Books & Poetry

Can ideas change the world? The famous words of Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, inscribed on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery, seem to suggest not. ‘The philosophers,’ Marx wrote, ‘have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ This ringing declaration has often been taken to mean that ideas are futile. But Marx can’t have meant anything quite as crude as that – for one thing, he presumably intended his words to have an effect on whoever read them. He certainly thought the world would change only through active revolutionary struggle, but the revolution nevertheless had to be guided by ideas. It’s ideas that change the minds of the people whose actions then change the world.

Something like this appears to be the thinking behind a new series from Atlantic Books. Its ‘Books that Shook the World’ are short ‘biographies’ of texts that can lay claim to world-historical significance, and among the first batch to be published are Simon Blackburn on Plato’s ‘Republic’, Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ and Francis Wheen on the magnum opus of Marx himself. Feature continues

Like any book about Marx, Wheen’s splendid little volume on ‘Das Kapital’ has to meet an obvious and rather substantial challenge: that what appears in Marx’s work as a kind of prophecy – about the emergence of an organised working class who would be the ‘gravediggers’ of the system that produced them; about a future material abundance that would guarantee equality – has not been confirmed by history but destroyed by it.

Wheen meets this challenge in two, not necessarily compatible, ways. On the one hand, he acknowledges Marx’s errors and unfulfilled prophecies, but insists that these are nonetheless ‘eclipsed and transcended’ by his devastatingly accurate description of the nature of capitalism. On the other hand, Wheen insists that the portrayal of Marx as a ‘mechanical determinist’ is in any case a caricature, and that Marx believed human beings to be capable of making their own history (albeit in circumstances not of their choosing).

Of course, if it’s impossible to predict equality on the basis of iron-clad historical laws, then one has to argue for it, and so advocacy replaces prophecy. In Wheen’s reading, ‘Das Kapital’ is a kind of source-book for socialist argument; not a premonition, therefore, but rather the description of a system that deforms and crushes the human spirit. And as long as that system endures, so will Marx’s masterpiece.

‘Das Kapital’, Wheen argues, is an attempt to map the terra incognita of an emergent industrial capitalism. And this exploratory character accounts for what the critic Edmund Wilson described as the ‘brain-racking subtleties’ of Marx’s prose. In fact, Wheen has learned from Wilson not to try to look past Marx’s extraordinary style, but instead to see in its ‘Dickensian’ textures an attempt to embody the way in which, under capitalism, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. He brilliantly evokes the atmosphere of Victorian Gothic that pervades the pages of ‘Das Kapital’, as Marx attempts to disclose the injustice and exploitation behind the ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of commodification.