REVIEWS
Rosen, Ellen & Kriegel, Leonard & Cooper, Louis F. & Ross, Benjamin & Ratner, Ronnie Steinberg & Widick, B. J.
ELEANOR MARX, by Yvonne Kapp. New York: Pantheon. Vol. I, 319 pp. Cloth, $10.00, paper, $4.95. Vol. II, 775 pp. Cloth, $17.95, paper, $6.95. Yvonne Kapp's two-volume biography of Eleanor Marx...
...Neither Paul Lafargue nor Charles Longuet, the husbands of Eleanor's sisters, appear to have provided much emotional support to wives burdened with sick children and constant financial worries...
...New York: Viking Press...
...About one-fourth of the way into the novel, however, all caution breaks down, and the reader finds himself ready to acknowledge that Burger's Daughter is one of those rare novels that stamps its existence on the consciousness of our time...
...As its substitute for structural change, Energy Future advocates a modish technical fix...
...Ironically, the tension between some expression of independence on her part and her strong affiliation to this same tightly knit group helped precipitate these crises...
...Energy Future's great value lies in its sophisticated understanding of this often neglected relationship...
...It is almost as if a more politically conscious James had returned to the themes he tried to grapple with in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima...
...Rosa Burger finally gets beyond her need for heroes, beyond the need to worship the dead father...
...The technical fix represents an attempt to ameliorate economic or social problems without touching the power relationships that lie at their roots...
...In 1883, only two years later, first her sister Jenny and then her father died within months of each other...
...Fascinated with Ibsen, whose Nora had recently caused a scandal in England, Eleanor learned Norwegian in order to 359 bring An Enemy of the People and The Lady From the Sea to the British public in 1888 and 1890...
...There are today, in the poor countries of the world, roughly 900 million people who live in absolute poverty—"a condition of life [to quote Robert McNamara] so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, high infant mortality and low life expectancy as to be below any rational definition of human decency...
...Kapp gives a blow-by-blow account of Bloody Sunday, the Dockers' and Gas Workers' strikes, and Eleanor's role in forming the first women's branch of the Gasworkers Union...
...Rosa's pain is her author's intimate knowledge...
...workers in the chemical, rubber, electrical, iron, gas, and docking industries that were concentrated in the urban slums of London...
...The growing scale and complexity of energy industries have required such a high degree of worldwide coordination and centralization that the industries are now altogether incapable of functioning in a competitive market...
...They are never viewed as determinants of social action to be evaluated in the same realistic manner as the attitudes and institutions controlling more conventional sources of energy...
...As far as lies in my power I intend to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother's life has been wrecked...
...But minor cavils aside, Professors Meier and Rudwick have performed a valuable service...
...Yvonne Kapp's two-volume biography of Eleanor Marx chronicles both the personal and public life of a woman who played a distinctive role in the socialist, working-class, and feminist movements of 19th-century Europe...
...It may indeed have been difficult to replace her father...
...Two things strike the reader about the Marxes' family life: their warmth and tenderness toward one another, and Eleanor's identification with her father...
...Even before the advent of atomic energy, the anarchy of price competition was so disruptive to the operations of manufacturers of electric generating equipment that they were driven into illegal price-fixing arrangements...
...The sophisticates of the Harvard Business School could hardly fail to recognize the social component of the energy crunch...
...Second, in countries where extreme poverty is partially a result of large domestic income inequalities, pressure should be brought if possible for changes in policy or structural reforms aimed at reducing internal inequalities...
...Lionel Burger's future may very well have been defined for us in Djilas's New Class, written almost 30 years ago...
...The authors do, however, underestimate one factor, in their analysis of why industrial unionism won...
...The novel is written from inside, even when it is written from a distance...
...15.00...
...I discover I can take from people what I need," Rosa has told us of her relationship to Brandt Vermeulen...
...The conclusion that U.S...
...Nevertheless, with the possible exception of the packing house workers, the UAW had done more in the factory and in the larger civil rights struggle than any other trade union...
...The book's third part takes up directly the subject of global distributive justice, a matter on which not only the morality of states but the whole "tradition of international political theory is virtually silent...
...on the other hand, a "true" marriage to a more conventional, giving man might have meant for her a life of service—as it had for her mother and sisters...
