Cover page

Series page

Classic Thinkers

  1. Richard T. W. Arthur, Leibniz
  2. Terrell Carver, Marx
  3. Daniel E. Flage, Berkeley
  4. J. M. Fritzman, Hegel
  5. Bernard Gert, Hobbes
  6. Dale E. Miller, J. S. Mill
  7. Joanne Paul, Thomas More
  8. A. J. Pyle, Locke
  9. Andrew Ward, Kant
Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

For my six (so far)

grandchildren

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to numerous students and colleagues over the years who have contributed in incremental, but hugely important ways to this book, and have made it tremendous fun to write. Also heartfelt thanks to two assiduous reviewers who contributed greatly to the final draft. And I owe particular thanks to George Owers, editor at Polity Press, who thought that I ‘might have something to say’.

Chapter 1 is an edited version of a previously published article: Terrell Carver, ‘Making Marx Marx’, Journal of Classical Sociology 17:1 (2017): 10–27; used with permission.

Abbreviations

CW Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works in 50 volumes (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004).
EPW Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley, with Richard A. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
IWMA International Working Men's Association, 1864–76.
LPW Karl Marx, Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Timeline

DateMarxEngels
1818Born 8 May in Trier in Rhenish Prussia, now in Germany
1820Born 28 November in Barmen in the Prussian Bergisches Land, now Wuppertal, in Germany
1836Attends Bonn University
1837Leaves school to work for family firm
1838Attends Berlin University
1841Receives doctoral degree from Jena UniversityUndertakes military service in Berlin and attends lectures at the University
1842Writes articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne
1843Marries Jenny von Westphalen, begins MSS studies (posthumously published as Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)
1844Moves to Paris, continues manuscript studies (posthumously published as ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’), and edits Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher with Arnold Ruge, including two articles by himself and two by EngelsWrites The Condition of the Working Class in England; visits Marx in Paris with ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’
1845Publishes The Holy Family by Engels and Marx, moves to Brussels and continues mss drafts with Engels (posthumously edited into book-form as The German Ideology)Travels to Manchester with Marx
1847Publishes The Poverty of Philosophy, and ‘Discourse on Free Trade’Writes drafts for Communist League
1848Publishes (anonymously) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’; moves back to Paris on invitation of revolutionary government, and then moves to CologneWorks with Marx on the ‘Manifesto’ and on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
1849Emigrates to London
1850Edits revived newspaper as ‘Organ of Democracy’Joins family firm in Manchester
1851Writes The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, published 1852; begins writing for American and other newspapers and encyclopediasAssists Marx with journalism and reference works
1857Returns to substantial work on ‘Critique of Political Economy’ (posthumously published as Grundrisse)
1859Publishes ‘half-volume’ A Contribution to the Critique of Political EconomyPublishes review of Marx's book
1864Begins working with IWMA
1867Publishes Capital, Volume 1Publishes reviews of Marx's book
1869Retires from employment and moves to London
1871Publishes ‘The Civil War in France’
1872Revises Capital, Volume 1 for French translation
1875Writes ‘Marginal Notes’ (posthumously published as Critique of the Gotha Programme)
1883Dies 14 March in Kentish Town, LondonDelivers ‘Graveside Speech’
1895Dies 5 August in Primrose Hill, London

Introduction

Another Marx

Karl Marx's works have had a multi-faceted and multi-functional appeal to all sorts of audiences, political and otherwise, since the early 1840s, though during his lifetime (1818–83) he had relatively few readers and little if any fame. His first mass audience was in the partisan context of the international socialist movement of the later nineteenth century, and after that he occupied an iconic position in its rival communist successors and state-structures from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 up to ‘the fall of the Wall’ in Berlin in 1989. In a much more limited way this kind of twentieth-century Marx-worship persists into the present, though now mostly marginalized and increasingly tenuous. All through these posthumous developments the relationships between the historical ‘real-life’ Marx, the Marxisms attributed to him, the iconic Marx of parade-banners, and the actual politics of Marxist movements, leaders and states has been a maelstrom of complex political, ideological and academic negotiations and conflicts. These processes have included the Cold War and Iron Curtain great-power confrontations, as well as formidable amounts of national liberation, revolution, subversion, intervention and regime change, together with considerable violence all across the globe.

