Overview
This is a radical reinterpretation of Marx’s life and works. Unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers in world history, Marx persistently made his ideas serve his political instincts, modifying his thoughts according to the standard of political effectiveness—the needs of power.
Marx as Politician is a political life beginning with Marx’s early years when he was sensitized to politics by the unique situation of the Rhineland, occupied for two decades by the revolutionary and Napoleonic French and then handed over to the Prussian bureaucracy. Defining his major effects on our late 20-century world, the biography carries Marx through to the burnt-out but still masterful leader.
Felix traces the pattern and demonstrates the importance of such political actions by Marx as his editorship of leading radical newspapers in Germany during two important periods; his leadership of the Communist League and the First International; his role as a provincial politician as well as an editor in the German Revolution of 1848; his brilliant use of the Paris Commune to gain credit for the International and his revolutionary doctrines; his shaping of the Communist Manifesto and Capital to provide inspiration, strategy, and structure for world communist revolution; his manipulation of the German socialist parties; and his cautious but quickening contacts with Russian populist revolutionaries. In all of this, Felix shows Marx the politician seeking and nurturing power against the grain of his time. While his political greatness became apparent only following his death, his stature was assured by the genius that kept his communist revolution inviolate—neither corrupted by compromise nor annihilated by premature action.
By focusing on Marx’s actions as related to his ideas, Felix renders untenable the conventional view of Marx as a failed and distracted leader. He shows, on the contrary, that Marx belongs among such leaders as Pericles and Caesar, Disraeli and Bismarck, Lenin and Roosevelt.