What do you think?
Rate this book
Meaning of Marxism
This book is largely based on What Marx Really Meant which was written by Cole and published in 1934. It is a revaluation of Marx's essential ideas and methods in relation to contemporary social structures and developments and considers the bearing of Marx's theories on the structure of social classes, which altered greatly since he formulated his account of them.
- GenresPolitics
Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 1964
3 people are currently reading
23 people want to read
About the author
G.D.H. Cole
435 books36 followersGeorge Douglas Howard Cole was an English political theorist, economist, writer and historian. As a libertarian socialist he was a long-time member of the Fabian Society and an advocate for the cooperative movement. He and his wife Margaret Cole (1893-1980) together wrote many popular detective stories, featuring the investigators Superintendent Wilson, Everard Blatchington and Dr Tancred.
Cole was educated at St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford.
As a conscientious objector during World War One, Cole's involvement in the campaign against conscription introduced him to a co-worker, Margaret Postgate, whom he married in 1918. The couple both worked for the Fabian Society for the next six years before moving to Oxford, where Cole started writing for the Manchester Guardian. During these years, he also authored several economic and historical works including biographies of William Cobbett and Robert Owen. In 1925, he became reader in economics at University College, Oxford. In 1944, Cole became the first Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He was succeeded in the chair by Isaiah Berlin in 1957.
Cole was educated at St Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford.
As a conscientious objector during World War One, Cole's involvement in the campaign against conscription introduced him to a co-worker, Margaret Postgate, whom he married in 1918. The couple both worked for the Fabian Society for the next six years before moving to Oxford, where Cole started writing for the Manchester Guardian. During these years, he also authored several economic and historical works including biographies of William Cobbett and Robert Owen. In 1925, he became reader in economics at University College, Oxford. In 1944, Cole became the first Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He was succeeded in the chair by Isaiah Berlin in 1957.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 17, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads, #Overrated Books To Roast:
I remember the first time I opened G.D.H. Cole’s Meaning of Marxism. It was on the second shelf of the musty Asutosh College library, sandwiched between pamphlets on co-operative economics and some forgotten Fabian daydreams. The spine had that sad, washed-out red that all “radical” books acquire once they’ve been abandoned to the dust. I picked it up expecting thunder and lightning.
A book promising nothing less than the “meaning” of Marxism should have come with sparks, a sense of urgency, maybe even a whiff of blood and iron. What I got instead felt like a courteously coughed lecture from a cardigan-wearing uncle who thought revolution could be explained with the same mildness as the rules of cricket.
Cole, bless his tweedy soul, lived through Stalin’s purges, Mao’s early disasters, the rise and fall of countless socialist experiments, and still had the gall to present Marxism as though it were a reassuring fireside story—“Yes, dear, I know there were famines and firing squads, but let’s focus on the dialectics, shall we?”
I wanted Lenin’s iron teeth; instead, I got lukewarm tea with too much milk.
There’s a peculiar comedy in reading a man try to extract “meaning” from a doctrine whose most consistent meaning has been misery. Cole seemed to think Marxism just needed better PR, a friendlier voice, a touch of English reasonableness to make it palatable.
The result reads like a travel guide to hell written by someone who never left the gift shop. “Yes, over there you’ll see the mass graves, but don’t worry, comrades, the theory remains pure.”
And oh, the smoothing. Cole smooths Marx the way a funeral director smooths the hair of the dead: careful, gentle, reassuring, and ultimately pointless. Where Marx thunders about class war, Cole gives us a genial “social adjustment.” Where history groans under gulags, Cole insists the idea was never meant to be taken that way. It’s almost touching—this endless effort to save Marxism from its children.
Almost. Until you remember those children’s names !! Care to count?
Stalin,
Mao,
Ceaușescu,
Pol Pot....
Cole missed the worst of them, not because he foresaw their crimes, but because death mercifully excused him from watching his tidy “meaning” drown in blood.
Reading him, I pictured Cole in a smoke-filled room, surrounded by Fabians, cheerfully debating the finer points of surplus value while outside, whole nations choked on collectivization. His faith was never in revolution so much as in interpretation.