However, the historical Marx and his intellectual legacy have only aroused much specific and respectful academic interest from the later 1930s. That Marx – ‘great thinker’ and would-be revolutionary – was then criticized in the 1950s, revived in the 1960s, reconstructed in the 1970s, and re-interpreted in post-Marxist re-readings since the later 1980s. More recently since the 1990s and into the new millennium Marx has been considered by some to be a major theorist of globalization, occupying an important position within global studies and international political economy. During and after the global financial and economic crises of 2008 Marx was invoked both by activist groups and communities, and by political economists and broadsheet journalists, even making the cover of international news magazines and featuring in TV documentaries. During the last decade post-colonial and ‘de-colonizing’ scholars have split decisively in how they view him: irremediably Eurocentric, ‘white’ and Westernizing, or early-off-the-mark with a global view of colonial expropriations and colonized dependencies. In some form or another, or in some way or another, Marx is back!

But then as a world-wide political reference-point and easily recognizable image in popular culture, and as an established figure in educational curricula and academic debates all over the world, Marx never goes away, and despite efforts, he never will. However, given that the political culture and ruling institutions of his day have long vanished, he has necessarily become something of a spectre. Or rather his vanished context, and his lived-experience within it, have come to haunt the different ways that his writings – the ones published in his lifetime, and the voluminous manuscript materials posthumously collected – have been interpreted to date by scholars, commentators, broadcasters and media intellectuals, as well as by Marxist-activists and vigilant anti-Marxists. While it is true that over the decades his works have acquired ‘a life of their own’, it is also true that what readers know of his life, or do not know, or think they know, invariably affects what he is thought to be saying to them. And that in turn will affect what conclusions they will want to draw from their interpretive encounters with the ‘great man’ and his works.

While the bare biographical facts about Marx – birth, marriage, death; youthful optimism, middle-aged tribulations, old-age miseries – are pretty much beyond dispute, the life-story that arises in differing biographical narratives necessarily generates controversy. If Marx had had an academic post (as he once desired in his student days) and had therefore generated a string of major tomes in philosophy, economics or sociology (which is generally where his output lands today on physically separated library shelves or in virtual classification systems), then there would be far less room for disagreement about what he was actually doing during his lifetime and what he might have wanted others to accomplish. As an academic Marx would be framed with a much better fit between his activities and lived-experience, on the one hand, and our perception of him and reception of his works, on the other. He would sit in a room and write down what he was thinking that was worth writing down. But as a political activist – and indeed one who scorned would-be radical intellectuals in no uncertain terms – Marx poses peculiar problems for academic study.

Notwithstanding biographical efforts to smooth this over, the pervasive image ‘Karl Marx: Man and Fighter’ (quoting the title of an early biography)1 generates interpretive disjunction in every direction. Given his radical political commitments from a very early age, which are generally summarized in terms of Enlightenment and French revolutionary ideals, why does he make such a passionate and brilliant contribution to German philosophy? Given his famous claim that ‘history is the history of class struggles’,2 why is there no sociological theory of class? Given his commitment to the international socialist movement, and his prominent role in the International Working Men's Association (IWMA), why did he labour so long over such a vastly obscure ‘economics’ as Capital?

