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  • Marx and Engels without the Frills
  • Jack Zipes (bio)

Times have changed since the Cold War years when primers were written for young people about the dangers of communism.1 We now have more sophisticated and sympathetic accounts of socialism and communism,2 and most recently, a biography for adolescents by Edward Rice, who earnestly seeks to place Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels into proper historical perspective for young American readers. Yet, Marx, Engels and the Workers of the World is a strange book.3 While endeavoring to explain how Marxist ideas are at the heart of most downtrodden and exploited people in the world today, Rice also wants to convince us that Marx was most fallible, heartless, and largely responsible for the authoritarian nature of communism today.

To understand Rice's indictment of Marx, and Engels as well, it is important to know that Rice is not a "traditional" Cold War warrior. He clearly sides with the emancipatory movements of oppressed people and the basic ideas of socialism. However, he will have no truck with intellectuals who do not practice what they preach and who use the situation of the deprived social classes as a laboratory to test their clinical ideas. Moreover, Rice wants to uncover the historical roots of the dogmatism and dictatorship of contemporary communism, especially since he believes that most of the world is under its sway. His book then is a sober, questioning account of the motives behind Marx and Engels in view of bureaucratization and "totalitarian" dangers of real existing socialism and communism.

Though Rice's approach is laudable, he falls into the trap of debunking Marx and Engels, and perhaps this is due to the fact that he, unlike his readers, has sifted through too much of the official mythmaking of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. Like the biographies of Washington, Jefferson, and other U.S. presidents written for adolescents in America, [End Page 83] the standard biographies of Marx and Engels in the Eastern Bloc, whether for adults or young people, overlook the foibles of the two revolutionary intellectuals and glorify all their accomplishments so that they appear as demi-gods. Rice wants truth and criticism, and he writes about Marx and Engels as mortal men with candor to present an antidote to the mythopoeic portraits of communist orthodoxy.4

What is the result of this antidotal biography of Marx and Engels? To begin with Marx, we learn that he was a brilliant, self-willed youth, who benefited from his father's indulgence during his bohemian student days. Marx always had the tendency to live beyond his means and borrow money without repaying loans. After his father's death in 1838, Marx's relationship with his mother became tense because she was not as free with money as his father had been. In 1841, upon receiving his doctorate from the University of Jena, he was employed by the renowned liberal newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, and quickly became editor-in-chief. As he began investigating social conditions in Germany and writing critical commentaries, Marx was drawn to socialism and began to elaborate his own particular viewpoints based on a radicalization of Hegel's philosophy, the rise of the industrial proletariat, and a penetrating socio-economic analysis of capitalism. At the same time, Marx showed a proclivity to be crass and assertive in his human relations and virtually overlooked the complex needs of people involved in social struggles. For instance, despite his Jewish heritage, Marx expressed anti-Semitic views in addressing the question of emancipation for Jews in the 19th century, and he continued to express anti-Semitic sentiments throughout his life as did Engels.

Moreover, Marx had a narrow understanding of the working classes. When he left Germany in 1843 after the Rheinische Zeitung was censored and forced to abandon publication by the Prussian government, Marx experienced a decline in social fortunes.

In Paris Marx lived for the first time in his life among [End Page 84] workers, the proletariat. Unfortunately, much as he could sympathize with the proletariat from a distance, he was unable to strike up close relationships. He found the French workers crude and unintelligent, yet he...

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