What do you think?
Rate this book
Karl Marx was the first theorist of global capitalism and remains perhaps its most trenchant critic. This clear and innovative book, from one of the leading contemporary experts on Marx's thought, gives us a fresh overview of his ideas by framing them within concepts that remain topical and alive today, from class struggle and progress to democracy and exploitation. Taking Marx's work in his pamphleteering, journalism, speeches, correspondence and published books as central to a renewed understanding of the man and his politics, this book brings both his life experience and our contemporary political engagements vividly to life. It shows us the many ways that a nineteenth-century thinker has been made into the 'Marx' we know today, beginning with his own self-presentations before moving on to the successive different "Marxes" that were later an icon of communist revolution, a demonic figure in the Cold War, a 'humanist' philosopher, and a spectre haunting Occupy Wall Street. Carver's accessible and lively book unpacks the historical, intellectual and political difficulties that make Marx sometimes difficult to read and understand, while also highlighting the distinct areas where his challenging writings speak directly to the twenty-first-century world. It will be essential reading for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and anyone interested in the contemporary legacy of his revolutionary ideas.
204 pages, Hardcover
Published January 3, 2018
4 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Terrell Carver
63 books9 followersTerrell Carver the professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He deals particularly with Marxism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 6, 2018
Carver is remarkable in how he conveys the depth and breadth on Marx’s writing, Marx’s life, and Marx’s context. The reader gets a clear sense that the author knows this material intimately and what we receive is a set of reflections after a life-time of labor. He seems to be another scholar who has read everything by Marx (and by Engels) – all in the original German, no doubt.
The premise of this book is two-fold: first, Carter wants to de-academicize Marx’s work. He rejects the various canonizations of Marx and he rejects too treating Marx’s work strictly textually. Instead, the goal is to treat Marx as the activist working out every day problems. The question for Carter is: why is Marx writing what he is writing? That is, what political problems and lead Marx to write – whether this is a pamphlet, a speech, a set of notes, or books? This is a book about setting Marx in his own political/activist context.
Second, the book selects ideas that still resonate for us: class struggle and class compromise (ch 2); history and progress (ch 3); democracy and communism/socialism (ch 4); capitalism and revolution (ch 5); and exploitation and alienation (ch 6, my favorite chapter).
The book is full of provocative insights but I will limit myself to four that I received:
- Marx’s emphasis on production over circulation is not merely a commitment to historical materialism (a term that Carver says Marx did not use), but also a political/critical move. Paradigms that start with the exchange process equalize the exchangers and neutralize politics. The switch to production allows us to see the power that capitalists have over laborers. Simple, I know. But sometimes simple elements are hard to see.
- Marx made fun of those who used the concept of “alienation’; it was not central to his thinking or his activism. For Marx, exploitation is the key concept. Alienation is highlighted by what Carver calls a “humanist Marxism” – invented after the student protests in the 1960s, an invention that Carver thinks is meant to make Marxism easier and more manageable for western Europeans.
- Marx’s Capital is an internal critique of political economy.
- However, Carver senses a danger in how Marx executes this critique. He performs it with so much humor, verve, and sarcasm, that it becomes hard to tell if we are reading critique or parody. And this allows some readers to interpret both the critique and the parody instead as an improvement of the theory being critique. Hence the claim by some that Marx was the last Ricardian.
It is clear that Carver had great fun writing the book. But perhaps too much fun. I found the book difficult to read but not because the ideas are unclear – far from it. Rather, too often the issue is with Carver’s sentence structure. I will name two problems: often his longer sentences are filled with so many qualifying clauses that I lost the thread of the idea within the sentence. Also, the verb is buried very late in long sentences. Again, this produces too much work for the reader.
Still, I will be likely reading this book again.
The premise of this book is two-fold: first, Carter wants to de-academicize Marx’s work. He rejects the various canonizations of Marx and he rejects too treating Marx’s work strictly textually. Instead, the goal is to treat Marx as the activist working out every day problems. The question for Carter is: why is Marx writing what he is writing? That is, what political problems and lead Marx to write – whether this is a pamphlet, a speech, a set of notes, or books? This is a book about setting Marx in his own political/activist context.