In his own time Marx was referenced as a formidable intellect, but regarded personally as rather a force of nature. And indeed it was only a very few people, in very limited circles, who were making these judgements and observations, sometimes long after the fact. During his lifetime he had several ‘goes’ at explaining himself to a reading public – saying who he was and (in censored publications) what he was doing. This public proved to be very small indeed, even at the very twilight of his career. While often repeated in biographical accounts, his brief paragraphs of autobiography and auto-bibliography bear little relation to the way that he has been – over the years – politically demonized, and alternatively iconized, as well as intellectually ‘made-over’ in contrasting ways. Marx has been portrayed as an undemocratic, sometimes anti-Semitic and cultish ‘Red Terror’ thinker, and conversely he has been memorialized as an indispensable ‘great man’ of worldwide, working-class and even peasant-led revolutions of national liberation and industrial modernization. And in rather less technicolor terms, he has been adopted within the academy as a ‘great thinker’ and parcelled out subject-wise as described above. But since the 1990s he has become less common as an image on national regalia, public monuments and household busts, and more common in print-form in textbook-readers, collected works and popular, ‘humanizing’ biographies.3 These are widely different Marxes, and each one has taken a lot of work to make.

It is therefore somewhat misleading to the reader to start a book on Marx in the usual way of intellectual biography, setting out his early life and influences, summarizing his early, middle and late works, recounting familiar life-cycle milestones, recycling the few amusing anecdotes that survive and summing up what contribution his ‘thought’ has made, overall, to philosophy and/or sociology and/or political theory and/or economics. As we have noted already, and as we will find in the ensuing chapters in detail, these academic categories do not make much sense when we examine Marx's works in his own context, given his political activist and concomitant anti-academic stance. And anyway he made it abundantly clear himself that ‘thought’ was not what he was actually doing: in an early ‘note to self’ he wrote that, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world … the point is to change it’, lines that have helped to bring him posthumous fame.4 Moreover, the political and social context that Marx was confronting in mid nineteenth-century Europe does not make all that much sense to us today in any very straightforward way, given that it is now 200 years since his birth. Therefore we need to take a long hard look at what we are doing, before we take up the ‘Marx question’.

More Marxes than Ever

Marx wrote a lot of words, a huge amount of which have been preserved. An enormous number of words have been written about him, but only since his death (hardly anyone wrote about him prior to that). Reconstructing Marx from his words – and noting those of others, whether written with favour or in criticism – has proceeded on an industrial scale ever since. And very recently this now familiar process has accelerated. The approach I have adopted in this introductory book is not strictly concerned with what Marx wrote but rather with what he was doing when he wrote what he wrote. Thus he is not being considered here as a philosopher, economist, political ‘thinker’ or some forbidding intellectual who needs ‘humanizing’. Very few of the writers who have written about Marx were political activists, as he was, commencing this ‘career’ when he was about twenty-four years old and continuing with it for the rest of his life. And even if some of these commentators were political activists, they were not doing exactly what he was doing in the way that he did it, not least because times change and politics with it.

This means that ‘what Marx wrote’ (or more usually in commentary, ‘what Marx thought’) has been framed – not so much out of context – as inserted into a writer-created context that was not his. Broadly speaking, this posthumous context is one of intellectual biography (of him, as an intellectual) and commentary by intellectuals (on him, which was not how he saw himself). And generally these expositions proceed by presuming an implausibly continuous coincidence between thought and writing, as if Marx always wrote down what he thought, and only thought what he wrote down (and as if all he wrote down that is preserved – a happenstance process – comprises this personal universe). However, your author here is not Dr Who, and you will not be entering a time-machine in order to re-create Marx's lived experience ‘in context’.5 Instead I have focused this book on the present, which is where readers are, in order to see how Marx looks from a point of view that can be shared, I hope, between author and reader. Moreover, taking this perspective I have aimed – rather against the grain – to explicate what we share today with Marx (or at least arguably share), rather than how different he is in the historical sense, and how odd he looks in the intellectual sense, as is the general trend in intellectual biography. Of course there are numerous differences of both kinds that have to be reckoned with: Marx is not available, either, for time-travel, so that he could persuade us to ‘fuse our horizons’ in lively conversation.

