On Karl Marx’s Two-hundredth Anniversary Sean Sayers It is 200 years since Marx was born. He lived and worked through the middle years of the nineteenth century. Many have tried to treat his ideas as rooted in his time and to consign them to the past as refuted and superseded, but they cannot be disposed of so easily. Controversy still rages about them and about his legacy. It was not always so. Marx first formulated his philosophy in popular form in The Communist Manifesto, written jointly with Engels and published in 1848. That work begins with the bold statement, "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism". 1 At the time, these words were more an expression of hope than a description of the historical situation as it then was. The Communist League, for which the Manifesto was written, consisted of only a tiny handful of activists, without any wider organisation or following. Hardly had the Manifesto been published than the revolutionary hopes it expressed were dashed. The revolutions that erupted across Europe in 1848 were defeated. The Communist League, together with other revolutionary groups, was smashed; their members were hounded and persecuted. Marx was forced to flee from Germany and settled in London. Recriminations and in-fighting ensued among the exiled revolutionaries, consuming what little was left of their political energies. Marx all but withdrew from direct political activity to devote himself to his studies in the Library of the British Museum. The “spectre” of communism had, it seemed, been extinguished and the bold vision of the Manifesto refuted. Gradually and steadily, however, the communist movement re-formed and re-organised, and the influence of Marx’s ideas began to grow. By 1883, the year of Marx's death, socialist groups had revived and Marx's ideas were spreading and becoming influential throughout Europe. The spectre had returned. World War I marked a turning point in the development of Marxism. Its outbreak precipitated the collapse of the international socialist movement; its end saw the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This was quickly followed by the formation of communist parties in many other countries and their unification in the Third International. There was a great 1 Marx and Engels 1978.
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On Karl Marx’s Two-hundredth Anniversary
Sean Sayers
It is 200 years since Marx was born. He lived and worked through the middle years of the
nineteenth century. Many have tried to treat his ideas as rooted in his time and to consign
them to the past as refuted and superseded, but they cannot be disposed of so easily.
Controversy still rages about them and about his legacy.
It was not always so. Marx first formulated his philosophy in popular form in The Communist
Manifesto, written jointly with Engels and published in 1848. That work begins with the bold
statement, "A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism".1 At the time, these
words were more an expression of hope than a description of the historical situation as it then
was. The Communist League, for which the Manifesto was written, consisted of only a tiny
handful of activists, without any wider organisation or following. Hardly had the Manifesto
been published than the revolutionary hopes it expressed were dashed. The revolutions that
erupted across Europe in 1848 were defeated. The Communist League, together with other
revolutionary groups, was smashed; their members were hounded and persecuted. Marx was
forced to flee from Germany and settled in London. Recriminations and in-fighting ensued
among the exiled revolutionaries, consuming what little was left of their political energies.
Marx all but withdrew from direct political activity to devote himself to his studies in the
Library of the British Museum. The “spectre” of communism had, it seemed, been
extinguished and the bold vision of the Manifesto refuted.
Gradually and steadily, however, the communist movement re-formed and re-organised, and
the influence of Marx’s ideas began to grow. By 1883, the year of Marx's death, socialist
groups had revived and Marx's ideas were spreading and becoming influential throughout
Europe. The spectre had returned.
World War I marked a turning point in the development of Marxism. Its outbreak precipitated
the collapse of the international socialist movement; its end saw the triumph of the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia. This was quickly followed by the formation of communist parties in
many other countries and their unification in the Third International. There was a great
1 Marx and Engels 1978.
2
flowering of Marxist thought in such diverse areas as philosophy (Lukács, Korsch, Frankfurt
School), social theory (Bukharin), political theory (Gramsci), legal theory (Pashukanis),
political economy (Rubin), psychology (Vygotsky, W Reich), linguistics (Bakhtin); and an
explosion of creativity in the arts inspired by Marxism (Eisenstein, Mayakovski, Prokofiev,
Shostakovich, Malevich, Rodchenko, Brecht, etc).
Despite the deadening orthodoxy that was enforced during the Stalin period the influence of
Marxism continued to expand. After World War II there was a second wave of communist
revolutions in China, Korea and Vietnam. The influence of Marxism spread to Latin America
after the revolution in Cuba, and to Africa where the Communist Party played a central role
in the struggle again Apartheid in South Africa. By the 1960s more than one third of the
world’s people were living under regimes inspired by Marx’s ideas.
With the spread of the political influence of Marxism there was also an enormous growth of
Marxist ideas. After Stalin’s death, the international communist movement began to break up.
In the new freer atmosphere there was a flowering of Marxist thought. Humanist and other
ideas critical of Soviet Marxism developed in Eastern Europe and the USSR (Schaff,
Kolakowski, Ilyenkov) and the New Left emerged in the West (E P Thompson, P Anderson).