...In their prescriptions for the future, the book's authors are unwilling to consider any serious changes in the way our country does business...
...Eating at the table and sleeping in the bedroom, the same bed, their little black boss...
...The thwarted engagement provoked a crisis of independence in which Eleanor left home to teach briefly in a boarding school north of London...
...Eleanor did not...
...His book is a persuasive, closely argued and lucidly written "attempt to work out a more satisfactory international normative political theory through a critique and revision of orthodox views...
...She is what she is because no other choices exist for her...
...It was thus because the UAW had been in the forefront of the struggle for economic and social change that Detroit blacks had found it to be such an indispensable ally...
...At the age of 17, Eleanor became engaged to a 358 34-year-old French Communard named Lissagaray, whose history of the Commune Eleanor was later to translate...
...For Brandt Vermeulen is a kind man, as so many contemporary jailers are kind...
...At the same time, driving herself to the limits of fatigue, she earned her living doing translations and research at the British Museum...
...Somehow, the authors fail to credit A. Philip Randolph and the 1942 conference in Detroit, as well as his threatened "March on Washington," as inspirational factors aiding the black militants and the UAW...
...Both Eleanor and Aveling became active members in the newly founded Social Democratic Federation, with the hope of moving it toward a British working-class constituency with ideological and political ties to the European socialist movement...
...And it is he who proves to be the stimulus to Rosa's recognition that her father has failed, that the revolution that finally levels apartheid will not bring with it the classless, unpigmented society of Lionel Burger's dreams...
...Beitz argues that Rawls's "difference principle," which states that social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, should apply globally...
...As Marx's favored daughter, she grew up among the leading socialists of late 19th-century Europe...
...Much of Eleanor's activity at the British Museum was "hack work," undertaken primarily for the small income it brought her...
...12.95...
...New York: Oxford University Press...
...And then there were young white radicals like Emil Mazey, who was far more active and important in the Ford organizing campaign than he has ever been given public credit for...
...In the reader's mind, they blend, as political conviction seeks to define victim and victimizer...
...Even as the daughter of Karl Marx, she was also a 19th-century Victorian English woman, whose typical destiny was expected to lie in marriage, motherhood, and serving the revolutionary cause through her husband...
...But recognition of social factors is not the same as criticism of social arrangements...
...The authors also revive the names of black preachers like Horace A. White and Charles Hill, who took on the essentially Uncle Tom establishment in the black community...
...But, essential as technology is to resolving the energy problem, its roots are as much social and political as technical...
...As an adolescent, Eleanor observed closely the early married life of her older sisters...
...In her late twenties, Eleanor came to know such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Olive Schreiner, Eduard Bernstein, Havelock Ellis, and Beatrice Potter (later Mrs...
...The authors should have added, "and white radicals," for it was the radical movements of the 1930s, working largely within the framework of the CIO, that insisted on winning over the black workers and involving them in unionism...
...That illusion of South Africa's future lies buried with the black dead at Sharpeville, a moment in which the dimension of color became inviolable for black as well as for white...
...Cloth, $16.50...
...Yet, this gain came at the cost of a partner with a limited capacity for intimacy or emotional support, and with a penchant for spending movement money extravagantly...
...You'll tell them to ask me for the television show...
...She became involved in a variety of political struggles—from raising money for the victims of the anti-Socialist laws in Germany to supporting the Irish Republican struggle...
...This was the time of her mother's final illness, and of her death in 1881...
...It is too late for men and women of good will...
...These requirements mesh poorly with the still somewhat competitive nature of American business and with the concept of government as a quasi-judicial regulator that plays only a passive role of constraining corporate behavior to satisfy fixed rules...
...Her gift for languages enabled her to play a role as interpreter at several European socialist congresses...
...This idea, which Beitz calls international moral skepticism, stretches from Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes to the modern "realists...
...HERE WE COME to the real choices in energy policy...
...I, p. 88...
...q BURGER'S DAUGHTER, by Nadine Gordimer...
...Overcoming them requires a government policy that champions conservation...
...Her sisters, Jenny and Laura, were ten and eleven years older than Eleanor...
...It also may have been an extension of her family life...