Second, the book selects ideas that still resonate for us: class struggle and class compromise (ch 2); history and progress (ch 3); democracy and communism/socialism (ch 4); capitalism and revolution (ch 5); and exploitation and alienation (ch 6, my favorite chapter).
The book is full of provocative insights but I will limit myself to four that I received:
- Marx’s emphasis on production over circulation is not merely a commitment to historical materialism (a term that Carver says Marx did not use), but also a political/critical move. Paradigms that start with the exchange process equalize the exchangers and neutralize politics. The switch to production allows us to see the power that capitalists have over laborers. Simple, I know. But sometimes simple elements are hard to see.
- Marx made fun of those who used the concept of “alienation’; it was not central to his thinking or his activism. For Marx, exploitation is the key concept. Alienation is highlighted by what Carver calls a “humanist Marxism” – invented after the student protests in the 1960s, an invention that Carver thinks is meant to make Marxism easier and more manageable for western Europeans.
- Marx’s Capital is an internal critique of political economy.
- However, Carver senses a danger in how Marx executes this critique. He performs it with so much humor, verve, and sarcasm, that it becomes hard to tell if we are reading critique or parody. And this allows some readers to interpret both the critique and the parody instead as an improvement of the theory being critique. Hence the claim by some that Marx was the last Ricardian.
It is clear that Carver had great fun writing the book. But perhaps too much fun. I found the book difficult to read but not because the ideas are unclear – far from it. Rather, too often the issue is with Carver’s sentence structure. I will name two problems: often his longer sentences are filled with so many qualifying clauses that I lost the thread of the idea within the sentence. Also, the verb is buried very late in long sentences. Again, this produces too much work for the reader.
Still, I will be likely reading this book again.
December 24, 2022
Be more like Marx and less like an academic Marxist! That's what the book is quietly screaming at you - or at me, at least. A very provocative and fruitful treatment of the old man, without explicitly trying to be provocative. However, when debating many of its conclusions with myself, I realized that it changed my view of Marx and Marxism - and the relationship between the 2 is one of the main reasons to read books like this in the first place - slightly less than I had thought.
Carver's Marx is thoroughly rid of the gigantesque, god-like image that, he argues, was constructed by Engels and then by everybody who wanted to write about Marx by writing about his "thought" ever since Engels (as well as by sculptors, of course). Carver's alternative is to study what Marx was doing, the practice. This approach appears to be strongly supported by the simple fact that ever since Marx had gotten his doctorate he stopped being an academic. And all the 20th-century academics (with some huge help from Engels, of course) have been projecting themselves onto Marx - this is much of Carver's argument, basically. So, Marx that emerges in Carver's book is still extremely interesting, though, importantly, not so much as a contributor to the timeless 'thought' of humanity (or alternatively, humanity's well-delineated social scientific disciplines and philosophy) but as an activist-intellectual. Now, this approach only makes Marx more interesting as we struggle to orient ourselves to the world in some practical way: roughly speaking, how to write texts and be of any revolutionary use? A few things follow from this approach.
1. One must separate published texts (i.e. published in Marx's lifetime of course) from the rest, and especially from the numerous self-clarifications, conspectuses, "notes to self" that Marx left in huge amounts. It is indeed ridiculous how unquestioned this practice is: take whatever notes of Marx we can find, pack it in a book, and then equalize it in status with the published works as a part of the overall corpus of 'thought'. Indeed this practice implies the god-like conception of Marx - only god's every utterance is as important and in a certain sense true as every other.
2. The right question to ask when reading much of Marx's works (published in Marx's lifetime) is "what is he trying to do with this text?" and more precisely, insists Carver, "what effect is he trying to have?" Without overcomplicating things or theory-dropping much, Carver introduces the idea of performativity, in an accessible manner, basically from the backdoor. The quintessential example is the Manifesto:
Hence Carver's insistence on sharp differences between Marx and Engels. Engels, he writes, was much more interested in "explaining". When Marx was looking at historical material, in contrast, he was not interested in applying "historical materialism" (which, again, Marx never used as a term) to *actively formulate a take* on *why* a particular revolution failed, but rather in "finding out" about "possibilities". Carver's Marx is thus so much more like David Graeber, and Engels is much more like an academic social scientist of our times - especially, of course, like a Marxist one.
