I did not finish this book, I'm stopping at chapter 6. I guess I'll return to it when I have a better understanding of Hegel?

Liedman bashes or backstabs every other biographer of Marx, promises a synthesis of biography and analysis, and can't deliver.

I'm exhausted and confused. I've got too many books to read in this lifetime to be giving myself a headache over sentences such as, "Humanity is bound up with nature, and thereby also with itself, for it is in itself a part of nature. But alienated labour alienates it from itself, and thereby from nature." [page 143]

C'mon, man.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to develop a better understanding of Marx beyond having read a couple of his major works (namely The Communist Manifesto, Eighteenth Brumaire and the first volume of Capital, the latter two of which I certainly didn't read as closely as I should have) and being familiar with the famous quotes. That makes for a nice start and all, but I think it's left me a with a pretty shallow understanding of a major strain of political, philosophical, and economic thought, and I suspect that a better understanding of Marx will also lend itself to sharpening my own anti-capitalist critique of the world (a "ruthless criticism of all that exists" should surely go beyond muddled denunciations of how capitalism is bad to truly count as ruthless criticism, after all). The problem is that reading Marx can be pretty daunting in my experience; understanding how his work informed, and was vulgarized or transcended by later Marxist writers is markedly more daunting.

I found Liedman's biography immensely helpful in explaining Marx's thought in all its complexity and contradictions (and the many controversies that have arisen therefrom), including how different strands of Marxists have interpreted those thoughts in the 140 years since his death. Liedman has his biases as regards Marx's interpreters, which he makes clear; his sympathies clearly lie with those who do not see Marx as a systematizer, and thus he almost universally views orthodox Marxist-Leninists more dimly than Marxists critical of the Marxism of the USSR (which happily for me accords with my own considerably less-well-informed biases). It's a long book, and not a breezy read, especially if you (like me) come to the book with only a vague conception of the philosophical milieu of 19th Century Europe. The book conveys the frequently fascinating events of Marx's life in a fairly dry fashion (although I don't know how much of this is owed to the English translation, which contains a number of obvious grammatical errors, and clearly could have used another pass over by the copy editor at the very least), and as such the book is probably more successful as a survey of its subject's thought than it is as a narrative of his life. In addition, while, as I said, Liedman devotes considerable time to discussing interpretations of Marx by Marxists, he devotes less than a page to interpretations of Marx by members of other ideological traditions after his lifetime; a very quick overview of anarchist and liberal assessments of Marx would have been nice in addition to the author's justly dismissive account of McCarthyism.

On the whole, I enjoyed this a great deal, and, in my opinion, found it not overly in awe of and certainly not overly critical of its subject. So not a bad place for me to start this undertaking, I hope.

Ett livsverk av forskning, sammanställt på ett sätt som är lika medryckande som teoretiskt intressant.

Listen, I'm sure this is a very enjoyable* book if you're already au fait with dialectics and all that bollocks. But if, like me, you're not, then WARNING: you may end up feeling Proper Thick. A resentful 4 stars because the dude clearly knows his stuff even if he does spend a lot of time being mega snide about other Marx biographers.

*may contain exaggeration

Star ratings are so weird, because it feels like I'm judging "how good is it?" but Goodreads defines the stars as "how much did you like it?" This book, and many others, is a great execution of a worthwhile project, but I didn't hugely enjoy reading it. It's often very abstract stuff. As the subtitle says, it is the "Life and Works" of Marx, and much of that guy's life was about his writing and ideas, so there is discussion about his personal life and such, but a LOT of this is discussion of what he believed and wrote and argued and how other people responded at the time or since. It can be kind of a slog at times, but it's nobody's fault, and this book does well what it's supposed to.

A long and difficult book, albeit interesting and insightful.

Liedman is nothing if not erudite, and his meticulous coverage of Marx’s changing opinions on philosophy is interesting and important, although it makes for slow reading for anyone not well-versed in the subtleties of Hegelian logic! It usefully explains many of the key ideas and phrases of Marxism - such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transformation of quantity into quality, commodity fetishism, etc - and describes the evolution of these ideas over the course of Marx’s life (and beyond).

The greatest achievement of the book lies in its compelling demonstration of the continued relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism. In a post-Soviet era where capitalist liberalism is supposed to have triumphed for once and for all, and where politicians routinely label Marxism as obscure and antiquated, Liedman is able to show that the contradictions of capitalism identified by Marx are as present as ever.

Another key point that Liedman emphasises is that Marx didn’t really set out to build ‘Marxism’; he delved into numerous areas of knowledge and developed several important theses, but he “never arrived at any summation of his work, much less any system.” The -ism was added to Marx by his followers after his death. This insight is helpful as a warning against dogma; as a reminder that Marx’s work was not ‘complete’ and that socialism is not a closed book but a living body of knowledge in need of constant development. However, Liedman’s objections to ‘system-building’ come across as being rooted in a rather stuffy academic perspective that has limited interest in the practical, real-world application of Marx’s analysis. The dismissive approach to 'existing socialism' feels a little, well, un-Marxist.

Defects notwithstanding, Liedman’s book is a thorough, well-researched and valuable contribution.

The only biography of Karl Marx that i have read so i have nothing to compare to. But it's an interesting primer , a vigorous warmup to all Karl Marx's works including the Communist Manifesto. So reading this before approaching Karl Marx's works is a good idea.