A False Prophet
Hebrew University political scientist
Shlomo Avineri has written a sympathetic biography of Karl Marx under the
auspices of the Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series. Although Marx came
from a family of Rabbi’s, he was not Jewish. His father converted to enjoy the benefits
of post-Napoleonic Prussia.
Instead of portraying Marx like his all
too many dogmatic disciples, Avineri’s Marx is not of the one size fits all school.
Hence in witnessing the advances in democracy in England and later on the
continent his Marx become more open to realizing his working class dreams
through the ballot box rather than revolution. Hence he learned from the
failures of the 1848 revolutions and contrary to Engels’ later writings, he was
critical of the Paris Commune. Further he was very ambivalent about the
prospects for revolution in Russia, Indeed aside from 1848-49 Marx never
directly participated in revolutionary activity; his role was to be theorist
studying the inner workings of the capitalist system.
He rarely discussed Jews and Judaism.
Early on in 1844 he associated Judaism with the worship of money in a typical anti-Semitic
trope. Nevertheless in 1854 in his dispatches on the Crimean War to the New
York Tribune he noted that Jerusalem was majority Jewish. This was 40 years
before the establishment of Zionism as a political force.
For someone so focused on the working
class Marx never lived among, worked with or studied directly real factory
workers. He got his insights from the works of Engels and book learning. In a
very real sense he was someone who loved humanity, but didn’t really like
individual people; not too different from many liberals today.
What Avineri doesn’t touch on is that
fact that in order to equalize society, the state doesn’t wither away, but
rather it requires brute dictatorial force to keep people equal. Nevertheless
for those readers interested in a short biography of Marx Avineri has offered
up a very readable book.
For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/REBLW2QXDDEDG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
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