![]() ![]() Historicizing-correcting for the tendency to presentize the past-is what scholars do. “Marx was not our contemporary,” Jonathan Sperber insists, in “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life” (Liveright), which came out in 2013 he is “more a figure of the past than a prophet of the present.” And Gareth Stedman Jones explains that the aim of his new book, “Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion” (Harvard), is “to put Marx back in his nineteenth-century surroundings.” The writer who made this prediction was, of course, Karl Marx, and the pamphlet was “The Communist Manifesto.” He is not wrong yet.Ĭonsidering his rather glaring relevance to contemporary politics, it’s striking that two important recent books about Marx are committed to returning him to his own century. As ideologies disappeared which had once made inequality appear natural and ordained, it was inevitable that workers everywhere would see the system for what it was, and would rise up and overthrow it. Soon, in fact, there would be just two types of people in the world: the people who owned property and the people who sold their labor to them. As cities and towns industrialized, as wealth became more concentrated, and as the rich got richer, the middle class began sinking to the level of the working class. Ten per cent of the population possessed virtually all of the property the other ninety per cent owned nothing. The new modes of production, communication, and distribution had also created enormous wealth. For the first time in history, men and women could see, without illusions, where they stood in their relations with others. People no longer believed that ancestry or religion determined their status in life. Just as important, it swept away all the old hierarchies and mystifications. ![]() Goods and ideas now circulated everywhere. In the name of free trade, it had knocked down national boundaries, lowered prices, made the planet interdependent and cosmopolitan. Its innovations-the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph-had unleashed fantastic productive forces. It surpassed, in its accomplishments, all the great civilizations of the past-the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman aqueducts, the Gothic cathedrals. Modern industry, it proclaimed, had revolutionized the world. On or about February 24, 1848, a twenty-three-page pamphlet was published in London. How useful is Karl Marx-who died a hundred and thirty-three years ago-for understanding our world? Illustration by Roberto De Vicq De Cumptich
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