...They write: "Supported in spirit by a growing band of Negro radicals and liberal New Dealers, black workers in the mass industries became members and officers in the new unions while the NAACP and the Urban League endorsed collective bargaining and also the CIO...
...She could preach socialism to workers in the East End and, at the same time, engage in the sectarian debates of the internationalist left...
...Difficult choices must be made and unpleasant policies adopted...
...At the same time, socialist feminist perceptions illuminate new features of the unknown Eleanor Marx...
...The other is the absence of any principle of international distributive justice: In the morality of states, each state is assumed to have a right to the wealth of its territory, and there are no moral rules regarding the structure and conduct of economic relations between states...
...At this point in history, few other writers, in the English language at least, could create a revolutionary world that is so human, so intimate in the presence it exerts on the reader, and so beyond the necessity of slogans that it can parody them with affectionate ease...
...Of her father she wrote, "How I love him no one can know—and yet—we must each of us, after all, live our own life...
...In the book he wisely revises this position: ". . an international difference principle applies to persons in the sense that it is the globally least advantaged representative person (or group of persons) whose position is to be maximized...
...The evident need for new energy supplies has called forth its share of technical fixes, from gasohol to the solar power satellite...
...The real question is whether America's voracious appetite for oil is to be curbed...
...Her father disapproved of this alliance...
...Thus, when Eleanor during her crisis at the age of 27 decided to become an actress, her sister Jenny, then tending sick children and herself near death, wrote to Eleanor about her younger sister's "prospect of living the only free life a woman can live—the artistic one...
...This intense activity speaks for her lifelong attempt to build a movement that was class-conscious and revolutionary, firmly centered in the real workingclass struggles of her time...
...Finally, Eleanor played a tireless role in sorting and editing the massive quantities of Marx's papers, which, under Engels's direction, became Volumes II and III of Kapital only after Marx's death...
...Although nearly all of business as well as both the President and most of Congress have voiced a strong desire for more nuclear electricity, not a single reactor has been ordered in four years...
...Its argument that conservation and solar energy could be a solution is being translated—even in the blurbs on its jacket—to mean that they will be a solution, and we therefore should do without coal and nuclear power...
...During these months Eleanor was furiously involved in her work at the British Museum and had started training as an actress...
...But now she discovers that she must provide others with what they need, even when what they need is a whipping boy (or girl) for black rage...
...As she wrote to her sister Jenny, "much and hard as I have tried I could not crush out my desire to try something...
...It is even more surprising, then, that in this Victorian era (and Marx was in many ways himself a "proper Victorian") even one of Marx's daughters would choose a more direct and independent role in the political struggles of her time...
...I wanted to know," she has told us earlier, "how to defect from him...
...The recent history of American policymaking is littered with the wrecks of technical fixes, from factory-built housing to the MacNamara Line...
...Nadine Gordimer knows that in order to meld politics and fiction, the writer must assume a distance beyond her characters but never above them...
...It has probably never seen such characterless wretches and stupid defenders of arid formulas as they became after attaining power...
...Yet, these illusory solutions will no doubt remain attractive as long as the desire persists to solve problems cleverly without the inconvenience of disturbing anyone's entrenched power...
...But Energy Future does not analyze its favored solution with the same rigor it applies to understanding the problem...
...In a contemporary world where independent political action is only beginning to be an option for women, Eleanor's life speaks directly to today's socialist feminists...
...Despite the financial generosity of Engels, these tribulations were to plague the Marx family well into Eleanor's maturity...
...Any roll call of the black and white heroes who risked life and limb to convert Ford's employees, thousands of whom were blacks, into CIO supporters would illustrate this point...
...Moreover, even if Eleanor was disillusioned with political work, Kapp does not explain why this led to taking her life...
...To be sure, such a conjunction of events might be devastating to the strongest of people, even if they had never experienced the emotional breakdowns Eleanor had suffered in her earlier years...
...Oh yes I knew him...
...The reality of South Africa remains for the radical daughter of a radical father...
...As Energy Future argues, "The barriers to conservation are very great, but they are rarely technological...
...The novel's power is not that it confronts the sickness that is South Africa nor the paranoia that will ultimately destroy both South Africa and the forces of its liberation...
...For this, journalism can tell the story adequately...
...It is not the empathy with which she creates Rosa that is so strikingly in evidence...
