With populist movements surging around the world, there is no better moment to reacquaint oneself with the work of Karl Marx, who predicted our current economic condition back in the eighteen-hundreds. Fortunately, we have Mary Gabriel’s book “Love and Capital,” which tells the story of Marx’s life and work through the prism of his marriage. The book, from 2011, reads like a Flaubert novel; it humanizes Marx, and shows him as a flawed family man who likely never would have produced his world-changing writings if it weren’t for his long-suffering wife, Jenny. Although Jenny was born to an aristocratic Prussian family, she remained devoted to Marx through enormous hardship, often collaborating with him to get his ideas on paper.
Marx’s theories were inspired by events that bear some similarities to ones seen today. In the Silesian region of Prussia, for example, the thriving textile industry went into severe decline after demand for handspun cloth plummeted. The industrial revolution had created a glut of machine-produced textiles, which depressed prices; meanwhile, the Prussian government refused to supply anti-poverty benefits to aid the newly unemployed. The factory owners responded to the decline in demand by cutting workers’ pay, driving them to desperation. In June, 1844, thousands of workers rebelled and destroyed the mansions of textile barons and industrialists. (The uprising was put down by force.) A few years later, during a debate on free trade, Marx disputed the idea that such trade would benefit workers, describing it as “freedom of Capital to crush the worker.” He publicly supported the policy, though, because he felt that it would cause so much suffering among the working class that it would hasten their eagerness for revolution.
Gabriel’s book lends a sense of texture and intimacy to this history, giving us a ground-level view of how Marx’s ideas took shape. But it also reveals the relationship that enabled those theories. Marx spent more than a decade struggling to complete his masterwork, “Capital,” in which he hoped to show the world that capitalism existed primarily to exploit workers. He and Jenny lived during those years in worsening poverty, moving between London, Paris, and Brussels and trying to keep their children out of starvation. The first installment of “Capital” received little acclaim when it was published, in 1867; today, it stands as one of the most influential texts ever written. Without Jenny, Gabriel suggests, it never would have seen the light of day.