Tag: English

As Marcello Musto announces, we are in the midst of a Marx Revival.

Only now does it become possible seriously to unhook Marx from those who claimed to make a revolution in his name. I am unsure as to how complete this historic uncoupling process is; but there is certainly a Marx Revival going on. Some very good new works on Marx have appeared over the last few years; there is clearly an ongoing process of recovery, discovery, and reappropriation or reconstruction. Another Marx-Early Manuscripts to the International is one its finest achievements. It is presented as a kind of biography, though it is segmented rather than complete or historically exhaustive. It is, I think, primarily a work of philosophical and sociological insight, presented in biographical and historical form.

Musto makes three moves, following three parts of the book or vital moments in Marx’s path. These steps are as follows. We begin with the early work, from youth to Paris. The second step involves the development of the critique of political economy. The third covers political militancy from the First International to Bakunin. All of which is, as you might say, well known. But his book suggests a starting over. And, as I shall suggest below, there is something special in the combination of skills and insights that Musto brings to his task which serves to set this book apart.

To begin, it is as though we hardly know Marx at all, or at least that we only know the iceberg peaks. As Musto reminds, earlier Marxists had very little of the corpus actually available to them. In the English language readers only had the most important manuscripts available to them into the nineteen sixties and seventies. This situation is continually improving. In English we have fifty volumes of the Collected Works. In German, we are still only up to volume 65 of the planned 114 volumes of MEGA 2. We discover that there are not only economic and philosophical manuscripts or ethnological or mathematical notebooks, but also ecological notebooks. Und so weiter… And this is indeed one important image that emerges from Musto’s book. Marx’s work consists of a partial list of actually published works, and a mountain, an immense accumulation of notebooks. For this is how Marx actually worked, how he combined reading, research, and critique and writing. The notebooks were Marx’s laboratory.

How might we read Marx, now, and why? The situation resembles the state of play in Gramsci Studies, where there are clear distinctions between philologists and reconstructionists, or between those who want first to get clear what Gramsci had to say, and those who view his writing as a toolbox whose purpose is to explain and address the present . For the philologists, the first task is to read and understand the Prison Notebooks in all their rich complexity. For the reconstructionists, the task is to seek intellectual orientation from these texts and especially their key themes, hegemony usw., and then turn to the pressing tasks of the day, in a world that sometimes seems light years away from the interwar period of Gramsci.

Musto’s task here is to begin by rereading Marx, text and context, with full attention to both. The result is in a sense uncanny, as it both places Marx, at that distance, and makes him our peer or contemporary, as we struggle with those ongoing tasks of reading, writing, researching and thinking the contemporary for ourselves. Musto does not address the problems of the present directly, but he leaves the door open to this possibility. This is, to my way of thinking, a serious advance on works like Jonathon Sperber’s Karl Marx, which seek to recover Marx by putting him a nineteenth century box.

In the longer conversation that might follow we will need again, also it seems to me, to reassess the paths not followed by the bullyboys of Bolshevism. This will include rethinking so called Western Marxism, the traditions of the Frankfurt School, council communism, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the legacies of East European critical theory  and so on . For as Musto reminds, the most powerful ethical legacy of Karl Marx was the enthusiasm for emancipation, or autonomy of self-development based on the cultivation of dependence or community.

So how does this book work? Musto has a fine combination of skills and attributes.  He demonstrates sensitive and sophisticated linguistic and philological skills, acute historical sensibilities, and the capacity to hear wideranging philosophical and political economic resonances. He has voice, but he also has a good ear. Marcello Musto understands the deep complexity of his subject, including his appalling medical history and desperate poverty. He combines a fine sense of detail, for example concerning Trier, with a clear sense of the philosophical substance of Marx’s project as it moves from Paris to London via Ireland and the Paris Commune, pointing later to the Russian Road. There are fine reminders of the importance of sarcasm and style in Marx, as in the famous burrowing mole, but also the representation of Herr Vogt as a perfectly detailed skunk. Musto pulls all this together; but he also knows full well that Marx’s brilliance was the result or product of his cultures, and it is plain that he too knows these cultures, as best as one could coming so much later.