Marx, for him, was not a prophet but a puzzle, a word game that clever Englishmen could solve over sherry.
He domesticated Marx the way the Victorians domesticated tigers into stuffed rugs: impressive in theory, harmless in the parlor.
And yet—here’s the irony—Meaning of Marxism did give me a kind of meaning, though not the one Cole intended. It showed me how ideology survives not on its own merit, but through endless reinterpretation by intellectuals too besotted with theory to see practice.
Cole was not a revolutionary; he was an apologist, the sort who could watch a train wreck and insist it was really just “an experiment in alternative transport.”
The most maddening thing about the book is its gentility. Cole writes as if Marxism were merely a harmless intellectual hobby—like chess, or stamp collecting.
Marx’s brutal predictions of upheaval, collapse, and blood-soaked renewal are translated into something like: “Well, of course, society will evolve, but let’s keep things orderly.”
Reading it, you realize this is the socialism of the British garden party: mild socialism, with scones. It’s the Marxism you can discuss without wrinkling your trousers.
Cole manages the impossible feat of making Marx boring. And Marx, for all his faults, was never boring. Angry, yes. Dogmatic, yes. Frequently wrong, yes. But boring? Never. Marx wrote with the fury of a man who thought he was penning the very blueprint of history, a man who saw history itself as an inferno, and who expected us to march through it with fists raised.
Cole takes all that fire and reduces it to a gentle glow, like a candle in a suburban dining room. Imagine translating Beethoven’s Ninth into Muzak, or turning Apocalypse Now into a Republic TV panel discussion on Indian agriculture—that’s the kind of crime Cole commits against Marx.
And it’s not just the tone. It’s the equivocation. Cole cannot bring himself to admit that Marxism, when tried, repeatedly produced nightmares.
Instead, he insists these were misunderstandings, bad applications, temporary glitches in the grand machinery:
1) Stalin wasn’t Marxism,
2) Mao wasn’t Marxism,
3) The gulags weren’t Marxism —
They were all accidents, deviations, impostors. Real Marxism remains unsullied, floating somewhere in the Platonic heavens, awaiting its day.
The line is familiar because every ideology that fails clings to it. The communists say “real Marxism hasn’t been tried.” The capitalists say “real free markets don’t exist.” The religious say “true faith hasn’t been practiced.” It’s the universal get-out-of-jail-free card of belief systems. Cole plays it like a man shielding his eyes from a fire and insisting the blaze is just “a trick of the light.”
What makes the whole performance unintentionally comic is the earnestness with which Cole persists. He truly believes Marxism can be explained in innocence. He writes as if he were laundering a bloodstained garment, determined that with enough soaking and scrubbing, the crimson will turn white. But history is stubborn, and the stains remain.
If you read Meaning of Marxism hoping for clarity about Marx’s theories, you’ll find instead a book-length sigh. Cole explains surplus value, historical materialism, and class struggle, but each is domesticated, softened, and made to sound like a policy proposal in the House of Commons. The thunder is gone.
Marx’s insistence that capitalism would collapse under its contradictions is presented as an interesting suggestion, rather like an economist speculating on next quarter’s GDP. Cole turns revolution into reform, fury into footnotes, apocalypse into adjustment.
To be fair, Cole was a Fabian. Fabians were always about the slow, the steady, the piecemeal. Their symbol was a tortoise. And if you read Meaning of Marxism with that in mind, it makes a strange sort of sense. The book is Marxism as rewritten by a tortoise: plodding, cautious, forever avoiding confrontation. It’s socialism without risk, without terror, without blood. Which is to say, it’s not socialism at all.
And yet I can’t utterly despise it. There’s a weird innocence in Cole’s project. It’s the innocence of a man who looked at Marx’s ragged, furious face and thought, “Surely we can clean this up and make it respectable.” He wanted to extract the rational core, the analytical brilliance, without the mess. In that sense, the book is less a defense of Marxism than a defense of wishful thinking.
Cole wanted a world where ideas could stay ideas, where theory could be pure and untainted by practice. He wanted Marx without the Marxists, revolution without the revolutions, history without the corpses.