...But Baasie is now a self-righteous black nationalist, a man in whom even the interracial past in Lionel Burger's house must be expunged in order to service his need for vengeance...
...The second part is an equally effective critique of the traditional alternative to international skepticism, which Beitz terms the morality of states...
...The book consists of three parts...
...The authors restore to prominence some of the forgotten black and white militants who undertook the dangerous task of unionizing Ford...
...Black and White, Unite and Fight," was a meaningful slogan...
...BURGER'S DAUGHTER is close in spirit to the Jamesian novel of manners, but it is a novel of manners in which political existence becomes the one true way to define the self...
...for Beitz argues that "the principle of state 365 autonomy . . . lacks a coherent moral foundation," and that therefore "external interference . . . with unjust [domestic] institutions might be justified when it has a high probability of promoting domestic social justice...
...The world has seen few heroes as ready to sacrifice and suffer as the Communists were on the eve of and during the revolution...
...Eleanor and Aveling's lecture tour of the United States, at the request of the newly formed Socialist Labor party of America in 1886, is described in detail, as are their efforts on behalf of the Haymarket martyrs whose arrest and imprisonment coincided with their trip...
...Eleanor's days appear to have been taken up with a constant round of planning demonstrations, giving speeches, writing political essays, and organizing congresses...
...The momentum of her return to the apartheid world is provided by her chance meeting in London with the son of a black revolutionary comrade of her father's, Baasie...
...In her world, politics is destiny...
...The tensions between the UAW's principles and what the union actually delivered were crucially important...
...The Marx family lived by a completely traditional sexual division of labor...
...And now she formed the liaison with Edward Aveling, which was to continue for the remaining 15 years of her life...
...It is her "humanness"—a vague enough word, but the only suitable one that comes to mind—that will ultimately make Rosa Burger a fit companion for Malraux's Kyo Gisors or Pasternak's Zhivago...
...The detail provided by Kapp's exhaustive chronicle rescues the material of Eleanor's life from obscurity...
...She is still bound by Lionel's sense of political purpose...
...In 1866 he wrote to Paul Lafargue who was then courting Laura, You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle...
...One need only substitute the word "nuclear" or "coal" for "conservation" to obtain the sort of technological optimism that, as Energy Future argues so convincingly, has often obscured the need for unpleasant action...
...The continuing existence of mass absolute poverty makes discussion of the moral aspects of international relations (and particularly of North-South relations) a matter of extreme importance...
...And to switch their roles...
...But I would not marry...
...Such an arrangement in 19th-century England should not be minimized...
...Finally, she describes Aveling's long illness and final betrayal in a secret marriage to another woman...
...Tell them how your parents took the little black kid into their home, not the backyard like other whites, right into the house...
...But "our kind" has lived to become as great an anachronism in South Africa as the proponents of apartheid, with their Calvinist heritage sharpened by a historical "triumph" that the future will deem as ironic as Casimir the Great's invitation to the Jews to settle in Poland...
...An industry whose survival depends on central planning could only coexist with anarchic decisionmaking structures while it was supported by a nearly complete social consensus...
...212 pp...
...she was also the daughter of Karl Marx...
...Their conclusions, in my opinion unassailable, are worth quoting: The entire history of the relations between black Detroit and the UAW have been characterized by a striking amibiguity...
...In 1897, only a year before her death, Eleanor begged off speaking engagements, pointing out that in the past eight months she had given 41 lectures, had spoken or taken the chair at 10 meetings, and had spent a week lecturing in Holland...
...The chance of independence is very sweet...
...One of the classic pitfalls in setting policies for the social use of technology is the search for a "technical fix"—a resolution of social and political contradictions through the introduction of new technology...
...The technological characteristics of nuclear generation—in particular, the large size of individual plants, the complexity of the fuel cycle, and the long lead times needed for new processes— demand advance planning on a scale of decades and highly centralized administrative structures...
...Here, we go finally with Rosa Burger into the terrible inevitability of the political tragedy known 362 as South Africa...
...Her early childhood was shaped by repeated illness, poverty, and ceaseless debt...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press...
...A sensible energy policy requires that we seek the form of social organization we think best, that we choose the technologies we find most beneficent, that we harmonize the two as best we can, and that when conflicts arise, as they must, neither society nor technology be treated as unchangeable...
