a scientific equivalent of the Bible . . . and [Marx] would act as a propagator of the new dispensation." The tone in which Manuel casts that accurate remark prefigures his subsequent caustic treatment of the Marxist intellectual movement. Indeed, by the time Manuel gets finished with Marx's thought there is almost nothing left besides the banderole, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." At that, Manuel shows that Marx and Engels popularized a concept drawn from the despised utopian socialists. Yet Manuel speaks of Marx's genius and properly notes that many of his ideas have oriented the thought even of his most determined opponents. He nonetheless sells Marx short here and might have usefully examined Marx's influence on such conservatives as, say, Pareto, Michels, Weber, Schumpeter, and Burnham.

There is more of value in Marx's interpretation of history and capitalist development than even the fair-minded Manuel acknowledges. He dismisses Marx's political economy out of hand and then makes a strained effort to salvage something: "There is a flagrant contradiction between the 'rights of man' ideology and the actuality of bourgeois exploitation, a deception Marx skillfully unmasked." Since Manuel dismisses the theory of surplus value, which constitutes the heart of Marx's theory of exploitation, we may be left to question the nature of the alleged contribution. Manuel might profitably ponder Schumpeter's underappreciated reworking of the theory of capitalist development to expose its relation to the moral and social decay of the modern world, which led Schumpeter back to Rerum Novarum.

Manuel confronts Marx's responsibility for the outcome of his ideas. Eschewing pseudo-solutions to moral dilemmas, he refuses to let Marx off the hook with the usual dishonest distinction between the saint and the sinners who have wrought havoc in his name:

For the sufferings of Karl Marx the exile, we can feel compassion; for his elaborate theoretical system, benign doubt and perhaps selective approval; for the abominable practices instituted in his name, loathing. A requiem for Marx cannot ignore the iniquities of his offspring -- prophets and messiahs must share the blame for the excesses of followers -- but the banner he unfurled need not be interred with his bones. Even a skeptical utopian like myself can still believe in the worth of the guiding principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.