"One view of Marx is comic, the other tragic..."

Citizen Marx

By refusing to treat Marx as our contemporary, Jonathan Sperber has brought him back to life.

Sam Stark 

October 8, 2013 

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One view of Marx is comic, the other tragic; both lack the history that gives order and purpose to his life. The idea of a “nineteenth-century life” determines Sperber’s simple and brilliant three-part structure. The titles of its three parts, “Shaping,” “Struggle” and “Legacy,” suggest three different stages of life as well as three different ways of relating to history. “Shaping” sets Marx on his revolutionary course by placing him in a revolutionary age, defined by living memories of revolution, by hopes and fears that it wasn’t yet over. “Struggle” begins with The Communist Manifesto and the revolutions of 1848, depicting Marx as insurgent, exile, observer and activist, pushing back or retreating from the rhythms of history: the massive liberal and democratic uprisings across Europe, the decade of reaction and resurgent capitalism in the 1850s, the global financial crisis of 1857, the unification of Germany under Prussian rule, and the great-power struggles that culminated in the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War. “Legacy” has one chapter on Marx’s last decade, showing him still learning, still trying to fathom a time that may be passing him by, but mostly it abandons chronology to analyze the three volumes of Capital, Marx’s personal life as an adult and his communist afterlife. This elegant form, with its slowly shifting perspective, captures the incredible scale of the changes that Marx lived through without lapsing into the picaresque."