Three suggestions:
(1) As biographies go, David McLellan's Karl Marx: His Life and
Thought (1978) is better than the shorter biographies mentioned
(Berlin, Padover) at juxtaposing the evolution and publication of
Marx's ideas against the events of his life and developments in
politics and the economy. That's important because ...
(2) Marx's economics are a continual effort at making sense of a
changing system at a time when the basic concepts of economics
(political economy) were much more in flux and much less reified than
they are today. Your students will need to have a sense of the
intellectual debates he is responding to--much more in England and
France than in Germany for the economics--and of his and Engels'
contemporary journalism and activism to get a sense of his project.
He's also profitably read side-by-side with Ricardo or Malthus or
other immediate predecessors, simply because they were defining the
concepts that he re-uses and re-defines.
(3) Marx was a better critic and polemicist than a systematizer, for
all that the latter was his life's conscious intellectual project. A
well-known phrase from one of his pre-1848 letters captures this
tendency: "for a ruthless criticism of everything existing." His
early writings on ideology suggest that the two most important
questions to ask of an economic analysis are, first, How well does
this approach describe and explain phenomena? and, second, How well
does this treatment package, justify, and mystify the phenomena,
concealing or distorting key factors?
The best living writer I have read on this latter topic is Mary
Poovey, for example, her book A History of the Modern Fact or some of
the more accessible articles she published in journals on Victorian
literature around the same time Modern Fact came out in the late
1990s or early 2000s. She's not really writing about Marx, but about
the milieu in which he studied, acted, wrote, and published. Her
comparative analysis of how statistics justified economic speculation
and how expectations of inheritance or returns on investment were
central to romantic literature undermines the claims of much economic
writing to be factual, and suggests that how people expect the
economy to function--our assumptions--is discernible from fiction,
including fiction published as fact in newspapers and financial reports.
Systematizers follow up on Marx's drive for total knowledge of
political economy. I personally find that goal an impossible one,
quixotic, tending more towards an ideology than a discipline of
thought. What is more useful today is to critique the basic concepts
of economic and political thought we rely on ("demand,"
"productivity," "deferred compensation," "labor market," etc., etc.)
in the same spirit Marx suggested and reapply the mathematical and
conceptual tools social science has developed in the intervening
century-and-a-half to phenomena with a clearer understanding of how
our concepts package that data.
The project of many political and social theorists of the last thirty
years or so has been to recover the theoretical vision that allows us
to analyze social phenomena through different conceptual lenses, and
ask questions seemingly foreclosed by the application of powerful
mathematical and econometric tools to data that are limited by the
concepts used to gather it. The approach to Marx's economic writings
I'm suggesting is in that vein.
I'm dashing this off, and perhaps not saying it very clearly, but in
a way, Marx and Engels at their best operated like Warren Buffet, an
analogy I think they would appreciate. They looked at their data
closely and asked what does this mean? rather than simply doing sums
with numbers. Today the world economy is in collapse after multiple
bubbles popped that were driven by speculation and chicanery, and
your students know that. I think they will connect with the critical
impulse in Marx's economic thought even if they find his ambitions to
describe how the whole system worked incomplete.
I hope this is helpful.
Pat Inman
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