But it may well be that Carver overstates his case. In terms of how they spent their lives, Marx, according to Carver, wanted to be more about action and performance, while Engels, presumably, wanted to be more about writing the first classics of historical materialism ('the origins', 'peasant war', etc). Alright. But Carver gives very little, if any, overview of how thinking about conditions, limitations, and thus strategy influenced Marx's activism. Wasn't there a split in the "Communist League" after the 1848 wave of revolutions precisely because M and E argued together that from their analysis it follows that there is a period of "prosperity" in the capitalist economy and no revolution is forthcoming? Wasn't Marx writing in the preface to the 1st edition of Capital of how society "can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs", though it cannot decree away its "economic law of motion"?
Indeed, Capital becomes a conundrum for Carver's narrative. He makes it clear that Capital is no Manifesto, rather it is one of those few works Marx saw as written in rather "wissenschaftliche" mode. So how to make sense of its relation to activism? Carver ultimately resorts to the answer that Capital is something like that of a debate between two famous academics: political, middle-class biased implications of classical political economy were to be defeated on classical political economy's own territory - such was the aim of Marx. But this is a very limited understanding of how Capital fits into political practice - Marx's and in general. Indeed some things relating to Capital in the book are in my opinion misleading, such as the idea that now unequal exchange is supposedly occurring not in the sphere of production (i.e. not inside the factory) and thus Capital is allegedly of little use. More interesting are his observations on Capital as a unique work, one of its own genre. Carver's specifications as to why this is the case again bring performativity to the table. In his view, Capital was supposed to be effective in a society in which categories of political economy are quite close to the everyday categories, actually used in economic practice, and thus helping to perform the economic system in some sense. This sounds of course very interesting but I do not come away convinced that this is *the* thing about Capital. Moreover, I do not buy into Carver's implicit view that those categories are somehow dated in practice - value, labor, capital, commodity, etc - none of those things are out of everyday use in economic activities. It is, in contrast, mainstream economics terms that are more distant from economic practice! And Carver himself almost suggests just that when discussing mainstream neoclassical econ as using specially-invented non-everyday categories for its analysis. Thoroughly working through this tension would make Carver criticize the very literature in economic sociology that he most likely has in the back of his mind - that of the performativity of mainstream, contemporary economics. The interesting question to ask, if one is interested in such matters, is: what if mainstream econ is still not that performative when compared to classical political economy?! Anyway, as I said, I find the performativity thesis more fruitful and less far-fetched for understanding Manifesto than for understanding Capital. Perhaps reading Carver's "Texts on method" would change my mind.
3. Marx's politics were coalitional, insists Carver. He reiterates, again and again, how liberal capitalist representative democracy is not the image to have in mind when imagining what Marx was up against. The more proper image is that of monarchies, republics with a greatly limited franchise, the states that have no trace whatsoever of welfare and are worlds apart from managing the economy for some more or less vague benefit of all in general. Again, this only makes Marx more relevant for us at the time of very weak (or simply destroyed) representative institutions and decades of neoliberalisation that was largely about relieving the state of those responsibilities. Now, in reality Marx was finding himself amidst a variety of states that were each in its own "epoch": Germany of his day was nothing like England, politically. It is a strong side of the book that Carver makes this crucial contrast with the mid 20th century state, but it is a weak side that he does not properly work through that variety.
Anyway, Carver's big message here is that Marx was a part of the overall movement pushing for social democracy: that is, for creating a state that has the universal franchise and, through this franchise, is forced to take care of the "social question". Naturally, this allows the coalitions that are way larger than a fight for a classless society. I was impressed by Carver's suggestion (which he strangely is unwilling to emphasize and develop at length) that Marx was able to start writing his radical socialist pieces in Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, its capitalist shareholders notwithstanding, precisely because those capitalists would have liked the state to take care of the poor, vagabond, unstable labor force that processes of commercialization had created in the first place! Thus Marx a coalition-maker with the bourgeoisie in the fight to socialize the costs of the capitalist mode of production.
