Karl Marx: A Life Book

It's strange but arguably true: millions of people died in Siberia because a philosopher in London had carbuncles on his ass. Chaos theory now makes a little more sense to me.

In a famous riff on Hegel, Marx once said that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Marx's own biography suggests a different sequence. His life was a grubby, shambolic farce that somehow gave birth to a world-historic tragedy. Francis Wheen, the author of this generally excellent biography, snidely pooh-poohs the idea that Marx bears any responsibility for the Gulag, but this seems as naïve as the reductionism it was meant to counter. If Stalinism was a misreading of Marx, it was at least a plausible misreading. It can't be a coincidence that every communist regime in history got Marx wrong in exactly the same way.

But, okay, Marx himself was no monster, and Wheen does a good job of humanizing the old bogeyman - almost too good a job, actually: his Marx is not just human, but hilariously, embarrassingly, disastrously human. For the first two-thirds of the book, Marx comes across as a bit of a loser, a schlemiel: living in rented rooms, shamelessly sponging off rich relatives and his good buddy Engels, refusing to get a real job, cowering in his study while his wife turned away creditors, fathering children with grim Victorian persistence (including one with the housekeeper), lancing the aforementioned carbuncles with a razor, getting massive boils on his penis, snoring on the sofa all day long while his kids romped among dirty dishes and broken furniture, confidently predicting revolution every other week (always wrongly), going on benders, writing thunderous, 200-page jeremiads against anyone who looked at him sideways, letting a friend fight a duel in his place (and take a bullet in the head), growing a freaky beard, malingering, and constantly, constantly, CONSTANTLY complaining...

And yet, damn it, the man was a genius. Deirdre McCloskey, a hardcore neoliberal (and therefore the furthest thing imaginable from a Marxist) calls him the greatest social critic of the nineteenth century. As a philosopher and economist, he was a horror show, but as a writer and all-around shit disturber, he has few equals. If only he'd stuck to journalism...

The last years of Marx's life were spent traipsing around the fashionable spas of Europe, where he charmed the other guests with his witty anecdotes and impeccable manners. He was also a doting grandfather. Eleven people showed up for his funeral.