...production can be doubled is forthrightly criticized for being obtained by "assum[ing] away many of the problems that we discuss and regard as most important" by "specifically exclud[ing] a number of environmental, political, and productivity constraints...
...But just as the power of 361 Man's Fate is best seen in the creation of the police chief Konig, so the strength of Burger's Daughter is best seen in the ironic portrait of the Afrikaaner nationalist, Brandt Vermeulen, who spends his life trying to construct an intellectual system that will make apartheid respectable...
...As soon as the opposition to nuclear power became significant, it was able to paralyze the industry without having to gain the support of either government or corporate power centers...
...Social conditions determine technological possibilities...
...An archaic financing system has magnified the effects of these delays and added its own bias against large-scale capital investment...
...Kapp insists that this episode did not represent a "rebellion...
...It concludes that the interaction of public attitudes, social institutions, and environmental concerns makes it impossible for coal and nuclear power to contribute effectively to increased energy supplies...
...Yet, Yvonne Kapp provides no evidence of Eleanor's disillusionment with the socialist movement or with the value of her work...
...Charles Beitz believes that "political theorists have paid insufficient attention to a variety of philosophically interesting and practically important normative problems of international relations...
...Beitz's persuasive theoretical position has, however, a broader practical implication he does not make explicit...
...In the future, one senses, only the identity of Rosa's jailers will have changed...
...The first is an effective attack on the view "that moral judgments have no place in discussions of international affairs or foreign policy...
...Unlike many scholarly studies, this work has readable footnotes that add to the book, a series of notes that make interesting reading, and a good bibliographical essay that reviews previous literature with a critical eye...
...Social structures are taken as given...
...In her first two crises Eleanor could rely on her circle of family and friends for support and attention...
...UPON THEIR RETURN to England Eleanor and Aveling began lecturing on socialism to the Radical Clubs of London's working-class East End...
...Jenny and Laura, her older sisters, reproduced their mother's life in marrying men whose socialist goals they supported in domestic service...
...If Eleanor's political work was tantamount to affiliation with an internationally extended family, the thwarting of her socialist goals by history may have been represented by the deaths of the "true revolutionaries" of her father's generation...
...One approaches novels that have been as highly praised as Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter with a certain caution...
...Disillusionment and loss pursue us all and frequently move individuals to new forms of personal growth and restored effort rather than to suicide...
...The social and political factors that might obstruct the conservation-solar strategy are seen as objects to be acted upon by policy-makers...
...New York: Random House...
...Eleanor saw all three of Laura's children sicken and die before they reached the age of six...
...This broader policy recommendation is that the rich countries should deliberately link international redistribution to domestic redistribution in the poor countries (or at least in those countries "where extreme poverty is partially a result of large domestic income inequalities...
...They remained "engaged" for ten years...
...As an adult woman, Eleanor's ability to move with confidence among such old family friends as Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, and Bernstein (and to quarrel with them on occasion) guaranteed her a place in a socialist political arena inevitably dominated by men...
...The elements of the proposed solution are, as usual in such policy studies, for the most part technically feasible...
...Yet the authors' own recommendation— that conservation and small-scale solar energy should produce needed supplies—rests on an equally tenuous base...
...More important, it enabled her to prepare the first English translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which appeared in 1886...
...This view has, Beitz suggests, two practical implications: First, in formulating aid programs, donor countries and agencies should take account of the special weight to be placed on improvements in the welfare of the world's worst-off groups, and with respect to particular recipient countries, attempt to direct aid primarily at the satisfaction of minimum human needs...
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...Marx's wife, and most likely his daughters as well, shared the belief that such sacrifices were legitimate and appropriate for women to make...
...After all, Rosa is the novel's heroine—and a heroine in a novel that demands heroic action...
...The choice, as Energy Future realizes, is not really between the new and traditional energy sources at all, for neither is sufficient alone...
...In line with current "unconventional" political thinking, the fix consists of a potpourri of decentralized solar energy and conservation technologies...
...If, however, one accepts Beitz's theoretical views, then this objection has no moral validity...
...Most of the black radicals came out of the political movements...
...Two of his daughters, like his wife before them, became hostages to historical inevitability...
...Their involvement focused on the unskilled, sweated workers in "Silvertown...