In the case of Manifesto, then, Carver goes as far as saying that its demands, its program should be seen as largely realized in social democracies (and to some extent in modern states, still). This is of course very provocative and Carver immediately says that he is arguing like libertarians. Is every next 0.1% of tax rate "communism"? Modern-day socialists laugh at this, but both libertarians and Carver's Marx say "yes!" The latter adds: since communism is no end state but a real movement that abolishes the present state of things! But why would Marx say that the movement towards social democracy abolishes the present state of things in a kind of 'correct' direction? Carver refuses to properly work through the fact that Marx developed his critique of that, in particular following the Paris Commune. (See Shanin's "Late Marx and the Russian Road". ) He describes Marx's new practical conception of the 'political form for working out emancipation of labor' but then obscures the differences with social democracy or even with neoliberal democracy:
Thus Carver paints Marx's cause as one that has won rather than lost in the 20th century, in contrast to all conventional beliefs. It is helpful for contextualizing Marx and helpful for keeping spirits a bit up. But it is not true to Marx's spirit.
Finally, the "coalitional politics" thesis obscures the non-coalition moments that are, for better or worse, seen as definitive by contemporary Left: I have in mind the polemics with Bakunin and Lasalle. Bakunin and Kropotkin were, to various degrees and forms, skeptical of the idea that building the "political state", and the very sphere of "public interest", and then participating in it as a party, i.e. all the familiar stuff of social democracy that Carver emphasizes is the way to go. Surely their concerns, after social democracy has shown what it is - the preservation of class society - are quite pressing today. But then Marx was against the Lasallian tendency as well. Sadly, Carver does not touch upon all of this at all. Indeed, a text like a critique of the gotha programme is not analyzed in the book at all.
4. Carver goes all out to destroy the obsession with the concept of alienation. He says it's a purely 1960s thing. He says that 1844 manuscripts are, again, not a 'work' but rough drafts and notes. He says Marx spoke this language because german philosophy of the day forced him to, 'to make sense to german philosophers' (imaginary philosophers in Marx's mind?). He says Marx disavowed the whole concept and threw it out of the window - together with much of the philosophical language - a couple of years later.
-----
So what do we make of Marx in relation to Marxism? I think if you tell smarter, and more politically-minded, Marxists that Marx was not a philosopher, but a revolutionary practitioner, they will (many of them having Lenin in mind) not be as surprised as Carver's book may make you think. If you tell them "then why are studying dialectics and all that stuff?" they will tell you they study it not because Marx explicitly applied it like one "applies" salt to a meal but because it was an immanent feature of his work. That is, he would not have been able to write things that he wrote and have had the effect that he had if he had not embodied characteristically "Marxist" skills.
What, then, they could learn from Carver's book? One is to understand the tension between marxism as a somewhat foundationalist framework of interpretation and marx's ethos of analytical/political practice. Engels wanted to make Marxism a more programmatic, a more foundationalist thing, and he pursued it, as Carver argues, because he sensed that this is what was playing well as PR of their general 'outlook' and their published works. After all, this is intuitive: say that you wrote cool books on some social subjects and you are at best interesting. Say that you have invented a new way of thinking, seeing and doing literally everything and some disoriented people looking for such new ways will pay much more interest - such, argued Shanin and others in "Late Marx", was the story Russian orthodox marxists, for instance. In contrast, Marx's ethos of analytical/political practice, writes Carver:
In a word(s), concrete analysis of the concrete situation, and much more analytical and practical work with the local - in time and place. Marx's own respectful and comradely attitude to the analysis and programs of the "People's Will", who never said they are Marxists (yet clearly had access to the same intellectual resources of the time! from Hegel to French socialism to Adam Smith etc), shows just that.
Next, class. To write of politics as if there are always classes already acting in their interest is a very poor habit of socialists. Carver writes:
To say that classes make - or made - politics is not the same as to say that there are always well-consolidated classes and everything must be explained in recourse to their actions. At the same time, practically speaking, to do politics, at least of the radically democratic and socialist sort, one absolutely needs (according to Marx) to organize as a class and to act as a class. And to achieve the latter, one may do well to learn not just dialectics or history or critique of political economy but how to speak about history understood as people's real experiences and how to appeal to the hearts.