A last word: this book is beautifully written and rendered by Patrick Camiller, and a pleasure to read. It is the best book written on Marx since Karl Korsch published Karl Marx in 1938. Eighty years is a long time to wait, but perhaps, like capital itself, the Marx scholarship itself is now also accelerating. More, this is a Marx whose compass is pointed to today, with all the complexity and depth of implication which that involves. This is a great achievement, suggestive of more to come. For understanding, like Marx’s lifework, is bound to remain unfinished.

Years ago in one of Marcello Musto’s graduate classes he told us that there are ‘many Marxs and many Marxisms’.

Indeed, true to the dialectical tradition, with the proliferation of interpretations of Marx’s thought, it seems that we never come across the same Marx/Marxism twice. Musto has provided us with yet another Marx in his bookAnother Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International. But his Marx is a vivid one, the fruit of rigorous philological research over many years. Some of this work is already published and more is forthcoming, and he hints at his ultimate aim in a footnote: ‘a complete intellectual biography of Marx’ (4).

The book opens with a discussion of the contemporary Marx revival and his prediction that ‘the renewal of Marx will continue’ (4). The character of Musto’s research on Marx and the seriousness with which he approaches it is evident in his claim that it was his studies ‘of the published and as yet unpublished corpus of MEGA2[Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe]’ which ‘nourished the underlying conviction of the present volume: that many paths remain to be explored, and that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, Marx is not at all an author about whom everything has already been said or written’ (4). One of his primary aims with this book, of course, is to foster discussion of interpretations. In particular, he seeks to challenge ‘philologically unfounded’ ones (6). His attempt ‘to offer a more exhaustive account of the formation of Marx’s thought’ is not limited to this book and he promises further work on ‘the research in the last years of his life’ (5). This is the topic of his bookThe Last Marx (1881-1883): An Intellectual Biography(Musto, 2018).

Another Marxis divided into three main parts: ‘Intellectual Influences and Early Writings,’ ‘The Critique of Political Economy’ and Marx’s ‘Political Militancy.’ Musto begins with Marx’s childhood and youth. He places him in the context of his broader cultural environment and the immediate circle of people that influenced his outlook on life, philosophy and early political leanings, including his experiences as a student during his time in Trier, Bonn and eventually his intellectual intercourse within the milieu of the Doctor’s Club and Left-Hegelians in Berlin. His narrative twists through Marx’s initial encounters with political-economic theory, his intense period of work in Paris in 1844 and the important manuscripts from this period; his maturing economic research in the early 1850s, when his life increasingly becomes one of hardship; his drafting of theGrundrissemanuscripts, experience with the 1857 crisis and further development of method; his political reflections in his journalistic writing for theNew York Daily Tribune; and a detailed account of the circumstances and struggles surrounding the writing ofCapitalwhich, incidentally, express a key reason for this intellectual biography: ‘The critical spirit with which Marx composed hismagnum opusreveals just how distant he was from the dogmatic author that both most of his adversaries and many self-styled disciples presented to the world’ (168). Throughout this narrative, Marx’s suffering with disease, poverty and related struggles is a recurring theme. Musto also fills in the history of the period in which Marx was absorbed in a feud with Karl Vogt, providing an interesting look at Marx’s personality as reflected in this work.

Arguably, one of Musto’s greatest accomplishments with this book is that he showcases Marx’s revolutionary ‘political talents’ and activity in a refreshing and enjoyable way (174). This is expressed through his role in the International Working Men’s Association (Musto includes information on the organization’s history, composition, internal politics and divisions, crisis and demise), as well as Marx’s conflict with Bakunin, all of which are situated in the context of the international politics of the time (e.g. the advent of the Paris Commune). The book closes with an analysis of Marx’s thoughts on the question of whether communism can develop in Russia without first passing through a stage of capitalist development (i.e. what scholars call the ‘multilinearity debate’) and the dogmatic Russian Marxists who claimed that Marx believed it could not, whereas Marx maintained that it is not necessarily required.