...One is the principle of state autonomy: like persons in domestic society, states in international society are to be treated as autonomous sources or ends, morally immune from external interference, and morally free to arrange their internal affairs as their governments see fit...
...It is a welldocumented, well-written and lively study of one of the crucial periods in modern labor history: the triumph of the UAW-CIO over that citadel of the open shop, the Ford Motor Company, and the domination this company had over the black community in Detroit...
...She has always viewed Baasie as her brother...
...Sidney Webb), and to witness the growth of H. M. Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation...
...A peculiar division into "us" and "them"—an aristocracy of the politically virtuous pitted against a bourgeoisie that has just begun to doubt itself...
...Inevitably, one wonders about the fate of a Lionel Burger who comes to power...
...Kapp reviews the Avelings' conflicts with both Hyndmanites and Fabians—and finally their split with the Social Democratic Federation, the formation of the Socialist League, and the challenges to this new group launched by the anarchists...
...Eleanor only broke with Lissagaray shortly before Marx died...
...Yet, it was only after her parents died that her political work began in earnest...
...Beitz proceeds to demonstrate convincingly that this view is morally unacceptable...
...It is an authoritative review of the men and the events that molded the city of Detroit in this period of race and class violence...
...By the very measures that make our present standard of energy consumption possible, technology has rendered the present organization of energy supply and use obsolete...
...In few other contemporary novels is politics so naturally integrated into the everyday lives and speech of characters...
...If there is a weakness in the novel, it is that Rosa away from South Africa is no longer compelling as a presence...
...These recommendations make sense...
...In choosing to devote his life to political and intellectual work, Marx did not meet his responsibilities as a breadwinner, and he appears to have been aware of the consequences...
...On the contrary, had I my career to start again I should do the same...
...His daughter learns that her "us" has become a "them" for black South African revolutionaries...
...In the Marx family, sacrifices of service and poverty were made by the women in support of the revolutionary enterprise...
...She can defect only from his illusions...
...In an earlier version of his argument, Beitz seemed to imply that the subjects of the global difference principle are states rather than individuals...
...But here, divorced from the realities of apartheid, it proves quibbling, even a bit sullen...
...When this support became unavailable through the death of a generation of older friends and political activists, notably of Engels, her third and final crisis was the result...
...There is no easy technical fix—certainly not one based on competitive markets...
...paper, $3.95...
...Always on the run from the police...
...Jenny died at the age of 39, most likely of complications of pregnancy...
...There is something terribly wearing about the way she struggles with the horrors of contemporary South Africa, but there is something terribly human about it as well...
...289 pp...
...One 360 wishes Kapp had been more sensitive to Eleanor's limited choices...
...For even as "our kind" bravely insists that men must be responsible for history, it is as finished as the apartheid it fought--with greater courage and determination, let it be noted, than any other segment of the population...
...Yet, his good intentions were not to be realized...
...Even the excruciating sense of detail with which Nadine Gordimer endows Rosa is politicized...
...I do not regret it...
...ELEANOR'S WORK provided her with the independence she wanted...
...The book's main shortcoming (to be discussed later) is that Beitz does not always make sufficiently explicit the broad policy implications of his theoretical arguments...
...This same conflict between her need for affiliation and separation were to mark her future...
...He was especially close to Eleanor, emotionally and politically...
...If Eleanor played the role of a favored daughter in the socialist movement, Engels's death may provide a key to an understanding of her third and final crisis...
...1:1 BLACK DETROIT AND THE RISE OF THE UAW, by August Meier and Elliott Rudwick...
...Love and guilt appear to have fought with her need for independence...
...She was a woman in Victorian England...
...Surely Eleanor did not cross her father but neither did she abandon her "fianc...
...In other words, rich countries should agree to meet the economic demands of poor ones (such as those set forth in the New International Economic Order proposals) in return for solid commitments on the part of poor countries to implement development strategies aimed at meeting the basic needs of their populations...
...When the "stresses" in both of these spheres became too intense, Eleanor simply reacted by taking her life...
...Both had husbands who were not only poor providers but managed to meet their expenses primarily through Engels's continued beneficences to Marx's heirs...
...Yet, the abundance of material that Kapp presents allows us to speculate on a more complex and intricate web of factors that shaped Eleanor's life—and her death...
