Marx? Stylish? I can explain. One afternoon I was giving a lecture on The Communist Manifesto to undergraduate students. We were devoting our energies to the famous moment when Marx and Engels describe the revolutionary sweep of the bourgeois epoch. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,” a student read aloud, “are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”[1] After reading these lines, the student could not help but give a brief commentary on them: “Woah.” And I agree. In fact, I agree so strongly that it seems impossible for me to imagine a person who reads those lines without feeling a little tickle of woah stirring somewhere in the chambers of their consciousness. Who can fail to be enchanted by the power of these sentences, in all their glorious velocity, performing the world-historical sweep they so audaciously describe?
But style, and especially Marx’s style, exceeds the pleasures of a well-spun phrase. Daniel Hartley’s work demonstrates how style inside and indeed outside the Marxist tradition is so much more than dexterity or pizzazz. For Hartley, style is necessarily political because it deals with language in time. Inescapably collective, styles bend or break under the historical pressure of convention, which is why style can even allow us to glimpse “symptoms of affects or relations which are currently historically unrealizable.”[2] Ludovico Silva’s energetic study shows how style was something Marx cultivated, put to work, so that he might more precisely investigate the structures and systems of capitalist society. By style, Silva writes,
I mean a genius consciously put in the service of a will to expression that is not content with the clean conscience that comes from having used the scientifically correct terms, but that also employs a literary conscience bent on making what is correct expressive and harmonious, a conscience that is ready to use every linguistic resource at its disposal to ensure that the logical construction of science is, at the same time, that science’s architecture. (1‒2)
The work was published in 1971. You can hear from these lines how Silva’s own prose, wonderfully translated by Paco Brito Núñez, crackles and delights (I have to exercise restraint in not quoting more from this book). Throughout this short, fierce study, you get the sense of being spoken to by someone who wants you to understand just how thrilling thinking can be—how thrilling Marx’s thinking is—and how badly science, broadly conceived, needs art.
This is a far cry from those attempts to praise a work’s style as a way of muting its critical and political force. We see this in those critics who remark in faintly condescending tones that it is best to read Capital as a novel. Francis Wheen’s biography of Capital, for instance, tousles the hair of its subject, declaring the work a “shaggy dog story, a picaresque journey through the realms of higher nonsense.”[3] It is impressive, as Anna Kornbluh has noted, that with this analogy Wheen manages to insult Marx and Victorian novelists at the same time: both emerge as enjoyable but ultimately harmless.[4] Wheen would have us flip through Marx’s patient and demanding pages—all that math about linen and coats!—to reach the juicier bits. To praise Marx’s stylistic flourishes is to miss the all-encompassing work of style in his writing. Silva’s study is a fresh and robust reminder that we cannot praise Marx into agreeableness. We cannot simply select enjoyable flourishes. We cannot separate Marx’s thinking from his style.
Silva shows us why style, far from flashes of lyricism or figuration, is vital to Marx’s thought. And it is through style that Marx’s thinking performs itself, which is why reading Capital can be fun and fatiguing all at once. As this or that concept morphs and the ground beneath you slowly shifts, you find your brain starts to hurt in ways that are mysterious and yet somehow oddly pleasurable. Flagging, you solicit David Harvey or Stephen Shapiro or other obliging Companions just to get you through the thing. Every now and then there appears a thunderbolt of analogy, a winsome quotation from Shakespeare or Horace, or a skirmishing footnote that summons a giggle—but to say that style in Marx provides something like readerly relief, or that it only provides relief, would be worse than misleading. “Marx’s thinking is something that can be plastically perceived,” Silva writes. “[I]n his work, the conceptual has a perceptual value” (3). Marx writes the way he does—and revises, with legendary application—because he wants us to feel our way to thought. “All great thinkers who are also great stylists,” Silva remarks, “tend to present their work not as the result of previous thought but as the process or act of thinking itself: their readers are always present at the creation of their thinking, and they benefit from it because, instead of being forced to digest hardened thoughts, they are prompted to think, to rethink and to recreate the very act of theoretical discovery” (3). We might think of this as the stylistic corollary of the old saw that if you give someone a fish they eat for a day, but if you teach them how to fish they eat for a lifetime. When Silva says that in Marx’s work concepts can appear as percepts, he means that we seize and sense the structure and shape of Marx’s thoughts as we work through them. On this reading, Marx is less lecturer than tour guide—voluble, funny, and serious in all the right places—leading us through the innermost workings of capitalist society. It is a role he is more than happy to take on: “There is no royal road to science,” he forewarns the intrepid readers of the first French edition of Capital, “and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”[5]
Silva begins with a brief and enlightening tour through Marx’s student days, including his “endearingly bad” lovesick poems to Jenny, and a remark by a grader that one of Marx’s essays was marred by “an excessive search for metaphors” (17). Both the early flirtations with lyric poetry and the gratuitous love for metaphor turn out for Silva to be strengths in the making of Marx’s mature style, of which Silva highlights three features: first, and most expansively, the “architectonic of science” (23), a term Silva derives from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to signify the art of constructing a scientific system. Science, like art, possesses a systematic, architectonic unity “in which all its parts correspond to one another and in which none is true without respect to the whole” (24). Marx’s lifelong obsession with presenting his ideas as artistic wholes, Silva observes, holds true for the general form of his scientific edifice and in its smallest details: “in the moulding of its expressions, the beadwork of its phrasing, the firm curves of its verbal vaults, in its metaphorical bas-relief, its conceptual pilasters, and, in the end, its foundation in erudition” (25).
