Karl Marx. Francis Wheen

have often succumbed to the equal and opposite error of imagining him as an agent of Satan. ‘There were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons,’ writes a modern biographer, Robert Payne. ‘He had the devil’s view of the world, and the devil’s malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil.’ This school of thought – more of a borstal, really – reaches its absurd conclusion in Was Karl Marx a Satanist?, a bizarre book published in 1976 by a famous American hot-gospeller, the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand, author of such imperishable masterpieces as Tortured for Christ (‘over two million copies sold’) and The Answer to Moscow’s Bible.

      According to Wurmbrand, the young Karl Marx was initiated into a ‘highly secret Satanist church’ which he then served faithfully and wickedly for the rest of his life. No proof can be found, of course, but this merely strengthens the dog-collared detective’s hunch: ‘Since the Satanist sect is highly secret, we have only leads about the possibilities of his connections with it.’ What are these ‘leads’? Well, when he was a student Marx wrote a verse-play whose title, Oulanem, is more or less an anagram of Emanuel, the biblical name for Jesus – and thus ‘reminds us of the inversions of the Satanist black mass’. Most incriminating; but there’s more to come. ‘Have you ever wondered,’ Wurmbrand asks, ‘about Marx’s hairstyle? Men usually wore beards in his time, but not beards like this … Marx’s manner of bearing himself was characteristic of the disciples of Joanna Southcott, a Satanic priestess who considered herself in contact with the demon Shiloh.’ In fact, the England inhabited by Marx had plenty of bushy-bearded gents, from the cricketer W. G. Grace to the politician Lord Salisbury. Were they, too, on speaking terms with the demon Shiloh?

      After the end of the Cold War and the apparent triumph of God over Satan, countless wiseacres declared that we had reached what Francis Fukuyama smugly called the End of History. Communism was as dead as Marx himself, and the blood-curdling threat with which he concluded the Communist Manifesto, the most influential political pamphlet of all time, now seemed no more than a quaint historical relic: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!’ The only fetters binding the working class today are mock-Rolex watches, but these latter-day proletarians have much else which they’d hate to lose – microwave ovens, holiday timeshares and satellite dishes. They have bought their council houses and their shares in privatised utilities; they made a nice little windfall when their building society turned into a bank. In short, we are all bourgeois now. Even the British Labour Party has gone Thatcherite.

      When I started researching this biography, many friends looked at me with pity and incredulity. Why, they wondered, would anyone wish to write about – still less read about – such a discredited, outmoded, irrelevant figure? I carried on regardless; and the more I studied Marx, the more astoundingly topical he seemed to be. Today’s pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like to mention the buzz-word ‘globalisation’ at every opportunity – without realising that Marx was already on the case in 1848. The globe-straddling dominance of McDonald’s and MTV would not have surprised him in the least. The shift in financial power from the Atlantic to the Pacific – thanks to the Asian Tiger economies and the silicon boom towns of west-coast America – was predicted by Marx more than a century before Bill Gates was born.

      There is, however, one development which neither Marx nor I had foreseen: that in the late 1990s, long after he had been written off even by fashionable liberals and post-modernist lefties, he would suddenly be hailed as a genius by the wicked old bourgeois capitalists themselves. The first sign of this bizarre reassessment appeared in October 1997, when a special issue of the New Yorker billed Karl Marx as ‘the next big thinker’, a man with much to teach us about political corruption, monopolisation, alienation, inequality and global markets. ‘The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,’ a wealthy investment banker told the magazine. ‘I am absolutely convinced that Marx’s approach is the best way to look at capitalism.’ Since then, right-wing economists and journalists have been queuing up to pay similar homage. Ignore all that communist nonsense, they say: Marx was really ‘a student of capitalism’.

      Even this intended compliment serves only to diminish him. Karl Marx was a philosopher, a historian, an economist, a linguist, a literary critic and a revolutionist. Although he may not have had a ‘job’ as such, he was a prodigious worker: his collected writings, few of which were published in his lifetime, fill fifty volumes. What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that this mythical ogre and saint was a human being. The McCarthyite witch-hunt of the 1950s, the wars in Vietnam and Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square – all these bloody blemishes on the history of the twentieth century were justified in the name of Marxism or anti-Marxism. No mean feat for a man who spent much of his adult life in poverty, plagued by carbuncles and liver pains, and was once pursued through the streets of London by the Metropolitan Police after a rather over-exuberant pub crawl.

       1 The Outsider

      A train grinds slowly through the Moselle valley – tall pines, terraced vineyards, prim villages, calm smoke in the winter sky. Gasping for breath in an overcrowded cattle truck, a young Spaniard captured while fighting with the French Resistance counts off the days and nights as he and his fellow prisoners are borne inexorably from Compiègne to the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. When the train pulls up at a station he glances at the sign: TRIER. Suddenly a German boy on the platform hurls a rock at the grille behind which the doomed passengers cower.

      Thus begins Jorge Semprun’s great Holocaust novel, The Long Voyage, and nothing on that journey to extinction – not even the anticipation of horrors to come at Buchenwald – pierces the narrator’s heart more agonisingly than the stone-throwing child. ‘It’s a goddamn dirty trick that this had to happen at Trier, of all places,’ he laments.

      ‘Why?’ a puzzled Frenchman asks. ‘You used to know it?’

      ‘No, I mean I’ve never been here.’

      ‘Then you know someone from here?’

      ‘That’s it, yes, that’s it.’ A childhood friend, he explains. But in fact he’s thinking of an earlier son of Trier, a Jewish boy, born in the early hours of 5 May 1818.

      

      ‘Blessed is he that hath no family,’ Karl Marx sighed wearily in a letter to Friedrich Engels in June 1854. He was aged thirty-six at the time and had long since severed his own umbilical ties. His father was dead, as were three brothers and one of his five sisters; another sister died two years later, and even the survivors had little to do with him. Relations with his mother were icy and distant, not least because she had been inconsiderate enough to stay alive and thus keep the rebellious heir from his inheritance.

      Marx was a bourgeois Jew from a predominantly Catholic city within a country whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. He died an atheist and a stateless person, having devoted his adult life to predicting the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the withering away of the nation-state. In his estrangement from religion, class and citizenship, he personified the alienation which he identified as the curse inflicted by capitalism upon humanity.

      He may seem an odd representative of the oppressed masses, this respectable middle-class German, but his emblematic status would not have surprised Marx himself, who believed that individuals reflect the world they inhabit. His upbringing taught him all he needed to know about religion’s seductive tyranny, arming him with the didactic eloquence and self-confidence to exhort humanity to throw off its shackles.

      ‘He was a unique, an unrivalled storyteller,’ his daughter Eleanor recorded, in one of the few surviving anecdotes from her father’s childhood. ‘I have heard my aunts