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Brief Lives

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Roger Caldwell rediscovers the bookish revolutionist.

It is a common fault to read philosophers out of their historical context: we tend to try to make them address our needs without understanding theirs. This is not least the case with Karl Marx. When capitalism seemed to totter in the crash of 2008, and in the subsequent period of great financial uncertainty, many reached for their long-discarded copies of Marx. But how much light should we expect a nineteenth-century writer on earlier stages of capitalism to throw on a complex credit bubble in the twenty-first? The capitalist system of which Marx writes in Das Kapital (1867), it can be argued, is not only very different to our own, but was already different from the one existing at the time of the book’s publication. Marx predominantly describes capitalism in its earliest, most predatory stages, before the progress subsequently achieved by labour organizations.

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