Recently, I chanced upon a book review by the British author and literary critic Terry Eagleton, published two years ago in the London Review of Books. The book he had reviewed is about Karl Marx’s style of writing and titled Marx’s Literary Style. It was written by Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva (1937-88), published first in Spanish 50 years ago.
The translation in English is done by Paco Brito Nunez and Verso published it in 2023. Since the book was hard to find in Pakistan, I was lucky to receive a copy from my friend Prof Imran Munir, who swiftly dispatched it to me from abroad.
Marx is seen as a dense philosopher by many with radical ideas of transforming the world. However, those who have a penchant for enjoying language are pleasantly surprised by his style of writing. Silva, observing that enough attention is not paid to Marx’s style of writing, has attempted to explore the literary craft that Marx employed in his works.
According to Silva, Marx did not only theorise revolution, he actually wrote it. His language was as transformative as his ideas. It was not simply a medium to offer an analysis of the old and put across a thoughtful vision for a new world. Marx, in fact, used language to animate his ideas and turn them into things that can be felt at both ideational and emotional levels. His construction of sentences was careful and precise, laced with metaphors, irony and rhythm.
Silva describes Marx’s writing as possessing an “expressive musculature.” In Marx’s hands, metaphors and rhythms don’t drape over ideas like decorative ornaments, but instead embody them, becoming intrinsic elements of the argument itself. It is not that the thoughts were using metaphors to become accessible, the metaphors are the thoughts. For instance, when Marx depicted the bourgeoisie as a vampire draining the blood of the living labour, he was not being gaudy or loud. It was a deliberate choice of words, creating a powerful image that explains the exploitation of labour and makes the reader understand his thinking about the extraction involved in the bourgeoisie-labour relationship.
According to Silva, Marx did not only theorise revolution, he actually wrote it. His language was as transformative as his ideas. It was not simply a medium to offer an analysis of the old and put across a thoughtful vision for a new world. Marx, in fact, used language to animate his ideas and turn them into things that can be felt at both ideational and emotional levels.
In his magnum opus The Capital and other writings often thought of as difficult and purely academic readings, Marx’s style includes emphases on key points he wants to convey and the use of irony and sarcasm. If we look at phrases such as “the commodity speaks”, “money walks”, and “the market not only exists, but mystifies”, we see that the writing is not just explanations, it is performative. When Marx decides to make his prose complex and exhausting, it seems like a deliberate choice. It is to engage his serious readers and make them think and take them beyond the simplicity of understanding how deeper concepts about economy and society work.
The crux of Silva’s argument is that Marx does not see language as plain or a set of symbols to convey thoughts; he sees and uses the language as a force that can shape reality, inspire action and then transform the world. There is an inseparability between concept and form. Therefore, if one tries to pull the metaphor out of a sentence constructed by Marx, the whole structure of his writing will collapse. If one tries to tone down his way of writing, it will take away the animation that tone brings. His tone is not an accessory but a vital part of the dialectic. He is not ornamental, he is tactical.
Silva writes: “Karl Marx had a lifelong obsession with constructing an Economy that had architectonic structure and appearance. He was also conscious that this needed to be accomplished in the same way as the creation of a work of art. And not just in terms of the general form of scientific edifice — its broadest and most general structural lines — but also 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.”
One example could be the famous quote from one of my favourite pieces of Marx’s writing, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx writes: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
We appreciate that every discipline develops or the practitioners of that discipline develop a specific language, which is usually dry and indifferent. It creates a community but also pushes back those who are not specialists. There are fascinating people from the world of science, such as Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, Isaac Asimov and Carlo Rovelli, who explained their subjects in common and literary language. However, Marx — on many occasions — did that a century before them. The Capital, for instance, explains power, capital, exploitation of labour, class and its allied consciousness and, most of all, political economy, without solving any complex mathematical equations.
We can say that the appeal of Marx’s writing, along with Friedrich Engels’, lies in their emotional energy that seeks a revolutionary change. This quality continues to inspire people even after a century and a half and the evolution of much more complex economic systems over this long period of human history. Marx’s language plays an important part in keeping his ideas alive. Marx had once said, “Language is practical consciousness.”
The columnist is a poet and essayist. His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell.
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 22nd, 2025