Those interested in a philosophical engagement with Marx’s work will find that Musto exaggerates the significance of a method of ‘careful philological examination’ (43). Consider, for instance, the case of theEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844(EPM). He claims that ‘nearly all readings of [the EPM] have either ignored or treated as unimportant the philological problems they present’ (42). While it is true that to ‘separate [the EPM] from the rest [of Marx’s manuscripts], to extrapolate them from their context, may […] lead to errors of interpretation’, comprehensively understanding them requires a more thorough analysis of the philosophy in them (45). Musto’s philological method leads to a misleading periodization of Marx’s thought in a way that separates and abstracts moments in its development. The way in which he treats Marx’s philosophical reflections in these early writings as ‘only [an] initial stage in his critical trajectory’ overlooks the extent of their relevance as a foundation for Marx’s ‘mature’ thinking (6). For example, Musto claims that in the EPM Marx’s ‘idea of communism remained highly abstract. At some point, he described it as the “negation of the negation,” as a moment in the “Hegelian dialectic”’ (39-40). But this ‘abstract’ set of ideas are deeply complex and writing them off in this way does not explain them; nor does it explain how these reflections in 1844 are connected to the expression of those ideas inCapital(cf. chapter 32 of the first volume).

To his credit, Musto assails the idea that there was a fundamental ‘intellectual break’ from Marx’s early period. Nonetheless, Musto’s method leads him to posit a kind of break in Marx’s intellectual maturation with his idea of Marx’s movement from ‘critical philosophy to revolutionary practice’ (45). Musto claims that ‘Marx’s thought underwent a decisive evolution during his year in Paris. He was now certain that the transformation of the world was a practical question. […] He bid farewell forever to philosophy that had not reached this awareness. […] From now on, his […] conclusions were not speculative but directed toward revolutionary action’ (47-8). The usage of ‘speculative’ here and elsewhere (e.g. pages 35 and 49) suggests its colloquial meaning, and there is no discussion of its specific meaning in Hegel’s thought (which, in a word, entails the recognition of ‘the positive in the negative’). It necessarily follows that a more comprehensive view of the relationship between Marx’s revolutionary theory/activity and ‘speculative’ thought in the Hegelian sense is left unexplored along with the abundant evidence which indicates that an essentially Hegelian ontology and epistemology is an integral component of Marx’s ‘mature’ philosophical thought. Some of this evidence is included in section 4.5 on Marx’s search for a method in which Musto points out how Marx identified Hegel with the correct method and insightfully claims that Marx’s criticism of him in the ‘Introduction’ to theGrundrisseis unfounded (by comparison, Marx’s attempt to distance his thinking from Hegel’s philosophy in the EPM is not afforded as much scrutiny). Musto nevertheless does not recognize that the ‘Introduction’ is one of many examples of Marx’s ‘speculative’ thinking. He also claims that with Marx’s ‘Crisis Notebooks’ [1857-58], ‘it is possible to change the conventional image of a Marx studying Hegel’sScience of Logic’ – even though hewas(cf. Marx’s letter to Engels dated 16 January 16 1858), which Musto is aware of – but such philological arguments in themselves produce only superficial insight into the nature of Hegel’s influence on Marx’s thought (85). Ultimately, this kind of critical reconstruction of Marx’s writings forces us to question the limitations of a philological approach. It reminds us of Marx’s criticism of Lassalle’s ‘philological finery’ when he was commenting on the latter’s book about Heraclitus. He claimed that, ‘Since most philologists arenotpossessed of the speculative thinking dominant in Heraclitus, every Hegelian has the incontestable advantage of understanding what the philologist does not’ (Marx, 1983: 260).

At times, Musto pushes the rigorousness of his philology to the point of redundancy – such as, for example, when he points out that one of Marx’s letters ‘is mistakenly dated 19 January 1958’ or that ‘Marx completed the proof corrections [of the first volume ofCapital] at 2:00 a.m. on 1 August 1867’ – giving the impression that this book is most suited for academics with a focus on Marxology (98; 164). With this level of rigorousness however, he has also effectively employed a meticulous collection of personal correspondence and biographical information in order to provide a revealing image of Marx’s life and times during the periods in which he was writing key works. This makes it especially useful for novice, albeit serious, readers.

On the strength of his philology, Musto recognizes a non-dogmatic spirit in Marx. At the beginning of the book he claims that ‘Marxism has often distorted [Marx’s] thought’, but by the end, when he describes Marx’s encounter with Marxists who misrepresented his theoretical position, it appears that Marx’s aversion to Marxists is such thatallMarxisms fundamentally diverge from his way of thinking (4). While Musto reduces this issue to the fact that those particular Marxists were wrong from Marx’s own perspective about a given question, a deeper grasp of Marx’s philosophy indicates that the more or less dogmatic philosophical attitude required for upholding any kind of Marxism is inconsistent with a key feature of the ‘dialectical’ philosophy that Marx practiced: radically critical engagement with theory which results in itssublation.