...IN DOCUMENTING these last years before Eleanor's tragic suicide, Kapp deviates from her preoccupation with public activity to write of Eleanor's personal tragedies: the deaths of valued friends-most important, that of Engels—and her conflicts with the Freybergers (a couple who cared for Engels during his last illness) over her father's letters and manuscripts, which Marx had bequeathed to Eleanor upon Engels's death...
...She was born in London in 1855, the youngest of three daughters...
...The emotional support she received from her family surrogates was something her flawed companion, Aveling, could never provide...
...She has, rather, simply replaced him in prison, arrested after the Soweto protest of October 19, 1977...
...Because Kapp relies heavily on family correspondence,we learn little about the influence of her mother...
...The absence of a more compelling explanation for Eleanor's death is somewhat distressing, given the vitality of a life so actively spent in political and literary work...
...On the one hand, the union has protected seniority rights, fostered greater economic security, and aided the blacks' movement into production and assembly line jobs outside the foundry...
...Although some of the barriers are economic, they are in most cases institutional, political, and social...
...0 ENERGY FUTURE: REPORT OF THE ENERGY PROJECT AT THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL, edited by Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin...
...She did manage to avoid such a life and have a sustained, if difficult, long-term relationship with a man who at least shared her literary and political interests, and Kapp acknowledges that...
...Young men like Horace Sheffield, Hodges Mason, Walter Hardin, Sheldon Tappes, and John Conyers, Sr., to mention a few activists, drew their support and politics from the radical circles...
...At the novel's end, some 14 years after its beginning, she has not managed to defect...
...She also continued to edit and see to the publication of Marx's papers...
...During these years Eleanor was a key organizer of the Congress, which was to initiate the Second International in Paris in 1889...
...IN THE FOLLOWING YEARS Eleanor began to take an active role in literary and political affairs, writing political essays, corresponding with Liebknecht, doing research in the British Museum, doing translations, and participating in the Dogberry Club, a private Shakespeare reading group...
...q 364 POLITICAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, by Charles R. Beitz...
...353 pp...
...And then the little bastard was pushed off back to his mud huts and tin shanties...
...Even when Marx died, Eleanor never legally married...
...Above all, the authors have succeeded in presenting a balanced appraisal of the relations between blacks and the UAW, which is in marked contrast to the many biased studies that have flooded the market in recent years...
...After Engels's death, and a full 12 years after her father's, Eleanor attended to the publication of Marx's other letters and essays...
...Yet Eleanor's contributions to these movements, as this book documents, demand recognition in their own right...
...Nor did she bear a child...
...She claims that Eleanor was troubled by what she saw as the failure of both her work and domestic life, and so lapsed into one of her recurring depressions...
...Writing to Laura after her marriage to Lafargue to request some books, he apologizes for disturbing her wedding trip, adding: "I am a machine, condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history...
...Energy Future, in surveying the problems in our supply of coal, oil, 363 natural gas, and nuclear power, takes the broad view of technology, economics, and politics that its subject requires...
...But social possibilities are often created by technology...
...One of Lionel Burger's best tame blacks sent scuttling like a bloody cockroach everywhere, you can always put your foot on them...
...Kapp devotes considerable space to the possible motives underlying Eleanor's suicide...
...Undoubtedly, these two facts shaped some of the contradictions of her life and influenced the choices she made...
...Kapp provides extensive documentation that Engels was a surrogate father to all of Marx's daughters...
...It is he who helps Rosa take her leave from the country her father had dreamed of changing into an interracial Marxist society...
...Some might object that this approach involves unjustifiable interference in the internal affairs of poor countries...
...When she tries to escape from South Africa to live with her father's first wife in the South of France, she carries her sense of detail with her...
...society is not to change to reflect the development of economic processes, but rather technologies must be chosen for their compatibility with its present organization...
...An administrative and judicial system based on the premise that government is always an impartial arbiter has introduced long delays in plant construction, while actually impairing safety by imposing legalistic obstacles to communication between builder and regulator...
...The Business School group starts from the premise that "reliance on the free market is the best way" to achieve economic growth...
...Eleanor may have had several mother surrogates, given the age gap between her and her sisters, and her close relationship to the family servant, Helene Demuth, who later became her confidante...