The chapter themes I have selected for this book are thus not the ‘usual suspects’, such as dialectic, materialism, idealism and science, that we encounter when Marx is presented to us either intellectually (in an oddly politicized context) or politically (in an oddly intellectualized context). The structure of this book derives instead from concepts that are current today and in most contexts unremarkably normal in liberal democracies. But these concepts also derive from Marx's activist context in coalitional politics when both liberalism and democracy were remarkably incendiary.

Thus what we share with Marx is not – following this logic – what he is most famous for since his death, given that his posthumous fame was constructed in order to make him consistently and uniquely doctrinaire, and thus politically potent. What counts as radical views and radical politics changed quite markedly in his later lifetime, and what made him ‘fit in’ with radicals in earlier times became no longer quite so interesting, even then. My point, however, is not to prove that Marx is no longer radical – far from it. Much of the interest in Marx since the financial crises of the later 1990s onwards has resurrected him precisely to make current radicalisms work. On the one hand this is a welcome change from the Cold War days when Marx's radicalism was identified as something that would never work, and – much worse – would necessarily unleash unimaginable evil and cause the downfall of civilization. On the other hand, perhaps it is not the most radicalized Marx (in the sense of politically distinctive and intellectually unique) who is the really valuable one to speak to us in our situation. I note – with relief – that very few today are arguing that he, and he alone, can ‘save us’ (and he was certainly on-record as saying that that was not his job).6

Thus this book is organized around concepts and ideas that are ‘in Marx’ textually and in use today, in both academic and activist contexts. The organization of this study is therefore somewhat opposed to both traditional academic and engagé activist narrations of Marx's ‘life and thought’, which generally proceed textually (through ‘great works’) and contextually (through political failure and personal misery) decade-by-decade. It is also opposed to overtly thematic ‘readers’, which introduce complete or excerpted texts, with minimal attention to context, either of the past or the present, thus through abstraction forcing a ‘philosophical’ or ‘theoretical’ consideration of his words. The starting point for this book is firmly with present-day political issues that are often in the news, but then showing how ‘a Marx’ has been constructed over the years to speak to continuing issues of this kind, but paying due attention to his own socialist activisms and political strategems as they unfolded.

Marx worked in an acknowledged (though somewhat misunderstood) partnership with Friedrich Engels (1820–95), but the two will be treated here as separate individuals and intellects, rather than presumed always to be in agreement, or dividing tasks, or writing complementary discussions, such that one speaks for the other, and quotations can be deployed interchangeably.7 The relationship between their activities, works and ideas as friends and comrades will thus emerge in a scrupulously historical and textually faithful way. Overall the aim here is to present another ‘Marx’, one who speaks to the present through concepts-in-use, both by activists and by academics. Marx's activisms were not focused on a narrow (and eventually sectarian) conception of what it is to be Marxist (or even Marxian) but rather on how to reach audiences of the time in order to make a difference politically. Interestingly these concepts tend to coincide with ones still in use today for much the same purposes, which – in mainstream politics – do not often succeed now by referencing the language of Marxism. Or to put it another way, social democrats, ‘progressives’ and social liberals today overlap considerably with this vocabulary, because that was the milieu through which much of Marx's activism worked at the time. This requires some historical adjustment, of course, not least in grasping that to be democratic and liberal in Marx's day – not just a ‘way out’ socialist or communist – was to be by definition a dangerous radical, an immoral subversive and a treasonous trouble-maker.

This approach also resists traditional political and academic pedagogy, which – in various ways – has presumed that induction into arcane philosophical debates forms a necessary preamble to an engagement with Marx. Indeed in his later years Engels himself encouraged just this sort of framing, delivering lecture-like materials on materialism, idealism, dialectic, science and the like.8 Subsequent commentators have filled out this framework with enquiries and arguments that are certainly of academic interest, but were not – for just that reason – attuned to the thrust of Marx's politics as he pursued it. The overall effect of this Engelsian reception is to limit access to Marx's thinking, since so much difficult preliminary study is supposedly required. It also overlays the politics with philosophical concerns, from which political connections must be drawn out, which is somewhat the reverse of the way that Marx worked. This philosophizing of Marx's activisms has drained away the political mind-set through which he operated, and stifled the political engagements that he tried to stimulate in his readers.

