Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. Isaiah Berlin.

Karl Marx: His Life and Environment
Isaiah Berlin
New York: Time Incorporated. 1963.

Why read it? RL Heilbroner: "Denunciation of Communist doctrine has become commonplace in America, but thoughtful examination of Communist philosophy is rare." This is a biography of ideas, not a biography of action. We can learn some things from Karl Marx, who said, "I am not a Marxist." Two ideas which especially influenced me are Marx's belief that the history of the world involves economic exploitation and his view of competition and cooperation. Today's business models emphasize both.

Karl Marx's ideas were vilified and worshiped and interpreted to a degree that later in life he said that whatever he was, he was not a "Marxist." He wanted to destroy society as it was and replace it with a classless society. He believed that this was the direction of history, the immutable laws of history. He took many ideas from many people and produced an original thesis. The history of the world was the history of economic class exploitation by the stronger of the weaker. He believed that conflict led to improved consciousness of the reality of the world.

He was an obnoxious controversialist. You were with him or you were against him. His belief in the laws of history, which he expanded, caused him to believe that he was unalterably right. He brooked no compromise or gradual change. At the heart of his system was the belief that private property was the root of evil, the thesis also of Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

Marx's (1818-1883) ideas were more effective than his personal relationships with people. However, his ideas were filtered through a variety of interpreters before reaching a large audience. Marx did not think that democratic societies could correct the injustices of capitalism.

Marx not a sympathetic person. Wanted to reshape the view of history in order to create future events. A theorist and an intellectual. Appeared to repeat his theses indefinitely until they were accepted. Wrote painfully slowly; wanted to forestall every possible objection. Felt that history is governed by immutable laws. Destroy and build. Conflict is a way to fully realize mankind's powers. Declined all forms of compromise. Rigorously single minded. Opposed to compromise or gradualism to avoid the necessity of drastic action. The necessity for a complete break with the past. Never questioned his own vision.

Attack on bourgeois society was made at a moment when it had reached the highest point of its material prosperity. Private property is the source of all evil. Which tendencies in the present are destined to develop and which to perish?

Marx never denied his debt to other thinkers. He was original in the sense of putting ideas together for a new solution to an old problem. Saint-Simon: a continuous conflict between economic classes. Engels: talent for perceiving the practical applicability of the discoveries of others. Bakunin: belief that only the ruined and the outcasts can be relied on to carry through the revolution to its conclusion since others will inevitably stop short when their own interests are threatened. Proudhon: the state is an instrument designed to dispossess the majority for the benefit of a small minority, a legalized form of robbery. All property is theft.

Proudhon: everything is contradictory: property is theft; to be a citizen is to be deprived of rights; capitalism is at once the despotism of the stronger over the weaker, and the lesser over the greater; to accumulate wealth is to rob. Competition evokes the worst and the most brutal qualities in men; cooperation, besides promoting greater efficiency, moralizes and civilizes them. Feuerbach: in religion men delude themselves by inventing an imaginary world to redress the balance of misery in real life. Belief is the action in which it is expressed. Belief and act are one.

Marx believed in educating the masses about their destiny: if you know in which direction history is going, you can either fight it and be destroyed or you can identify with it. Marx: at all periods within the recorded memory, mankind has been divided into exploiter and exploited, master and slave, patrician and plebeian, and, in our day, proletarian and capitalist.

The opening and closing pages of the Communist Manifesto as an instrument of destructive propaganda had an unparalleled effect on succeeding generations.

Marx's inner life was tranquil: those not with him were against him and he knew that his ideas were right and would bear fruit. Marx's greatest contradiction: ideas don't determine the course of history, but the very force of his ideas altered the hitherto prevailing view of the relation of the individual to his environment and to his fellows.