References

Marx, Karl1983Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40Eds. Betty and Peter Ross. New York: International Publishers
Musto, Marcello2018The Last Marx (1881-1883): An Intellectual BiographyLondon: Oxford University Press

Marx’s Method Of Political Economy

Marx’s method of political economy offers a critique of the political economy of capitalism in relation to its historical, social and material foundations, and this contributes to understanding and explaining the nature and functioning of capitalism, as well as the root causes of social and economic inequalities and its different forms of (re)production in industrialised capitalist societies, as Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho explain.

The discussion of Marx’s method traces back to his early writings of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which comprises the initial breakthrough in the field of political economy from 1843 to the composition of Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, written between 1857 and 1858. Grundrisse is an introductory draft of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and a preparatory work for Capital. According to Marcello Musto, it contributes to understanding Marx’s thought as a whole and Capital in particular. Musto further explains that, in Grundrisse, Marx aimed to clarify the guiding principles for theorising the problem and contradictions of capitalism. In this regard, Derek Sayer (1979) considers that Marx’s analysis is a method of enquiry that analyses the intrinsic relations of capitalism.

Marx was influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach. In his early career, Marx identified himself with the group of Young Hegelians (who were more radical) rather than with in the Old Hegelians (considered more reactionary), but the influence of Feuerbach’s materialism led Marx to move away from the Young Hegelians who believed that human intellectual development still had far to advance. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, philosophy was dominated by Hegel and his followers. Fine and Saad-Filho explain that Hegelians “were idealists, believing that theoretical concepts can legitimately be developed more or less independently of material reality.” The Hegelians also believed that “intellectual progress explains the advance of government, culture and the other forms of social life”. In contrast, Feuerbach believed that human need determines consciousness. For him, in general humans seek God or religion, to satisfy an emotional need. For that reason, Marx extended Feuerbach’s materialist philosophy beyond religion to all the other areas of society. Feuerbach’s materialist analysis is ahistorical and non-dialectical, while Marx believed that human consciousness can only be understood in relation to historical, social and material circumstances. Thus, Fine and Saad-Filho argue that the relationship between dialectics and history became the cornerstone of Marx’s method. For Marx, consciousness is first and foremost determined by material conditions that develop dialectically throughout human history. In Marxist terms, dialectics is a method that translates a way of thinking about reality. It consists in going beyond reality to understand and analyse the social whole through a materialist analysis.

Therefore, it is important to explore the discussion on historical materialism and dialectical materialism made by Nicos Poulantzas because it sheds light on an understanding and distinction between interpretations of both Marxist philosophy and method. Poulantzas explains that historical materialism is the science of history. It studies the different modes of production and social formation, their structure, constitution and functioning, and the forms of transition from one social formation to another through an historical perspective. Its object is the concept of history. While dialectical materialism is defined as a Marxist philosophy, it has its own particular object of production and that is the structure and functioning of the process of thought. The object of dialectical materialism is the theory of the history of scientific production.

Thus, as Marx showed in Grundrisse and in Capital, historical materialism maintains a general theory for defining the concepts of mode of production, of social formation, of real appropriation and property, of combination, ideology, politics, conjuncture and transition. These concepts contribute to defining the object through a historical perspective. This means that the object of historical materialism is the study of different structures and practices – the economy, politics, and ideology. As Poulantzas explains, the combination of these different structures and practices constitutes the mode of production and the social formation.

Therefore, in Grundrisse, Marx defines the historical criteria and the material production of society as the starting point of his method of analysis. But how? Where do we begin? Marcello Musto (2008) explains that in Grundrisse, Marx “addressed the major methodological issue: how to reproduce reality in thought. How to construct an abstract categorical model capable of comprehending and representing society?” Marx sought to question and challenge the founders of political economy, William Petty and Pierre de Boisguilbert, by questioning their method of starting their analysis off with the entire population. For Musto (2008), Marx believed that to initiate an analysis with the entire population gives an overly generic image of the whole as it is incapable of demonstrating the divisions into classes (bourgeoisie, landowners and proletariat) because class can only be determined through its foundations: capital, land ownership and wage labour. For this reason, Musto considers that such an empirical approach would dissolve the analysis of the state “into abstract determinations such as division of labour, money or value”. In fact, this procedure was employed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in economics and by Hegel in philosophy. For example, the abstract categories in economics arose from simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, and exchange between nations and the world market. For Musto, Marx’s “abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought”. Moreover, in Marx’s account, Musto argues that, with the right categories, it is possible “to retrace the journey until one finally arrives at population again, only this time not as the chaotic conception of the whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations”.