Moreover, the approach in this book will also resist a ‘fetishism of the archive’ through which Marx has been narrated since the 1920s, as scholars have sought novelty and surprise. While there is nothing wrong with archival research, and indeed it can be very revealing, this scholarly enterprise has tended to undermine the authority and interest of the works that Marx actually published himself (only two of which were in fact overt collaborations with Engels). The production and publication history of most of Marx's works is highly complex, but on the whole he showed much more interest in re-starting projects afresh than in recycling in retrospect what he had put aside, probably not for posterity. With characteristic acerbity about himself, he once commented in print that one whole set of manuscripts had been ‘abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice’,9 while he himself had – quite characteristically – moved on, often to the frustration of his family, friends and associates.

The thematic discussions in each chapter below will be enlivened with some less familiar textual quotations and excerpts, namely from Marx's journalism, a characteristic vector through which he worked to change the world. Indeed what counts as journalism in his oeuvre – in the sense of a published political intervention – will be discussed when relevant, so that some traditionally ‘philosophical’ and/or ‘sociological’ and/or ‘theoretical’ and/or ‘economic’ and/or ‘historical’ works by Marx will begin to look rather different, and rather more like the political interventions that they were for him. Similar considerations apply to his correspondence, particularly when read alongside specific journalistic engagements, and collective activist commitments, so in that way we can see just how his political thinking operated within a given medium and with an intended public.

Overall I am aiming for a refreshed way of encountering Marx, taking on board scholarly researches of textual and contextual significance but also focusing the reader's attention on the roles that his ideas and thinking have come to play – even if in uncredited form – in today's political practices and academic cultures. It is hard to think of another ‘great thinker’ of modern times who has had more influence on lives, deaths and ideas than Marx. But then all those Marxes were not really him. His thoughts – or rather those that we have in published form – have been left to others to think and re-think, whether in relation to global-scale political changes, or to set texts and student essays. While my approach does not aim to answer the impossible question, ‘What would Marx say now?’ it does encourage the practical question, ‘How does reading Marx stimulate me to think again?’

Problems and Preliminaries

But in outlining what we share with Marx, and getting him into meaningful conversation with us, there are first of all some difficulties. Quite a lot of this book is directly concerned with those issues, so that after some thought and adjustment in us Marx begins to make sense. Thus the exercise here is not one of providing his context to the reader, but of alerting us to our contextual presuppositions and presumptions as readers, so that he appears somewhat less alien. In that way I am hopeful that readers will develop some critical thoughts on why they might find Marx interesting – and not just historical or curious – in the first place.

Thus there is a genre issue here, since this book is neither a biography (of an intellectual who thought great thoughts) nor a textbook (what you need to know to be an intellectual). It is rather a set of essays on topics to think about when reading Marx, dipping into the vast oeuvre, but not always finding the familiar texts and usual angles that will – for clarity and general information – also be rehearsed as we go along. If this approach works, I will have shown something about how and why Marx was thinking about things that interest us vitally today, but not in the way that most ‘Marxes’ have been constructed to speak to various reading publics. Of course Marx was not doing what he was doing in his own time in precisely the same way as any of us are doing anything today, or for exactly the same reasons, but then no two among us thinks about politics today in precisely the same way and for exactly the same reasons, anyway. I trust the reader to accept that the orientation of this book in the present also makes due allowance for historical difference, and is not by definition anachronistic or pointless.

There are more intellectual biographies of Marx available than ever, and more reading of archives (and not just his) into these works as a matter of their composition than anyone some years ago could have expected. There are also political primers available, giving lapidary accounts of ‘doctrine’ and fundamentals of his ‘ism’ (as if he and Marxism emerged together as one – which they did not). If we stick to the man (and take the ‘ism’ as a later intellectual abstraction and political project), then we will have fewer interpretive issues to contend with. Most importantly of all, this study will avoid projecting the various Marxisms that have emerged independently of Marx – including Engels's contemporary summaries of Marx's published thoughts – back on to the man himself, without precise historical warrant. Those who wish to start with Marxism and work back to Marx, and then forward to ourselves, are quite entitled to do so.10 But the title and contention of this book is to stick to Marx – and to his activisms and ours – and to leave more complex intra-Marxist engagements to other occasions and in-groups.

