Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography
By Francis Wheen,
Atlantic, £ 9.99

Perhaps no other work, fiction or discursive, has had a longer gestation than Das Kapital by Karl Marx. It is equally true that no other work has been more misunderstood. The writing of Capital, as the English translation is popularly known, occupied Marx’s life from the 1840s till his death in 1883. Capital overwhelmed him, the writing of it and its absence in his daily life. Very few works have been written in the conditions of abject poverty that Marx endured while he researched and wrote his magnum opus. As Marx himself wrote, in a moment of black humour, to his closest comrade, Frederich Engels, “I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff.’’

Yet the work is unfinished. Marx only completed the first volume. The other two volumes were put together by Engels after Marx’s death from notes and drafts. It would be simplistic, however, to conclude that it was poverty or the lack of time that prevented Marx from finishing his life’s work. The unfinished and fragmentary nature of most of Marx’s writings, including Capital, was related to the way Marx’s mind worked and the way he chose to write. Marx’s method was not just dialectical, as is well known, but it was also dialogic. He was in constant conversation with himself and with the authors he read. His notebooks were full of quotations and his comments on those quotations; he wrote and revised his drafts, and he was never satisfied. His mind was in perpetual quest as he tried to come to terms with a socio-economic reality where, in his own memorable phrase, “everything solid melts into air’’. His style, to meet the demands of his analysis of this reality, was multilayered, moving from the philosophical to the analytical to the historical to the ironic and the literary.

Francis Wheen, in this short but extraordinarily lucid book, explores Marx’s writing of Capital, the conditions in which he wrote it and the richness of the text. There are sections where he comes perilously close to oversimplifying complex notions like surplus value but this is compensated by the fact that he brings alive a text that has been widely denigrated and misunderstood. He signposts Marx’s staggering erudition, his literary flair and the extraordinary power of his analysis of the capitalist system.

One of the strengths of Wheen’s book is that when he comments on Marx’s analysis of the immiseration of the working class, he does not restrict himself to the economic. For Marx — and Wheen does well to draw this out — this was a reference to the over-degradation of the working class. The analysis in Capital was always linked in Marx’s mind to the idea of alienation he had explored as a young man in Paris in 1844. Similarly, as an old man he was honest enough to admit that his analysis of capitalism was relevant only for western Europe. He struggled in his old age to come to terms with the commune in Russia and what he was learning about the non-Western world.

There could be no end to the journey that Marx undertook. He knew that and hence his reluctance to publish. The volume he published in 1868 has had a very long afterlife, and Wheen notes some of the features of this afterlife. An Indian could well say that Capital has an afterlife because the book has a soul.