RACHEL HOLMES’S game-changing biography of Eleanor Marx (Eleanor Marx: A Life, Bloomsbury, 2014) not only restored Eleanor to her rightful place as foremother of socialism-feminism but raises serious questions about how we understand and engage Karl Marx’s legacy.

Eleanor, Karl’s youngest daughter and his favourite, was Marx’s first biographer and, Holmes shows throughout in her book, her editorial work was crucial in preserving her father’s legacy and bringing it centre-stage in the Second International, in which she was a central figure.  

The work of an editor is a thankless job yet, as anyone who has ever published anything knows, it can make all the difference between a brilliant intervention which will change the world and an inconsequential piece of writing discarded to the garbage can of history.

The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston, written in 1853, published in 1899, Diplomatic History of the 18th Century, written 1856-57, published in 1899, and crucially Value, Price and Profit, written in 1865, published in 1898, are just a few examples of Eleanor’s editing in her father’s archive.

The latter’s worth pausing on. As Holmes shows, Eleanor edited it as a response to Edward Bernstein’s articles in Neue Zeit that sparked the debate and row over revisionism.

This debate was the centre of discussion of the Second International, when Bernstein, Engels’s student, presented the virgin/mocktail version of Marxism — socialism without revolution, which, as we know, is the crucial ingredient of Karl Marx’s writing.

We usually consider another Jewess in defending Marx’s legacy against Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg’s radical text Reform or Revolution (1900) also written as a response to Bernstein.

But without Eleanor’s intervention we would have neither Marx’s monumental work nor would we have it in the clear, concise form in which she produced it.

Lastly, Eleanor was her father’s first biographer and all works on Marx and Engels drew upon her sources.

Thinking of Eleanor’s work in the context of her father’s legacy gains a crucial twist when put in context of Holmes’s reading of Eleanor’s radical approach to feminism-socialism.

“The woman question is, first and foremost, one of economics and one of organisation of society as a whole.”   

She continues: “Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers.” So wrote Eleanor in her groundbreaking text The Woman Question (from a Socialist Point of View).

Eleanor theorised how underwriting and underacknowledging women’s work sustains patriarchal capitalism, which, she shows, are two systems that need each other in order to sustain themselves.

Thus, our approach to her work as editor and biographer through Holmes’s explicitly feminist lens raises serious questions as to how we engage Marxist legacy today and regarding our own blind spots in understanding the politics of labour from a feminist point of view.

“Is it not wonderful, when you come to look things squarely in the face, how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?” Eleanor wrote to her older sister Laura — a quote which serves as an epigraph in Holmes’s book.

I take this calling from Eleanor to examine how, when we celebrate the birthday of a man so eponymous with socialism, an ideology and system of thought which champions equality like no other, we underwrite the labour of love of his favourite daughter that enabled his legacy to sustain and flourish in his lifetime and after.

It is heartening, though, that, when we celebrate Karl Marx’s 200 birthday, Eleanor gets fine tributes of her own. On May Day an exhibition opened in the British Library celebrating the links between Karl’s work and Eleanor’s there and the legacy of father and daughter side by side.

You can still catch the last week, until May 12, of Lucy Kaufman’s critically acclaimed play “The Jewess of Jews Walk” in Sydenham, where Eleanor’s life, work and love gain their rightful place centre-stage.

So, today, when we all celebrate the monumental legacy of Karl Marx, I will be raising my glass to his favourite daughter Eleanor, whose tireless work in her father’s archive and beyond enables us to have these celebrations.