Fine and Saad-Filho consider that “the best known example of the application of Marx’s method can be found in his critical examination of capitalism in Capital”. Fine and Saad-Filho assert that Marx’s approach has five important broad features: (1) Social phenomena exist, and can be understood, only in their historical context. For Marx, societies are organised by different modes of production and structured by different class relations. Thus, class analysis offers a clear insight into the internal structure, the mechanisms of power and contradictions of a capitalist society; (2) Theory loses its validity if pushed beyond its historical and social limits which means that concepts and theories are always constructed to address a particular society and historical moment; (3) Marx’s analysis is structured by the relations between theory and history. For him, the historical analysis belongs within the method of the study, which contributes to understanding the past and present, but cannot be used to predict the future; (4) Dialectical materialism informs and defines the key concepts, structures, relationships and levels of analysis required to explain the concrete or complex outcomes. Marx uses dialectical materialism in Capital to understand and determine the essential features of capitalism and their contradictions, to explain the structure and dynamics of this mode of production, and to locate the potential sources of historical change; (5) Marx’s method is focused on historical change. For Marx, there is an interdependent and mutual relationship between the structures of production, the social relations and historical change. These influences are always determined by the mode of social organisation. Fine and Saad-Filho explain that “these relations exist independently of individual choice, even though they have been established in the course of the historical development of society”. Therefore, these social relations of production are determined by class relations within a particular mode of production, such as in a capitalist society.

Thus, Marx’s method of political economy is thus particularly useful as a scientific and rigorous method of analysis that provides an analytical template to understand how social systems works.

It is unusual for the publication of a book to signal a new turn in the study of an author.

At best, it usually confines itself to updating the interpretive framework or developing particular areas, without undertaking a comprehensive revision. In short, the prevalent tendency is to work within an established paradigm, rather than take the risk of a truly innovative approach.
This general orientation may be found even more clearly in writings on the thought of Karl Marx. After a veritable ideological orgy in the 1960s and 1970s, when the philosopher’s texts were used to legitimize the most diverse, and sometimes most extravagant, political positions, and after the near-total oblivion following the so-called crisis of Marxism, the few books that have appeared in recent years on the author of Capital have done little more than repeat stereotypical formulas, making no serious attempt to do Marx justice by reading him in the way he deserves – as a great protagonist of theoretical research worthy of belonging to a gallery of outstanding classical thinkers.
In fact, we may speak of a revealing paradox in this connection. Until yesterday, indeed until this very day, the Marx about whom people have again begun to speak is the prophet of communist society, the bitter critic of   capitalism, the architect of a philosophy of the proletariat called “historical materialism”: that is, a figure who, if we stick rigorously to what he actually wrote, instead of swallowing the implausible legends that blossomed in the shadow of nineteenth-century ideologies, has nothing in common with the real theoretical identity of the thinker from Trier. Among the numerous examples that underline the real deformations that his work has suffered, it is enough to recall his repeated insistence that he never formulated a “socialist system” and his complete disinclination to “write recipes for the cook-shops of the future”.
The grave and inexcusable delay in “doing justice to Marx” (to paraphrase the title of the work in which Jacques Derrida settled his account with Freud) has today finally been redressed by Marcello Musto’s Karl Marx Biografia intellettuale e politica 1857-1883 (Einaudi, XI-329 pages, Euros 30). The book is structured on the basis of a methodological choice that is both simple and extremely effective: to delineate the theoretical contribution contained in Marx’s writings between 1857 (the year of the Grundrisse) and 1883 (the year of his death) in the context of the main events of his life. In this, the book stands opposed to the still persistent tendency to separate the existential narrative from Marx’s theoretical elaboration.
The result is a masterly work in every sense: in its accuracy of textual documentation, its crystal clarity of exposition, and its originality of interpretive approach. Musto is already the author of other fundamental contributions to the understanding of Marx’s thought – including Ripensare Marx e i marxismi (Carocci, 2011) and L’Ultimo Marx (Donzelli, 2016) – and now we have a book that shakes the torpid world of lifeless Marxological literature and presents the thought of a great classical thinker in all its vibrant topicality.