I have kept the citation of secondary works very limited in order to fit the conversational manner of the exposition, directing the reader (I hope) to items that I think are accessible and helpful in broadening understanding and promoting discussion, preferring always the most recent works. For reference back to Marx and his works, I have used the two-volume Cambridge University Press collection (Early Political Writings and Later Political Writings) along with the ‘standard’ English-language Collected Works by Marx and Engels (in 50 volumes).11 While selecting only highlights, the Cambridge volumes are in paperback and affordable. The Collected Works are quite a lot more complete (though what exactly would constitute ‘complete’ in Marx's case has been a contentious set of projects over almost 100 years involving numerous political turmoils). Those with access to library services will have some chance of pursuing my use of this resource. I hope that this is a fair compromise, and that readers who become intrigued will find their way to as much Marx as we have in English, which in terms of readability is actually more than there is in his native German or in any other language. And of course there are numerous other popular selections or series-volumes of Marx's and Engels's works available in print, second-hand or on-line.12

I include a helpful timeline, showing notable dates for both Marx and his career-long friend and sometime collaborator Engels, thus providing a biographical and bibliographical spine to support the thematic chapters. There are also references throughout to accessible biographies so that readers can pursue further detail. The five thematic chapters will present selected ideas in pairs, first in their present-day context, and then working back to Marx himself through intervening receptions that readers are likely to encounter. Marx's real-life activism will thus be summarized in and through a set of usable concepts, deployed by him and in use by us today. This will avoid making a spurious claim that his ‘thought’ was a unity (or intended as such), that it culminated in tidy-minded ‘theories’ (or scientific or political ‘doctrines’) achieved largely through purely intellectual struggle, or that ‘it’ – the thought – was really Marx himself the political activist.

While scholars are not prone to advertising the imaginative element in their narrations, it is certainly in use here. Taking the ‘activist’ approach to Marx that I do, there is necessarily some element of speculative reconstruction. Marx was active in obscure networks and groupuscules that came and went without all that much contemporary notice, so the job of narrative reconstruction is much more difficult than if it had all been ‘on the record’. In conversational terms – which is where a lot of his activity-time was located – people did not write everything down (or indeed anything down, usually), and more importantly, what got written down (and, at least occasionally, published) was quite context-dependent, almost always subject to censorship, and often ad hominem. Quite a lot of the homines, with whom Marx was involved, have themselves been devolved into obscurity by historians, which is not at all what happened to him, though not through much fault of his own. It is quite an effort to see him as in some ways equal to – and at the time considerably less than – those who are now remembered only as ‘walk-ons’ in his life-story, because biographers have constructed that story in a genre-dependent, Marx-centric way. If I had wanted to play safe in this book, I would have stuck to ‘the words on the page’ (which of course in their printed uniformity are nothing like the real pages that Marx himself was writing or even like the ones his publishers actually produced). However, I took the risk here – which one has to do in attempting to regenerate the ephemeral activisms of the time – of filling in some gaps in the record, not least because record-keeping at the time would have played into the hands of the police and courts, who were generating their own ‘spectral’, ‘Red scare’ versions of these activisms anyway, ably assisted by politicians and spies.

Perhaps the genre here is something like the documentary film or historical drama: some of the dialogue is verbatim, but some of the reportage is in the spirit of what was (probably) going on. Overall I am aiming here for some sense of lived experience, rather than dead(ly) texts. However, if the exercise is successful it will not be because I have convinced anyone that Marx is right or even very readable all the time. Rather my index of success will be the moment when any reader's attention wanders off Marx and considers (or better, reconsiders) the pressing political issues of today.