Carver's Marx is thoroughly rid of the gigantesque, god-like image that, he argues, was constructed by Engels and then by everybody who wanted to write about Marx by writing about his "thought" ever since Engels (as well as by sculptors, of course). Carver's alternative is to study what Marx was doing, the practice. This approach appears to be strongly supported by the simple fact that ever since Marx had gotten his doctorate he stopped being an academic. And all the 20th-century academics (with some huge help from Engels, of course) have been projecting themselves onto Marx - this is much of Carver's argument, basically. So, Marx that emerges in Carver's book is still extremely interesting, though, importantly, not so much as a contributor to the timeless 'thought' of humanity (or alternatively, humanity's well-delineated social scientific disciplines and philosophy) but as an activist-intellectual. Now, this approach only makes Marx more interesting as we struggle to orient ourselves to the world in some practical way: roughly speaking, how to write texts and be of any revolutionary use? A few things follow from this approach.
1. One must separate published texts (i.e. published in Marx's lifetime of course) from the rest, and especially from the numerous self-clarifications, conspectuses, "notes to self" that Marx left in huge amounts. It is indeed ridiculous how unquestioned this practice is: take whatever notes of Marx we can find, pack it in a book, and then equalize it in status with the published works as a part of the overall corpus of 'thought'. Indeed this practice implies the god-like conception of Marx - only god's every utterance is as important and in a certain sense true as every other.
2. The right question to ask when reading much of Marx's works (published in Marx's lifetime) is "what is he trying to do with this text?" and more precisely, insists Carver, "what effect is he trying to have?" Without overcomplicating things or theory-dropping much, Carver introduces the idea of performativity, in an accessible manner, basically from the backdoor. The quintessential example is the Manifesto:
If and when people believe in this picture, then – so runs the narrative thrust of the Manifesto – they will make their politics one of class struggle, which would then play out as victory for the everyday labouring class, or – in the little-quoted alternative scenario – as the ‘common ruin of the contending classes’.
Hence Carver's insistence on sharp differences between Marx and Engels. Engels, he writes, was much more interested in "explaining". When Marx was looking at historical material, in contrast, he was not interested in applying "historical materialism" (which, again, Marx never used as a term) to *actively formulate a take* on *why* a particular revolution failed, but rather in "finding out" about "possibilities". Carver's Marx is thus so much more like David Graeber, and Engels is much more like an academic social scientist of our times - especially, of course, like a Marxist one.
But it may well be that Carver overstates his case. In terms of how they spent their lives, Marx, according to Carver, wanted to be more about action and performance, while Engels, presumably, wanted to be more about writing the first classics of historical materialism ('the origins', 'peasant war', etc). Alright. But Carver gives very little, if any, overview of how thinking about conditions, limitations, and thus strategy influenced Marx's activism. Wasn't there a split in the "Communist League" after the 1848 wave of revolutions precisely because M and E argued together that from their analysis it follows that there is a period of "prosperity" in the capitalist economy and no revolution is forthcoming? Wasn't Marx writing in the preface to the 1st edition of Capital of how society "can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs", though it cannot decree away its "economic law of motion"?
