A Human Being

Jenny Diski

• Karl Marx by Francis Wheen
  Fourth Estate, 441 pp, £20.00, October 1999, ISBN 1 85702 637 3
• Adventures in Marxism by Marshall Berman
  Verso, 160 pp, £17.00, September 1999, ISBN 1 85984 734 X

They say, and it does seem to be true, that we get the prime ministers and presidents we deserve. Now, it looks as if each generation is going to get the Karl Marx it deserves. There are advantages in watching the process of a Marx revived again and again according to the perceptions of social pundits: with each recasting and each self-appointed recaster of Marx representing the texture of current thought, we’ll have a chance to observe something about our state of mind, while, if we were there before, we can comfort ourselves with the notion that our Marx – naturally – was the real Karl. Right now, columnist, game-show pundit and biographer of Tom Driberg, Francis Wheen is here to tell us that all the previous practitioners and theoreticians of Marx’s work – both the governments and the academics (in economics, history, geography, sociology, literature) who professed themselves Marxists – have ‘calamitously misinterpreted’ his thought. The academics and zealots have had their day apparently, and it is time, Wheen says, ‘to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man’. If your immediate response is ‘why?’, you’ve probably been off-planet for a few years. The biographical obsession, personality-bound cod analysis, has got everywhere. We prefer to see the portrait of the man, rather than think about his thoughts. The retreat in search of lively personal origins as a form of explanation is less demanding than the perpetual examination of ideas and their development. In October 1998 the New Yorker named Marx as ‘the next great thinker’ (possibly following on from the author of The Little Book of Calm). Marx the Movie is surely just around the corner, and not long after we can – oh please can we? – expect the musical ‘Carbuncle!’; maybe, if we get very lucky, Disney will animate lovable, hairy Karl, or as Wheen describes him ‘squat and swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing’ (voiced undoubtedly by a frantically guttural Robin Williams) scribbling The Communist Manifesto at his desk while a chorus of comically evil creditors sing a hummy hymn to capitalism, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose but our claims.’ Oh, what an exciting new century we have to look forward to.