![]() ![]() He spent his life sponging off Friedrich Engels. Marx was in many ways an awful human being. The fall from grace is embodied in capitalism man is redeemed as the proletariat rises up against its exploiters and creates a communist utopia.Ī second reason is the power of his personality. He was a latter-day prophet describing the march of God on Earth. Who can forget his observation that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”? His ideas were as much religious as scientific-you might even call them religion repackaged for a secular age. But he was a brilliant thinker: he developed a theory of society driven forward by economic forces-not just by the means of production but by the relationship between owners and workers-and destined to pass through certain developmental stages. Marx may not have been the scientist that he thought he was. The obvious reason is the sheer power of those ideas. Why does the world remain fixated on the ideas of a man who helped to produce so much suffering? The point of madness But the sheer volume of commentary is evidence of something important. ![]() The best short introduction is still Isaiah Berlin’s “Karl Marx”, which was published in 1939. None of these bicentennial books is outstanding. And publishers are producing a cascade of books on his life and thought, from “Das Kapital”-sized doorstops (Sven-Eric Liedman’s “A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx”), to Communist Manifesto-slim pamphlets (a second edition of Peter Singer’s “Marx: A Very Short Introduction”). The British Library, where he did the research for “Das Kapital”, is putting on a series of exhibitions and talks. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, is visiting Trier, Marx’s birthplace, where a statue of Marx donated by the Chinese government will be unveiled. At the 200th anniversary of his birth, which falls on May 5th, interest in him is as lively as ever. Yet for all his oversights, Marx remains a monumental figure.
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