The problem is that the world is not so kind. Theories leak. They don’t stay in books. They escape into streets, factories, and barracks. And once they do, they meet power. That’s where meaning is made, in the encounter with reality. Cole’s Meaning of Marxism never gets there. It hovers forever in the seminar room, afraid to step outside.
By the time I closed the book, I felt like I had been trapped in a very long dinner conversation with a kindly but oblivious uncle, the sort who insists that communism was a lovely idea if only the wrong people hadn’t gotten hold of it. You smile politely, you sip your wine, you nod at the right moments—but inside you’re screaming.
And that, I suppose, is the real meaning of Meaning of Marxism. It is the memoir of an idea stripped of consequence, a theory treated like fine china, admired for its patterns while ignored for the cuts it leaves in real hands.
Cole gave us a Marxism you could safely read on the train without upsetting the person next to you. Which is another way of saying: he gave us no Marxism at all.
Ignore this book. Play Sudoku instead if you’re looking forward to killing time.
I remember the first time I opened G.D.H. Cole’s Meaning of Marxism. It was on the second shelf of the musty Asutosh College library, sandwiched between pamphlets on co-operative economics and some forgotten Fabian daydreams. The spine had that sad, washed-out red that all “radical” books acquire once they’ve been abandoned to the dust. I picked it up expecting thunder and lightning.
A book promising nothing less than the “meaning” of Marxism should have come with sparks, a sense of urgency, maybe even a whiff of blood and iron. What I got instead felt like a courteously coughed lecture from a cardigan-wearing uncle who thought revolution could be explained with the same mildness as the rules of cricket.
Cole, bless his tweedy soul, lived through Stalin’s purges, Mao’s early disasters, the rise and fall of countless socialist experiments, and still had the gall to present Marxism as though it were a reassuring fireside story—“Yes, dear, I know there were famines and firing squads, but let’s focus on the dialectics, shall we?”
I wanted Lenin’s iron teeth; instead, I got lukewarm tea with too much milk.
There’s a peculiar comedy in reading a man try to extract “meaning” from a doctrine whose most consistent meaning has been misery. Cole seemed to think Marxism just needed better PR, a friendlier voice, a touch of English reasonableness to make it palatable.
The result reads like a travel guide to hell written by someone who never left the gift shop. “Yes, over there you’ll see the mass graves, but don’t worry, comrades, the theory remains pure.”
And oh, the smoothing. Cole smooths Marx the way a funeral director smooths the hair of the dead: careful, gentle, reassuring, and ultimately pointless. Where Marx thunders about class war, Cole gives us a genial “social adjustment.” Where history groans under gulags, Cole insists the idea was never meant to be taken that way. It’s almost touching—this endless effort to save Marxism from its children.
Almost. Until you remember those children’s names !! Care to count?
Stalin,
Mao,
Ceaușescu,
Pol Pot....
Cole missed the worst of them, not because he foresaw their crimes, but because death mercifully excused him from watching his tidy “meaning” drown in blood.
Reading him, I pictured Cole in a smoke-filled room, surrounded by Fabians, cheerfully debating the finer points of surplus value while outside, whole nations choked on collectivization. His faith was never in revolution so much as in interpretation.
Marx, for him, was not a prophet but a puzzle, a word game that clever Englishmen could solve over sherry.
He domesticated Marx the way the Victorians domesticated tigers into stuffed rugs: impressive in theory, harmless in the parlor.
And yet—here’s the irony—Meaning of Marxism did give me a kind of meaning, though not the one Cole intended. It showed me how ideology survives not on its own merit, but through endless reinterpretation by intellectuals too besotted with theory to see practice.
Cole was not a revolutionary; he was an apologist, the sort who could watch a train wreck and insist it was really just “an experiment in alternative transport.”
The most maddening thing about the book is its gentility. Cole writes as if Marxism were merely a harmless intellectual hobby—like chess, or stamp collecting.
Marx’s brutal predictions of upheaval, collapse, and blood-soaked renewal are translated into something like: “Well, of course, society will evolve, but let’s keep things orderly.”
Reading it, you realize this is the socialism of the British garden party: mild socialism, with scones. It’s the Marxism you can discuss without wrinkling your trousers.
