Reviews (4)

history mixed with fantasy
while the historical detail is interesting, there is copious use of quotations, from correspondence between marx and engels and of his contemporaries, it is the author's opinions and conjecture that really let this book down.

frank e. manuel seems determined to attach the "self-hating jew" label to marx whenever possible, even though many times he ends up having to qualify his statements by labelling them as guesswork or hypothesis on his part.

even worse is his linkage of marx's theories to present times, and the critical and ignorant way in which he does this.

take for instance:

"The vocabulary for labeling social classes has changed radically since Marx's death, particularly in advanced industrial societies. In the United States, middle class is the preferred self-designation of most Americans, proletariat has disappeared... It is difficult to imagine a struggle among these classes or to imagine what alliances and alignments they might form."

the sheer idiocy revealed in this small quotation speaks volumes about the author, and his limited understanding of marxist theory. the "preferred self-designation of most Americans" is irrelevant to their actual econmic conditions, it simply reveals the yearning of many to "ascend" to the ranks of the petit bourgeois.

while the author finds it hard to envisage class struggle in the US, many of the pre-requisite conditions are present. in 1999 11.8% of the US population was living in poverty, figures compiled in 1995 show that the richest 10% of the population have 70% of the overall wealth. the disparity between the rich and the poor continues to grow in the US, reaching levels that are higher now than in the 1930s.

the author, and perhaps the people he refers to, would love to imagine some capitalist utopia where there is only a middle class and the super rich living in harmony, the simple facts themselves belie this fantasy. while people may not have achieved the level of class-consciousness necessary to realise their role as the proletariat, and while they might not use marxist phraseology to describe their class status, reality on the ground shows that the inequalities that marx saw in his time are alive and well today.

my verdict on this book; too much opinion, not enough facts.

Great Caesar's Ghost
Marx makes better sense from his critics and having proceeded through all I could find in the JC series in the stacks I came across this one. Not bad, although a few cliches are crusting around the edges, this from the author of the fine mega-volume, Utopia in Western Thought. This title might go well with Derrida's Spectre of Marx. The problem is that people have been refuting him since the end of the nineteenth century, and many of these first critics were the most acute. Marx as a self-hating jew is a canard, although his tract on the Jewish Question is seen now rightly as a tale of unintended consequences. The strangeness of Marx lingers in the combination of brilliance and shoddiness that left his work bound in its mystique, one that loses the obvious insights of the 1840's journalist. All in all however this is worth reading. Like a rubber duck, Marx always seems to reflotate, and the journalist of the 1840's still haunts modernity.

The Historical Marx
In this book, Frank E. Manuel attempts to give the reader an unbiased, historical account of Marx as he really was. We, as a group, were left with the impression of Marx as a self-loathing man on a self-prescribed "heavenly" quest. His rejection of his Jewish heritage colored his dealings with the rest of the world. He spent his life fighting for the liberation of a people that he neither knew nor liked on a personal level. The cost of this quest was his financial freedom, family life and physical health.

Manuel's biography of Marx provides the reader with a gripping account of one of the most fasciniting characters of the 19th century. An overall captivating depiction of his life, work and death. It is well written and we recommend it to anyone studying Marx or his theories.

Marx the Man and His Communism
This is a wonderful reading about Marx the man and his particular brand of "scientific" socialism. It reveals Marx's insecurities, self-loathing, bigotry, and financial failures, as well as his life as essentially an attempt to burry all that in a heavenly vision of a new society, which Marx constantly nurtured through intense intellectual persuites.

This is a portrait of Marx, a humanistic intellectual, as he is revealed in his correspondence with Engels and his actions in a Victorian/Dickensian London. This is a man whose idealism and a feeling of being discriminated against led him eventually to adopt the attitude of suspicion and contempt for almost all human beings, this is Marx-Halevy trying to escape his own roots and ending up planting seeds of communist revolutions in backward, agrarian societies for which he had so much contempt. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Exciting reading, not simple
The book presents a variety of useful discussions of Rosa luxemburg and Marxism. The analysis and discussion of Luxemburg's "Accumulation of Capital" makes VERY valuable reading. Add to that the discussion of women's liberation (and Rosa Luxemburg's complicated and contradictory relationship to it) and Marx's Ethnological Notebooks, and you have one of the most interesting recent Marxist works written by an actual revolutionary, not an academic.

Not all of the moments equal those, and I still think problems present themselves at moments where Dunayevskaya places forces other than the working class as the historical Subject. Overall, however, I think this book is a fine example of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition.

This book is too simple and easy!
I do not mean to use Raya Dunayevskaya as a straw-man, so to speak, but this book simply does not hit the mark. In it, the author asserts that Rosa Luxemburg was a blatant feminist. This, as anyone who has studied Luxemburg's life would know, is an absolute overstatement. It is clear that this claim was only made for the author's own end. Rosa Luxemburg cannot simply be called a feminist: She actually rejected the women's movement! Luxemburg indeed holds a place in the larger scope of feminist history, but Dunayevskaya's work is over-simplified and should not ever be used as a reputable piece of history as regards that admirable socialist leader.