How It Works and What It Does

The issues and themes presented above are worked through in more detail in Chapter 1 ‘Making Marx “Marx” ’, setting the stage for pairing conceptual ‘lenses’ in Chapters 2 to 6, through which to view Marx's activisms, locating his words within his projects.

Chapter 1 will explain how we got to a position at which Marx is ever-present. This opening chapter resists conventional approaches which argue that a constructed Marx is necessarily false to the ‘real’ one. Instead it explains how the first Marx arose as an artefact within specific political strategies undertaken by Marx himself, and how subsequent Marxes were constructed by biographers, commentators, politicians and activists right up to the present. But along the way we encounter the biographical ‘basics’ of his life, so that we gain some familiarity with his activities and times. This approach entails an expanded view as to what counts as politics, given the shifting terms through which political activism has been conducted in different historical contexts. It will also explain in detail how and in what ways Marx became an academic subject, and has thus had his works – and hence his politics – refracted through various disciplinary framings, chiefly in philosophy, sociology, economics and history. Moreover, these framings constitute, to a great extent, Marxism as an ideology, revealing its quasi-academic rather than hands-on origins, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. But then this poses the problem of synthesis and reference – can what we know of Marx, and what we have of his works, only be understood with reference to these posthumous constructions of himself and his own ‘ism’ and ideology? Succeeding chapters proceed instead with concepts arising in the present, and work back through these phenomena of reception to the activist Marx in his ‘everyday’ context.

Chapter 2, ‘Class Struggle and Class Compromise’, introduces the overarching and arguably most important concept associated with Marx that is still in use – class struggle – and the one that was most central to Marx's life, thinking and politics. The text will briefly review the commonplace theorizations of class through which contemporary politics proceeds, showing how political projects and academic analysis have worked together – and also in tremendous tension – to set this up as the ‘social question’. Class struggle in politics is sometimes conceived in opposition to, and sometimes an intersectional partner with, the ‘identity politics’ of race, gender, sexuality, religion and the like that has been ongoing, particularly since the 1950s. Class compromise, by contrast, is usually theorized in a negative relationship with Marx's revolutionary activity, but outside that context it is usually theorized in a positive relationship with the achievements of anti-authoritarian constitutionalism and social welfare states. Overall the chapter argues that these liberal achievements, following on from the European upheavals of 1848–9, have been received historically in a way that minimizes or erases the struggles and conflicts through which – against conservative and reactionary rulers and institutions – liberal democratic revolutions were actually achieved. Conventionally but counterfactually these achievements are often understood as the outcomes of peaceful compromises, a process about which Marx was a great deal more realistic (in terms of struggle) and of which he had some personal experience as a political activist (in making compromises).

Chapter 3, ‘History and Progress’, illustrates the way that contemporary politics of liberal democratic and capitalist triumphalism reproduces the ‘history-lessness’ against which some Marxist activists – and many academics – have struggled, particularly those concerned in recent years with genealogical and deconstructive approaches to decision and judgement in present circumstances. This concern with contingency and indeterminism has its roots in Marx's texts, but also its ‘other’ in older versions of Marxism and Marxist history, where concepts of determinism and science formed a powerful political conjunction, but one that has ultimately fallen victim to twentieth-century critiques. Marx's political focus on production, distribution, consumption and exchange as crucial elements in both everyday life in any period and in any investigation into history (including pre-history) has revolutionized historiography, at least in establishing an essential reference point for debate. Progress is perhaps less powerful an idea in contemporary politics than it used to be, but then any concern with human betterment (and perforce planetary conditions for humans) raises definitional issues relating to just what kind of society even marginal political adjustments ‘for the better’ are based on. Marx has been rather too easily dismissed as a visionary – and indeed some of the ideas attributed to him in this vein are spurious – but few who take this critical line do so in order to endorse visions of stasis or regress instead. There is truth in the catch-phrase, ‘We are all Marxists now.’