The figure of Karl Marx is so bound up with what I have studied and reflected on, over the years, that I feel I have become quite well acquainted with him while only occasionally making his life story the direct object of my inquiry.

My experience of Marx is thus not that of a “Marx scholar.” I have not tried to monitor all the biographies of Marx, although to do so would no doubt reveal a lot about the changing fortunes of the Left. I have been alerted to aspects of Marx’s trajectory here and there while being drawn into varied political debates, all of which led me to focus more on what he said (and did) than on the process through which he arrived at his positions. Moreover, when I have turned directly to his writings, it has been primarily in order to apply his perspective – which I grew into in the way that one acquires one’s primary language – to the analysis of some particular issue or historical moment.
But the progression from Marx the person to Marx’s thought and practice as the inspiration of a global movement – the genesis of the approach to history that made Marxism more than just a sect – now claims our attention with ever increasing urgency as the forces of capital that he highlighted escalate their devastating worldwide impact, and it becomes ever more vital to draw people into the struggle for a socialist reorganization of society. What Marcello Musto calls the current “Marx revival” – in which Musto’s own studies and collections have played a leading part – reflects the extreme challenge of a juncture at which capitalist accumulation, if not halted, will push the human species, along with many others, into oblivion.33 A concise recent overview of the physical basis for this projection is Julia Adenay Thomas, “Why the Anthropocene Is Not ‘Climate Change’ – And Why That Matters,” (January 2019), available online at: https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/01/31/why-the-anthropocene-is-not-climate-change-and-why-that-matters/.View all notes
What can we usefully learn, at this juncture, from Marx’s life? And how can Musto’s biographical study help us? Much of Marx’s story will be well known to readers of New Political Science. In Musto’s rendition, which juxtaposes textual analysis and historical markers with details of the personal hardships that Marx had to overcome, what comes through is the portrait of a man who, in the face of extraordinary obstacles in his daily life, drew strength from “the unshakeable certainty that his existence belonged to the movement for the emancipation of millions of men and women” (p. 116). This is a dramatic way of expressing the point that, for all the rough edges, sufferings, and defeats that have attended the global struggle for socialism, there is a vital force that perseveres; it lies in the capacity, embodied by Marx, to grasp the enormity – both the scope and the horror – of the overarching regime that has to be transcended. In the context of Musto’s treatment, the “other Marx” of his title is clearly the one whose teachings endure despite all the disappointments – and especially the ideological distortions – produced by first-epoch socialism.
Although these ideological distortions were widely debated on the Left even before the collapse of the regimes in question, their origins remain a matter of controversy among Marxists. Musto locates them, in part (following a tradition pioneered by Georg Lukács), in a formulation of Friedrich Engels according to which there exists a “parallelism between history and logic” (p. 104), an observation which, in Musto’s view, was not shared by Marx. Musto might usefully have elucidated this point in the main text. In what sense does the quote from Engels represent more than an incidental difference? Without an explanation of this, we might be thrown into the camp of those who see Engels more sweepingly as the progenitor of a vulgarized Marxism – an interpretation which has tended to discredit the application of Marxist method outside the realm of social relations, narrowly understood (that is, to the exclusion of the natural/ecological infrastructure).44 Marx and Engels shared a unified approach to society and nature. The wider scope that this implies for Marxism is highlighted in Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).View all notes
Musto makes clear that he is not offering a full biography; he states that “a complete intellectual biography of Marx still has to be written” (p. 4). What he presents is three major stages of Marx’s career: Part I of the book focuses on the genesis of Marx’s perspective; Part II, on the circumstances surrounding his writing of the Grundrisse(written in 1857 but not published until 1939) and of Capital Vol. I (1867); and Part III, on Marx’s participation in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) (1864–1872).
What I find most useful about Musto’s narrative is the tight link it shows between Marx’s activities and the changing circumstances through which he lived. While the general awareness of such connections is not new,55 For a thorough exposition, see especially August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). Hal Draper’s 4-volume work, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1977–1990), is also valuable.View all notes some of the specific juxtapositions that Musto highlights – for example, between the writing of the Grundrisse and the economic crisis of 1857 – are quite striking. More generally, what is remarkable about Marx’s life is the stark contrasts that appear among the various types of activity in which he either chose or was forced to involve himself, often shifting suddenly from one to another (and back) as a consequence of some unforeseeable conjuncture. From our present-day perspective of a society confronting extreme events – for many activists, from a position of economic insecurity – his experience offers a precedent that is at once alarming and hopeful: the hazards of revolutionary engagement offset by the prospect – not always easy to envisage – of eventual epic achievement (which for Marx meant comprehending and conveying to the whole world the historical dynamic of capital).
The most obvious flux and reflux – inherent in Marx’s calling – is between his theoretical labors and his organizational activity. Cutting across this central axis, however, was a wide spectrum of pressures and interests. Among the pressures were, first, the heavy hand of the bourgeois state, expelling him from three countries, and, later, the pain of living on the edge, at once economically and – partly because of this – in terms of both physical ailments and emotional turmoil, including the early deaths of three of his children. Added pressures arising from his work included ill-informed polemics by political adversaries. Musto gives particular attention to Marx’s year-long detour from the writing of Capital to compose Herr Vogt (1860), an often-overlooked work in which Marx, apprehensive of future misunderstandings, deploys against his critic the full battery of his theoretical arguments, seasoned with disdain for Vogt’s clumsiness of expression. The latter concern reflects in part Marx’s lifelong immersion in the classics of Western literature. Another great interest for Marx was the whole varied world of the natural sciences, with particular emphasis on evolutionary biology and agricultural chemistry – topics on which he avidly followed the latest developments, blending them seamlessly into his overall depiction of the scourges of capital.66 See Ian Angus, “Marx and Engels and Darwin,” in his A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism(New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2017), pp. 27–45, and Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2017).View all notes
Although Marx could at certain stages concentrate for months at a time on his theoretical work, there was no period of his life in which he was not on high alert to the openings for revolution. The period of relative quiescence in the 1850s was one in which his main outreach was through journalism, especially the articles on current politics that he – and sometimes also Engels – wrote for the New York Tribune. Both before and after that decade, however, his activism was more direct. Part III of Musto’s book, focusing on the IWMA or First International, reminds us that Marx in his political practice abjured personal projection, working instead outside the spotlight to make sure that the necessary strategic understanding was embraced and articulated by the workers themselves.77 See also Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 194.View all notes
The IWMA would ultimately collapse under the weight of sectarian struggles. At its height, however, it expressed in organizational form the class consciousness that Marx had been working to instill. That historical moment, embracing also the publication of Capital Vol. 1 and, only four years later, the Paris Commune (of which Marx’s contemporaneous analysis, The Civil War in France, became the most widely diffused interpretation), brought Marx’s work decisively into the position of global prominence, as revolutionary theory, that it has occupied ever since.
Musto’s book, which also includes a chronology of the publication history of Marx’s major works, as well as reference-information about many of Marx’s comrades, is part of a larger project that, given the current resurgence of mass discontent, should go beyond earlier projects in showing the relevance of Marx’s practice to a new generation of activists.

