Karl Marx: A Life
Francis Wheen
431 pages, including index
published in 1999

Since I've started calling myself a socialist, it seems no more than reasonable to learn more about the man who arguably did more than any other person to develop socialism and socialist theory: Karl Marx. Which is why I got this biography of him, written by Francis Wheen, out of the local library. I already knew Wheen from his various BBC radio 4 appearances and thought I could trust him. He didn't disappoint: Karl Marx: A Life is an interesting, broad biography of both the man and his work, portrayed in a generally sympathetic light.

Wheen's intentions are made clear int he first sentence of the book: "cite>Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper inspired such global devotion-or been so calamitously misinterpreted. It is time to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man". The focus here is on the life of Marx, witht he devlopment of his theories a secondary though important theme. Karl Marx: A Life is therefore written as a conventional biography, in chronological order detailing the important events in Marx's life, from his childhood to his death.

However, he doesn't neglect Marx work, which would be difficult to do in any case,as so much of Marx's life is interwoven with his work on socialism and socialist theory. Leave it out and you're left with a life that is for a large part as unevenful as any of ours. Once he had settled down in England with his family as a refugee from his native Germany, he spent most of his days writing.

Before he had settled in England, Marx had had an eventful life however. Born as a son of a liberal Jewish family in Germany, he became a radical freethinker in university. After he left university, he edited the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper. He eventually had to leave Germany due to his radicalism and moved first to France, then to Belgium, where in the great revolutionary year of 1848 he wrote the Communist Manifesto, with Friedrich Engels, the man who would become his protector for the rest of his life. After a short spell back in Germany, Marx moved in 1852 to London and would remain in England until his death in 1883.

In between, Marx writes other political and philisophical works, culminating in the publication of his masterpiece Capital in 1867. Throughout the book, Wheen traces the development of this work in some detail, going from Marx's earliest writings through the Grundisse (1857-1858), Marx's incomplete series of notes in which Marx took his first stabs at several of the ideas later coming back in Capital. In this way Wheen shows the development of Marx's thinking, the ways it changed and the ways in which it remained consistent.

Wheen also concentrates a great deal on Marx's private life, his family and friends. From Wheen's portrait we see a man who is at times egocentric, vain and arrogant, but also a loving husband and doting father. It also turns out that the scourge of the bourgeois himself leads a pretty middle class life, determined to keep up appearances and deprive his family of none of the amenities the middle class has at its possession. Wheen makes much from this alleged inconsistency between Marx's writing and his life, making more of it than it deserved I thought. In a capitalist society it is impossible for anybody to lead a socialist life; everybody needs to adapt in some ways to it if only to just survive. In daily life, every socialist has to make compromises.

But this is a minor irritant in an otherwise excellent book. Wheen makes Marx come alive and as importantly, makes you curious for more of Marx's own writing. Whether or not you agree with Marx's convictions, you cannot deny his importance in shaping the modern world. If you are curious to what Marx was like, this is the book for you.