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A
critical reading of the work of
Karl Marx now requires us to lay
to one side the myths and legends
which have obscured his ideas over
the past one hundred and twenty
years- distortions and misinterpretations
to which perhaps no thinker has
been more prone. In one sense, this
is not difficult, because there
is enough of his writing preserved,
albeit in translation, for any of
us to read Marx in his own words.
Most however have been unwilling
or unable to do this. The fifty
volumes of the Marx-Engels Collected
Works are forbidding, and when beginning
as one almost inevitably does, with
the received wisdom surrounding
Marx’s name, there is much
to discourage a reader from seriously
taking on the task of understanding
Marx. The aim of this project is
thus to begin to challenge some
of those myths in order to clear
the way for a fresh reading of Marx
that will hopefully be less prone
to the distortions, misunderstandings
and blatant falsehoods that have
so far surrounded Marx. We believe
that what Marx had to say remains
of considerable relevance to an
understanding of problems we face
today, but that a reading of Marx
now must maintain a critical caution
which does not merely reproduce
received ideas- positive or negative-
about Marx’s work.
The
distortion and questionable interpretation
of Marx’s work is in many
senses a direct result of his great
success. His name became synonymous
with a vast movement which not only
changed, but virtually defined the
twentieth century. The leaders of
the communist parties needed to
prove themselves true disciples
of Marx, while anti-communists followed
suit by attributing everything they
hated to Karl Marx. Interpretation
of Marx has thus been driven by
a number of historical factors,
and any attempts to gain, for example,
a “scholarly” understanding
have necessarily been secondary.
Yet this is not to mourn any supposed
loss of the purity of Marx’s
thought to the struggles and conflicts
in which he has been implicated!
It is not simply a case of counterposing
a “true” Marx to the
Marx that gave his name to the movements
of the twentieth century. To set
against the distortions we cannot
raise up a singular, uncontradictory
Marx, abstracted from history and
ultimately separable from everything
that comes within “Marxism”,
yet it remains that there is much
in that received wisdom about Marx
that is refutable, or at
least rendered distinctly questionable,
with a little attention to the textual
and historical evidence.
There
is thus, on the one hand, the generally
negative task of demythologising
Marx where we need primarily to
just look at the evidence carefully.
This task is the guiding one of
“Marx Myths & Legends”,
but on the other hand Marx interpretation
must to some extent also involve
a battle over facts, and the negative
task is inextricable from a more
positive interpretive one. In areas
where controversies remain, we hope
to present a heterodox and critically
open account, whilst the project
itself will be ongoing, with new
texts added gradually to cover more
areas of Marx mythology and take
account of other areas of debate.
We encourage readers to contribute
their own Critiques
& Rejoinders to the articles
published here.
Divisions of Marx Myths & Legends
The
myths and legends about Marx broadly
fall from the start into two camps;
on the one hand those myths propagated
tendentiously or maliciously by
opponents of socialism, and on the
other, the myths of those who claimed
Marx as their authority. They have
been the product of various historical
factors, and the question of any
responsibility for such
myths is a complex one. But it remains
of central importance that Marx
is fundamentally a contested thinker,
bound more than any other to specific
interests and conflicts within modernity,
and the myths and legends historically
reflect this.
Both
of the broad “pro” and
“anti” camps share thereby
a common core of myths, namely those
which conflate Karl Marx with the
Communist International, and its
most prominent leaders, Lenin and
Stalin. The ghastly nature of “real
existing socialism” and the
ideology of those states has often
been simplistically identified with
Marx by opponents of socialism.
The first group of myths which we
deal with therefore are those which
ascribe to Karl Marx political ideas
about workers’ states, state-ownership,
centralised planning and suppression
of individual freedom. These are
dealt with primarily in the section
on ‘“Myths Conflating
Marx with “State Socialism”’
Another
group of myths about Marx that have
been propagated by opponents of
socialism are ad hominem: they seek
to call into question Marx’s
ideas by attacking his character.