Notes
3 A concise recent overview of the physical basis for this projection is Julia Adenay Thomas, “Why the Anthropocene Is Not ‘Climate Change’ – And Why That Matters,” (January 2019), available online at: https://climateandcapitalism.com/2019/01/31/why-the-anthropocene-is-not-climate-change-and-why-that-matters/.
4 Marx and Engels shared a unified approach to society and nature. The wider scope that this implies for Marxism is highlighted in Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
5 For a thorough exposition, see especially August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). Hal Draper’s 4-volume work, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1977–1990), is also valuable.
6 See Ian Angus, “Marx and Engels and Darwin,” in his A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2017), pp. 27–45, and Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
7 See also Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 194.

Written to be accessible to students and non-experts, this book challenges common conceptions of Marx’s ideas and seeks to stimulate new interpretations of Marx’s work among academics.

The book charts the earlier stages in Karl Marx’s intellectual development, drawing on his letters, preparatory manuscripts of Capital, and the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (Marx’s early writings assembled by Friedrich Engels). The first part of the book looks for Marx’s intellectual influences in his childhood, youth, and university years, with one chapter devoted to his earliest encounters with political economy. The next section examines his critiques of political economy and the origins of his Capital, from his studies of political economy through his early manuscripts. The third section of the book chronicles his political militancy during the period from 1864 to 1872, such as his involvement in the International Working Men’s Association, the revolution in Paris, and his conflict with Mikhail Bakunin. Historical b&w photos are included.