The second feature of Marx’s style is in the dialectics of expression—or, what amounts to the same thing for Silva, the expression of the dialectic. Here again it is worth hearing the gamely personality that emanates from Silva’s prose: After working through the broader architectonics of Marx’s style, “we will now invert our point of view,” Silva explains, “and examine up close the verbal sinews that fill out and enliven that structural skeleton like a living mass of cells” (29). He is not kidding. Marx is at pains to make his sentences move. Zooming in on sentences in the original French or German, Silva demonstrates how Marx sets up syntactical and conceptual oppositions and syntheses, dynamic movements that lend his sentences a rounded quality.
These oppositions and movements are perhaps best shown, to borrow one of Silva’s examples, in Marx’s jousting with Proudhon. Proudhon tried to show how the Hegelian dialectic—most famously if imperfectly summed up by the triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—applied logically to historical development. Here is Marx in “The Poverty of Philosophy”:
The principle of authority, for example, had the eleventh century, just as the principle of individualism had the eighteenth century. In logical sequence, it was the century that belonged to the principle, and not the principle that belonged to the century. In other words, it was the principle that made the history, and not the history that made the principle.[6]
This head scratcher, Silva shows, is not mere wordplay. It derives its rhetorical and analytical force from a tight syntactical structure in which “the opposite terms are neatly drawn in an antagonistic correlation before being fused in a synthetic phrase” (35). It sets up an antagonism, here between centuries and principles, inverts it, then synthesizes it. This is what Silva means when he says that Marx’s style performs phenomena, “as if the words were suddenly transformed into actors on a stage. In this sense, Marx’ s language is the theatre of his dialectic” (42). Dialectical thought thus provides something of the immediacy and pleasure of drama: concepts stride onto the stage and say their piece, and the reader, furnished with something like a sense of dramatic irony, can feel and appreciate the play of oppositions.
But Silva’s largest contribution to understanding Marx—and the third feature of Marx’s style—may lie in the section on “Marx’s Great Metaphors.” Metaphor takes you places. When some problem is put in a new light, with fresh terms, you see things you simply could not have seen before. But metaphor also seduces and beguiles. Corporations know this when they tell striking workers that they are one big family; politicians know it when they contrive to convince us that running a national economy is the same thing as an individual tallying up a budget. Analogies in particular bully complexity into simplicity. They demand a certain vigilance, which Silva exhibits to an extraordinary degree, expending what might seem like an excessive portion of his energies explaining why we must treat Marx’s metaphors as literary illustrations of his thought rather than substitutes for thought itself. To say something is metaphorically adequate is not the same thing as providing a social and historical explanation. Marx earns his metaphors, Silva suggests, by going beyond them, so that the metaphor of the ideological superstructure in The German Ideology, for example, allows patient elaborations of ideological formations. Metaphor in Marx must then be understood as intensifying and enriching—rather than glossing over—the social and historical impetus of his thought. “Marx knew what Marxists seem to ignore,” Silva writes, “that it’s one thing to give a schematic introduction to a theory by means of illustrative metaphors and quite another to explain that same theory scientifically and positively” (49).
“How many have tried to imitate Marx’s style,” Silva exclaims in the “Epilogue on Irony and Alienation,” “only to copy the indignation while forgetting the irony!” (93). At a time when critics have been questioning the political claims of literary criticism—good for interpreting the world, but what about changing it?—we may finally be ready for the stylish Marx. Spanning poetic, novelistic, dramatic, and epic modes, Marx’s style remains as appealing and challenging as ever. Arresting, often funny, and brisk, Silva enjoins us to think with greater care and seriousness about why Marx writes the way he does. In one of the book’s later sections, Silva devotes some space—and one wishes for more space—to Marx’s “polemical spirit” and his “spirit of mockery” (71). Withering when he wanted to be (which was often), Marx knew better than most how to boil the piss of his adversaries. It is helpful to remind ourselves that his high-wire stylistic feats came from a place of deep indignation at the brutality of capitalism. “The truth of Capital makes life harder to live,” writes Keston Sutherland in a bracing essay, “The Poetics of Capital”: “It is a critique of reality that confirms in logic the feeling that reality is fundamentally inimical to life.”[7] That is why understanding Marx’s style, for all its nimble playfulness, all the jibes and the jokes, will always be something more than an exercise in literary admiration. Marx’s sentences thrum with devastating truth because the reality they describe—contradictory, brutal, inimical to life—remains our own. It is Silva’s great achievement to show us the expressive power of Marx’s sentences. Not for nothing do they still command a “woah.”
Notes:
[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. and trans. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 456.
[2] Daniel Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 262. See also Hartley’s review of Silva, “Karl Marx’ s Literary Style Was an Essential Part of His Genius,” Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2023/01/karl-marxliterary-style-capitalism-alienation-book-review.
[3] Francis Wheen, Marx’ s Das Kapital: A Biography (Vancouver, Canada: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 42.
[4] Anna Kornbluh, “On Marx’s Victorian Novel,” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 25, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 15‒37.
[5] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1976), 104.
[6] Karl Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to The Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, vol. 6 (London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), 164.
[7] Keston Sutherland, “The Poetics of Capital, ” in Capitalism: concept, idea, image, eds. Peter Osborne, Éric Alliez, and Eric-John Russell (London: CRMEP Books, 2019), 209.