Articles dealing with these myths
are grouped under the section on
“Myths about Marx’s
Character”. According to these
legends, Marx was a megalomaniac,
a bully, an anti-Semite and a racist,
a snob, a womaniser and a sexist,
a boring writer and a plagiarist.
It is easy to anachronistically
impute such charges to individuals
of periods prior to contemporary
notions of political correctness,
but without employing a kind of
historical relativism it is valid
to question the real intellectual
and historical merits of such accusations
when their target is often more
properly the prejudices and illusions
of an entire age than those of an
individual. Works such as Hal Draper’s
“Marx and the Economic-Jew
Stereotype” can thus be useful
in elucidating the real historical
context of some of Marx’s
remarks and language. Though Marx,
as represented by Francis Wheen
for example, may not have been a
perfect human being, it is fair
to say that many commonplace stories
about Marx’s character are
distinctly questionable.
The
contexts of the reception of Marx’s
ideas have been very different from
that in which they were formed,
and this in itself is perhaps the
reason for many myths. Marx’s
way of thinking was arguably already
somewhat alien to the dominant intellectual
trends of its time, and the critical
spirit on which Marx had been raised
as a Young Hegelian was foreign
to the majority of his original
readers. Consequently, from the
moment what he wrote left his pen
it was interpreted in the spirit
of nineteenth century socialism,
and its dialectical, Hegelian aspects
were largely misunderstood or just
set aside. Thus a third group of
myths is also shared by many friends
and foes alike: myths conflating
Marx with 19th Century socialism
and positivism.
His
most intelligent interpreters, and
those who were to become his principal
advocates after his death, were
capable of distinguishing between
the ideology of the broader socialist
movement of the times and the ideas
of Karl Marx, even if they did not
clearly understand that difference.
The fourth and most enduring group
of myths about Karl Marx originates
from his most illustrious and faithful
advocates, Frederick Engels, Georgi
Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky, and
were perpetuated by the leaders
and thinkers of “actually
existing socialism”. According
to these, Marx was the founder of
a coherent philosophical and metaphysical
system, and a definite, repeatable
methodology. We are talking about
the myth of dialectical materialism,
or “scientific socialism”
— that ideology “cast
from a single piece of steel”[1]. Beyond this group we must add
further “Myths of Marxism”-
myths based on more simplistic interpretations
of Marx’s ideas: that Marx
was an economic determinist, or
for that matter, any kind of determinist
or any kind of economist, that Marx
declared philosophy to be obsolete,
or alternatively, that he was a
materialist philosopher.
Lastly
we come to a collection of more
recently founded myths- some of
which have their roots in Marxist
tradition, but have become more
important in later debates. In this
group we place the myth that conflates
Marx with Alexandre Kojève
and Hegel’s “master-servant
dialectic,” the myth that
Marx had a theory of ideology as
“false consciousness”,
and the myth that there is a necessarily
disdainful attitude towards the
natural world in Marx’s allegedly
“promethean” or productivist
views. These myths can perhaps be
attributed to a filtering of Marx
through the intellectual climate
of the second half of the twentieth
century, in which issues of “recognition”,
“ideology critique”,
and the critique of the “Enlightenment”
dominated.
The
categories dealt with so far in
this project are intended only provisionally,
and do not cover exhaustively every
area of Marx mythology. As the project
grows we intend to broaden its scope
and increasingly cover areas of
potential controversy, as well as
developing upon what we already
have through critical dialogue.
Marx
should be read just as you would
read anyone else: critically and
for yourself, not uncritically or
secondhand. Marx Myths & Legends
will have succeeded as a project
if it at least helps some to begin
to study Marx with a strong mistrust
for the prejudices, preconceptions
and layers of congealed misinterpretation
that surround his life and work.
Andy
Blunden & Rob Lucas, April 2005.
1.Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
Chapter 6, Lenin 1908
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