...Indeed, Kapp's portraits of Lafargue and Longuet, impecunious and self-involved, depict them as little more solicitous of their wives than the villain Aveling himself...
...1:1 366...
...On the other hand, the constraints placed upon the international leadership by the white rank and file often inhibited implementation of the union's constitutional provisions prohibiting racial discrimination, and blacks from the beginning waged protests against the union's failure to eliminate job bias and the lack of representation in the highest councils of the organization...
...361 pp...
...Kapp recounts Eleanor's learning of an illegitimate halfbrother born to her father and Helene Demuth...
...A reader also receives a better appreciation of the tough job that R. J. Thomas did as president of the auto workers' union in those critical days...
...This book really shows, unfortunately, that conventional solutions won't work unless something is done to make them work, while unconventional answers might succeed if sufficient effort was made...
...For there is, as Rosa senses, a certain inevitable justice in Baasie's excoriation of her father...
...Nothing Nadine Gordimer has written to this point—not even those superb short stories or her earlier novels—quite prepares her readers for the power of Burger's Daughter, a power built up layer by layer, scene by scene...
...His father was too busy to look after him...
...But her frame of reference remains her father and the small Communist party of South Africa, what Rosa thinks of as "our kind...
...that makes the manner with which Nadine Gordimer is willing to accept her characters' views as their own all the more notable...
...When Engels died, Eleanor was past 40 and had less than two years to live...
...Despite its thorough exposition of the costs of OPEC oil, Energy Future seems destined to contribute more to the problem than to the solution...
...Our kind repudiates ethnic partitioning of the country," Rosa insists...
...Democratic decisions must be taken that some people will not like—but if any energy policy is to he successful, government must receive a mandate to plan for changes in the status quo...
...Although by the 1960's the warm relationship between rank-and-file black auto workers and the UAW international leaders on the one hand and between those leaders and the national black protest organizations on the other hand would deteriorate, the Alliance had endured so long precisely because the UAW had been in the vanguard of the labor movement and indeed of the larger American society in its support for black aspirations...
...This book has many virtues...
...The possibility that the United States could decide its energy future democratically, and carry out that plan, is ruled out by the taboo on any suggestion of institutional change...
...Here Beitz extends to the international arena John Rawls's influential theory of justice, which is concerned almost exclusively with domestic society...
...The result has been paralysis-a paralysis often duplicated, for these and other reasons, in mass transit, in conversion of oil-fired boilers to coal, in electricity pricing, and in a host of other areas of energy supply and conservation...
...Two basic features [he writes] of the morality of states are especially striking...
...Too busy with the whites who were going to smash the government and let another lot of whites tell us how to run our country...
...The evidence marshalled so well by Energy Future demonstrates irrefutably that we are in big trouble unless we do something to overcome the obstacles—political, psychological, economic, and technical—to increasing energy supply and reducing demand...
...Before the publication of this biography she had stood in the shadow of her father, Karl Marx, while the particulars of her life had been obscured by an aura of romantic tragedy...
...As Eleanor approached the age of 27 she suffered a second crisis of independence marked by an attack of what is now assumed to have been anorexia nervosa...
...But only because Rosa's life has been defined politically—by her father, by her fellow Afrikaaners, and, as she discovers in Europe, now by black South African revolutionaries...
...She recounts Aveling's role in the formation of the Legal Eight Hours League, the Independent Labour party, and the Trade Union Congress...
...In other words, one of the major ingredients of her breakdowns also helped her in the process of recovery...
...The present energy situation requires both social and technological changes...
...Typical of the book's approach is its evaluation of one study of coal...
...Her relationship with Aveling permitted, and perhaps even sustained, her independence...
...Their weddings were followed by a rapid succession of pregnancies, which were accompanied by the illness of both mother and child...
...In Europe, Rosa seeks to shed the politics of belief...
...This outlook is so little examined that our national unwillingness to make collective decisions is hardly even noticed as a factor to be reckoned with...
...The obsolescence of present industrial arrangements is seen most clearly in the problems of nuclear power...
...Her biography provides the data with which the analyst can both ask and answer questions about the significance of Eleanor Marx's life...
Vol. 27 • July 1980 • No. 3
