Over the course of the last few months, my partner and I did a little reading group. We read Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. It’s a joint biography of Karl and Jenny Marx by journalist Mary Gabriel. Marx was, of course, not too into anarchism. We’ll return to that.
For now, there’s much of interest in Love and Capital. The Marx family was an interesting family, and Gabriel shows the collective, whole family nature of the Marx political project. However, one topic that kept returning to me as I read is the relation between anarchism and Marxism.
That’s not a central topic for Gabriel, but she finds it important to several key moments in Karl Marx’s life. And like many commenters who focus on Marx, she comes down almost entirely on the side of Marxism in any dispute with anarchists. But several events in the book highlighted the conflict again for me. Battles between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin around the First International, in particular.