Author brings Karl's Marx philosophy to life
"Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution" is the third book in the "trilogy of revolution" by the Marxist humanist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya (who died in 1987). This second edition includes a foreword by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, a new essay by the author, a biographical note by the editor and five pages of "New Thoughts" on the book. These "New Thoughts" are passages added as answers to questions raised in a 1983 lecture tour by the author. The book has three parts, as the title suggests. The first, "Rosa Luxemburg as Theoretician, as Activist, as Internationalist," covers an enormous amount of ground with striking originality. As Adrienne Rich suggests, it is "not a conventional biography but rather the history and critique of a thinking woman's mind." The main chapters deal with Luxemburg's ideas--on spontaneity, on economics and debates with Lenin, as well as the major events of the period--war and revolution. The second part, "The Women's Liberation Movement as Revolutionary Force and Reason," begins with a short section on the historical importance of the "Black dimension" to the history of the women's movement. The second chapter returns to Luxemburg and takes issue with Peter Nettl's authoritative biography. Nettl's assertion that Luxemburg's years after the break-up with her lover Leo Jogiches were "lost years," is a "typical male attitude" according to Dunayevskaya who documents Luxemburg's myriad activities and theoretical work including Mass Strike. Her address to the 1907 Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in London on the meaning of the 1905 revolution appears as an appendix. Dunayevskaya feminist sensibility that Luxemburg's wish not to be "pigeonholed" into the "woman question," and argument that her passionate espousal of revolution had a "hidden feminist dimension," are other controversial aspects of the book. The second part concludes with the modern day feminist movement, which Dunayevskaya believes has raised important questions, specifically on organizational forms. The feminist demand for a decentralized form of organization is, for example, a new appreciation of the creativity of a movement that was not only interested in the overthrow of the existing reality but also creating new human relations. This concern is the central element of Marxist humanism and why Marx Marxism must be returned to as a totality. The final section, "Karl Marx--From Critic of Hegel to Author of Capital and Theorist of 'Revolution in Permanence,'" takes up nearly half the pages of the book. It is not biographical but considers Marx's idea of revolution in permanence in its first articulation in his Doctoral Dissertation of 1841, to his last writings on anthropology, "The Ethnological Notebooks." Two elements, Marx's rootedness in Hegelian dialectics and its reconceptualization as "Revolution in Permanence" remain central to each chapter. Over and over again we are introduced to new elements of Marx that have been ignored by other scholars, including little discussed aspects of the "1844 Manuscripts," the "Grundrisse" and "Capital." Moreover the "Critique of the Gotha Program" (1875) becomes an important element in an original chapter that traces Marx's ideas about organization. Dunayevskaya argues quite convincingly that Marx had a concept of organization that was very much tied up with his world view and philosophic outlook. It is the truncations by post-Marx Marxists (Luxemburg, Mehring, Kautsky and Lenin among the first) that has remained the received view. Lassalle was elevated to the authority on organization while Marx was denigrated to an intellectual figure in the British museum. However it is not "merely" the question of organizational form but the idea of what Marx's Marxism, as a "philosophy of revolution" is, which concerns Dunayevskaya. Here Engels comes in for the sharpest critique as the first "post-Marx Marxist." Although the critique of Engels is implicit throughout the book it comes to the fore in the final chapter which concentrates on Marx's last writings: "The Ethnological Notebooks," his letter (including drafts) to Vera Zasulitch and the 1882 preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. All of these are concerned with the possibility of revolution coming first in a "backward" land. The contrast between Marx's "Ethnological Notebooks" and Engels' "Origin of the Family" (Engels supposedly based his Origin on Marx's notes) is profound. Dunayevskaya's represents one of the few analyses of "The Ethnological Notebooks" and it is surprising that others have not contrasted Marx and Engels on this point. Briefly, Dunayevskaya shows that Marx concentrates on showing the dualities within the primitive commune, and the transformation into opposite of gens into caste society. Rather than the deterministic and stageist view put forward by Engels in the Origin, which saw class society developing at the end of the primitive commune, with the "historic defeat of the female sex," Marx traced the process of dissolution within the commune itself. Dunayevskaya contends that in the context of Marx's increasing "hostility to colonialism.... [t]he question was how total the uprooting of existing society and how new the relationship of theory and practice" had to be. She adds that Marx's studies enabled him (Marx not Engels) "to see the possibility of new human relations, not as they might come through a mere 'updating' of primitive communism's equality of the sexes, as among the Iroquois, but as Marx sensed they would burst forth from a new type of revolution" (190). It was this new type of "revolution" that Dunayevskaya attempts to connect to Marx's concept of the Man/Woman relation set forth in the 1844 manuscripts viz: "the direct, natural relationship of human being to human being is the relationship of man to woman." What remains central to Dunayevskaya's view of Marx is the "human resistance of the subject" which she calls a multilinear view of human development. "Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution" is an engaging and stimulating account by someone who viewed the dialectic as the lifeblood of Marxism. Those still interested in a dialectical and humanistic view of Marx might find points of disagreement but they will find this book a refreshing interruption. ... Read more

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