With the worldwide upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s a profusion of forms of “Western
Marxism” proliferated, including humanist (Sartre, Fromm), Structuralist (Althusser,
Poulantzas) and analytical Marxism (Cohen, Roemer).
In the USSR and the Soviet bloc there was a brief period of liberalization, but it was soon
snuffed out, and a long period of stagnation and slow relative decline ensued. And then, quite
suddenly, Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR came to an end, not through
revolution but relatively peacefully, through internal collapse. The whole social and political
edifice of Soviet Communism turned out to be a rotten shell which disintegrated as soon as its
citizens were able openly to challenge it, although it was helped on its way, to some extent,
by a newly resurgent capitalism, championed by Reagan and Thatcher. Communism was
widely dismissed as outdated and refuted. Fukuyama even proclaimed that its collapse was
the final disproof of the Marxist theory of history and the conclusive demonstration that
capitalism and liberal democracy are the final stage of human development, the `end of
history’.2
2 Fukuyama 1989.
3
These claims turned out to be short-lived. In 2008, less than twenty years after history was
supposed to have ended with the collapse of Soviet communism, capitalism was plunged into
a deep and prolonged crisis from which it has not yet recovered. The liberal, laissez-faire,
free market philosophy which had come to have such strong sway over economic and
political thought was discredited. Marx’s analysis of capitalism as volatile and crisis-prone
was vindicated. Marxist ideas began to be studied again and the idea of an alternative to
capitalism came back on to the agenda.
What is Marxism?
This history of the ways in which the influence of Marx’s ideas has grown and spread raises
the question: what is Marxism? Neither Marx nor Engels themselves used the term, it was
first employed by Marx's opponents. Indeed, Engels reports that Marx responded to its use by
saying `all I know is that I am not a Marxist'.3 Towards the end of Engels' life, however, it
began to be used by the followers as well as the opponents of Marx,4 and this usage rapidly
gained acceptance to refer to the system of thought created by Marx It is often also usually
taken to include the work of Engels and, by extension, to the ideas of Marx's subsequent
followers, derived from or based upon his work.
It is in these terms that I have been talking about it so far. As I have briefly described,
Marxism has developed into a tradition of world-historical proportions. Marx’s ideas have
been taken up by innumerable followers. They have been adapted to new conditions,
extended into new areas of enquiry, and developed in a huge variety of political and
intellectual contexts. In the process a great profusion of different forms of Marxism have
arisen. There are distinctive Russian, Chinese, Cuban, German, French, Italian, British and
many other traditions of Marxism, each containing within them a diversity of tendencies and
theories. Moreover, there have been numerous attempts to combine Marxism with other
schools of thought, giving rise to Hegelian, analytic, structuralist, existentialist, neo-Kantian,
and many other interpretations of Marxism. Marxism continues to evolve and new forms
continue to emerge.
It may be thought this must have led to the dissolution of Marx’s theories into innumerable
different forms in which they become unrecognisably scattered and dispersed, but this has not
3 Engels n.d. [1956?], 496.
4 Manale 1974.
4
been the case. Rather, Marxism is a historical tradition that has developed and grown, like a
flourishing tree whose spreading branches are signs of its vigour and strength.
Because it has grown in this way, problems arise when the attempt is made to be more
specific about what Marxism is. What did Marx really say? Who are his genuine followers?
What is the correct interpretation of Marxism? Many different ways of answering these
questions have been suggested.5
The attempt is often made to define Marxism by specifying an essential core of social and
economic theory. However, it resists such systematisation. Changing and adapting to new
situations may be regarded as essential to Marxism as a living tradition. `We do not regard
Marx's theory as something complete and inviolable,' wrote Lenin, `on the contrary, we are
convinced that ... socialists must develop it in all directions if they wish to keep pace with
life.'6
Others have attempted to specify Marxism in terms of its dialectical and materialist method.
According to Lukács, for example, `orthodox Marxism is not the “belief” in this or that thesis
... orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’.7 Alternatively, the active, political commitment
of Marxism to the cause of the working class and to communism may be looked upon as its
defining feature. But none of these approaches is without problems.
Sometimes the attempt is made to distinguish Marx’s own views, as `true’ Marxism, from the
supposed simplifications and distortions of later follows: Engels, Kautsky, Lenin in
particular. In recent years some scholarly writers have argued that Engels’ version of
Marxism, which exercised such an enormous influence on the development of Marxist ideas,
misrepresents Marx’s own views.8 Others maintain that Marx’s ideas are a product of the
nineteenth century conditions in which they were formed and that they no longer apply in the
modern world.9
Of course, it is true that Engels’ ideas differ from those of Marx. However, Engels’ ideas are
developments of Marxism. They are interpretations of Marx’s views, they are a form of
5 These problems are similar to those that arise within Christianity, Islam or in any other great tradition of ideas