Cole manages the impossible feat of making Marx boring. And Marx, for all his faults, was never boring. Angry, yes. Dogmatic, yes. Frequently wrong, yes. But boring? Never. Marx wrote with the fury of a man who thought he was penning the very blueprint of history, a man who saw history itself as an inferno, and who expected us to march through it with fists raised.
Cole takes all that fire and reduces it to a gentle glow, like a candle in a suburban dining room. Imagine translating Beethoven’s Ninth into Muzak, or turning Apocalypse Now into a Republic TV panel discussion on Indian agriculture—that’s the kind of crime Cole commits against Marx.
And it’s not just the tone. It’s the equivocation. Cole cannot bring himself to admit that Marxism, when tried, repeatedly produced nightmares.
Instead, he insists these were misunderstandings, bad applications, temporary glitches in the grand machinery:
1) Stalin wasn’t Marxism,
2) Mao wasn’t Marxism,
3) The gulags weren’t Marxism —
They were all accidents, deviations, impostors. Real Marxism remains unsullied, floating somewhere in the Platonic heavens, awaiting its day.
The line is familiar because every ideology that fails clings to it. The communists say “real Marxism hasn’t been tried.” The capitalists say “real free markets don’t exist.” The religious say “true faith hasn’t been practiced.” It’s the universal get-out-of-jail-free card of belief systems. Cole plays it like a man shielding his eyes from a fire and insisting the blaze is just “a trick of the light.”
What makes the whole performance unintentionally comic is the earnestness with which Cole persists. He truly believes Marxism can be explained in innocence. He writes as if he were laundering a bloodstained garment, determined that with enough soaking and scrubbing, the crimson will turn white. But history is stubborn, and the stains remain.
If you read Meaning of Marxism hoping for clarity about Marx’s theories, you’ll find instead a book-length sigh. Cole explains surplus value, historical materialism, and class struggle, but each is domesticated, softened, and made to sound like a policy proposal in the House of Commons. The thunder is gone.
Marx’s insistence that capitalism would collapse under its contradictions is presented as an interesting suggestion, rather like an economist speculating on next quarter’s GDP. Cole turns revolution into reform, fury into footnotes, apocalypse into adjustment.
To be fair, Cole was a Fabian. Fabians were always about the slow, the steady, the piecemeal. Their symbol was a tortoise. And if you read Meaning of Marxism with that in mind, it makes a strange sort of sense. The book is Marxism as rewritten by a tortoise: plodding, cautious, forever avoiding confrontation. It’s socialism without risk, without terror, without blood. Which is to say, it’s not socialism at all.
And yet I can’t utterly despise it. There’s a weird innocence in Cole’s project. It’s the innocence of a man who looked at Marx’s ragged, furious face and thought, “Surely we can clean this up and make it respectable.” He wanted to extract the rational core, the analytical brilliance, without the mess. In that sense, the book is less a defense of Marxism than a defense of wishful thinking.
Cole wanted a world where ideas could stay ideas, where theory could be pure and untainted by practice. He wanted Marx without the Marxists, revolution without the revolutions, history without the corpses.
The problem is that the world is not so kind. Theories leak. They don’t stay in books. They escape into streets, factories, and barracks. And once they do, they meet power. That’s where meaning is made, in the encounter with reality. Cole’s Meaning of Marxism never gets there. It hovers forever in the seminar room, afraid to step outside.
By the time I closed the book, I felt like I had been trapped in a very long dinner conversation with a kindly but oblivious uncle, the sort who insists that communism was a lovely idea if only the wrong people hadn’t gotten hold of it. You smile politely, you sip your wine, you nod at the right moments—but inside you’re screaming.
And that, I suppose, is the real meaning of Meaning of Marxism. It is the memoir of an idea stripped of consequence, a theory treated like fine china, admired for its patterns while ignored for the cuts it leaves in real hands.
Cole gave us a Marxism you could safely read on the train without upsetting the person next to you. Which is another way of saying: he gave us no Marxism at all.
Ignore this book. Play Sudoku instead if you’re looking forward to killing time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review