Chapter 4, ‘Democracy and Communism/Socialism’, presents what is now an increasingly important conjuncture. Throughout Marx's career and his subsequent receptions he and others have had a distinct interest in drawing a sharp line between his views as a communist (or later, socialist – the terms were not stable and distinct in those days) and the views of pro-democracy advocates and revolutionaries, where there are still substantial areas of debate in theory and difference in practice. However, Marx wanted to distinguish himself from other liberals (i.e. advocates of constitutional democracy) as a ‘left’ thinker, arguing that democratic governments must not leave economic and social problems solely to market-relations or only to organized charity or personal beneficence. And in fact he worked alongside such liberals, since all advocates of constitutionalism at the time were by definition traitors, rebels and revolutionaries – denominated as such by authoritarian, non-constitutional and deeply clerical regimes. However, as authoritarianism gave way (through struggle) to very limited forms of democratization and the concomitant development of a public sphere of (still highly censored) debate, liberals drew a sharp line between themselves and their radical, still revolutionary former socialist and communist confrères. This chapter will lead the reader through this puzzling set of binary distinctions, and review Marx's very limited – but methodologically very interesting – refusal to discuss communist society – or even socialist transitional stages to it – in much detail.

Chapter 5, ‘Capitalism and Revolution’, addresses Marx's undoubted strength in the present era, namely as capitalism's most trenchant and most thorough-going critic. Marx regarded capitalism – a self-expanding spiral of production for profit – as itself a revolution of the utmost significance in human affairs. This revolution, in his view, was reflected in long-term shifts in forms of government, legal and political systems, and the religious, intellectual and cultural practices through which social life is lived and ‘made to make sense’ for individuals. These practices were notably characterized by Marx as ideological forms through which struggles are envisaged and enacted. He spent his life investigating this global revolutionary phenomenon in all these aspects, such that the negative aspects of capitalism could be abolished but the productivity gains and technological improvements recouped and organized for the benefit of all. This put him squarely against the private property system through which inequalities in wealth and power characteristically arise, and against which – so he argued and campaigned – democracy would work and over which it would triumph. This chapter will explain that what Marx meant by revolution is generally unlike the commonplace negative view that violence in social change cannot be justified, rather than a realistic appraisal of historical fact; and also unlike the commonplace liberal view that democracy is merely a form or procedure invoking ‘majoritarian’ institutions and systems, rather than a substantive vision of human flourishing and specifiable package of likely policies.

Chapter 6, ‘Exploitation and Alienation’, explores the contrast between an older ‘economist’ Marx and a youthful ‘humanist’ Marx that post Second World War academic reception has created. Marx's magnum opus, the first volume of Capital, was a thorough-going indictment of a logically specifiable system that was – and is – creating increasing inequalities and disastrous crises, with global repercussions. His aim was to cut the ground from under the propertied elites and the contemporary social science – ‘political economy’ – that supported their power and influence in government and society. Marx's work is thus dedicated to defining and illustrating exploitation precisely and politically in its capitalist setting. But his reasoning is rather too close in discourse to the political economists of his time – and thus rather too far removed from present-day economics – to be readily understood today. Alienation, by contrast, derives from manuscript notes and sketches that Marx himself had left behind, as his thinking on these subjects and issues – crucial to him and to us alike – attained greater analytical precision and detailed empirical clout. Somewhat paradoxically this ‘early’ version of his ‘thought’ (rather than his concomitant activism) is what survives most commonly today as a canonical critique of capitalist society. This is because the apparently ‘philosophical’ character of his writing in these editorially fabricated texts now seems to transcend the disjunction between his later elaborated critique of ‘political economy’ and the presumptions of today's economics. This chapter explores the way that different readers have created different ‘Marxes’, even creating new ‘works’ for his canon.

Afterword: This concluding discussion will review and assess the various concepts and receptions detailed above and discuss the ‘usability’ of various ‘Marxes’ in future.

Notes