Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life

Rating:
Summary: A man for the times? The experience of defeat
Review: This is one of the most useful and interesting of the Marx biographies and shows us another Marx, behind the man of fiction who was a later invention. Christopher Hill in _The Experience of Defeat_ details a host of figures in the English Civil War, from the Levellers to the Fifth Monarchists, who were written out of history, and who had to live with failed revolutionary lifetimes. We forget the actual experience of Marx, the experience of defeat after 1848, and his persistence nonetheless without illusions documenting the capitalism of his time and era. After the grotesquerie of the twentieth century Communists it is significant to remember this other Marx.
This is surely the experience of the current left, and one might expect it to end as forgotten as the defeated figures from Munzer onward--save that the right will not rest, and will reinvent slavery or worse if left to their devices, while the current left fantasies a series of leftist fictions, among them about Marx.
It might help to look at the failure of Marxist theory, the experience of defeat, behind the unique brilliance of Marx, and at least know the history, starting with Marx's challenge to Hegel's philosophy of right. This work shows the problems that Marx experienced in his theoretical struggles, and shows, for example, the inability of Marx to complete his life's project, Capital. This aspect of the book is compelling, and often quietly filtered out. Marxists have rarely known what they are talking about, but, like the Levellers, will always accompany the definition of modernism.
Very acute biography.