Indeed, Capital becomes a conundrum for Carver's narrative. He makes it clear that Capital is no Manifesto, rather it is one of those few works Marx saw as written in rather "wissenschaftliche" mode. So how to make sense of its relation to activism? Carver ultimately resorts to the answer that Capital is something like that of a debate between two famous academics: political, middle-class biased implications of classical political economy were to be defeated on classical political economy's own territory - such was the aim of Marx. But this is a very limited understanding of how Capital fits into political practice - Marx's and in general. Indeed some things relating to Capital in the book are in my opinion misleading, such as the idea that now unequal exchange is supposedly occurring not in the sphere of production (i.e. not inside the factory) and thus Capital is allegedly of little use. More interesting are his observations on Capital as a unique work, one of its own genre. Carver's specifications as to why this is the case again bring performativity to the table. In his view, Capital was supposed to be effective in a society in which categories of political economy are quite close to the everyday categories, actually used in economic practice, and thus helping to perform the economic system in some sense. This sounds of course very interesting but I do not come away convinced that this is *the* thing about Capital. Moreover, I do not buy into Carver's implicit view that those categories are somehow dated in practice - value, labor, capital, commodity, etc - none of those things are out of everyday use in economic activities. It is, in contrast, mainstream economics terms that are more distant from economic practice! And Carver himself almost suggests just that when discussing mainstream neoclassical econ as using specially-invented non-everyday categories for its analysis. Thoroughly working through this tension would make Carver criticize the very literature in economic sociology that he most likely has in the back of his mind - that of the performativity of mainstream, contemporary economics. The interesting question to ask, if one is interested in such matters, is: what if mainstream econ is still not that performative when compared to classical political economy?! Anyway, as I said, I find the performativity thesis more fruitful and less far-fetched for understanding Manifesto than for understanding Capital. Perhaps reading Carver's "Texts on method" would change my mind.
3. Marx's politics were coalitional, insists Carver. He reiterates, again and again, how liberal capitalist representative democracy is not the image to have in mind when imagining what Marx was up against. The more proper image is that of monarchies, republics with a greatly limited franchise, the states that have no trace whatsoever of welfare and are worlds apart from managing the economy for some more or less vague benefit of all in general. Again, this only makes Marx more relevant for us at the time of very weak (or simply destroyed) representative institutions and decades of neoliberalisation that was largely about relieving the state of those responsibilities. Now, in reality Marx was finding himself amidst a variety of states that were each in its own "epoch": Germany of his day was nothing like England, politically. It is a strong side of the book that Carver makes this crucial contrast with the mid 20th century state, but it is a weak side that he does not properly work through that variety.
Anyway, Carver's big message here is that Marx was a part of the overall movement pushing for social democracy: that is, for creating a state that has the universal franchise and, through this franchise, is forced to take care of the "social question". Naturally, this allows the coalitions that are way larger than a fight for a classless society. I was impressed by Carver's suggestion (which he strangely is unwilling to emphasize and develop at length) that Marx was able to start writing his radical socialist pieces in Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, its capitalist shareholders notwithstanding, precisely because those capitalists would have liked the state to take care of the poor, vagabond, unstable labor force that processes of commercialization had created in the first place! Thus Marx a coalition-maker with the bourgeoisie in the fight to socialize the costs of the capitalist mode of production.
In the case of Manifesto, then, Carver goes as far as saying that its demands, its program should be seen as largely realized in social democracies (and to some extent in modern states, still). This is of course very provocative and Carver immediately says that he is arguing like libertarians. Is every next 0.1% of tax rate "communism"? Modern-day socialists laugh at this, but both libertarians and Carver's Marx say "yes!" The latter adds: since communism is no end state but a real movement that abolishes the present state of things! But why would Marx say that the movement towards social democracy abolishes the present state of things in a kind of 'correct' direction? Carver refuses to properly work through the fact that Marx developed his critique of that, in particular following the Paris Commune. (See Shanin's "Late Marx and the Russian Road". ) He describes Marx's new practical conception of the 'political form for working out emancipation of labor' but then obscures the differences with social democracy or even with neoliberal democracy:
Many of these ideas are current today as political demands, albeit within centralized structures of government, which are themselves thoroughly imbued with the importance of economic management.To me this sounds like salvaging one's argument through the abstraction of "economic management".
Thus Carver paints Marx's cause as one that has won rather than lost in the 20th century, in contrast to all conventional beliefs. It is helpful for contextualizing Marx and helpful for keeping spirits a bit up. But it is not true to Marx's spirit.
Finally, the "coalitional politics" thesis obscures the non-coalition moments that are, for better or worse, seen as definitive by contemporary Left: I have in mind the polemics with Bakunin and Lasalle. Bakunin and Kropotkin were, to various degrees and forms, skeptical of the idea that building the "political state", and the very sphere of "public interest", and then participating in it as a party, i.e. all the familiar stuff of social democracy that Carver emphasizes is the way to go. Surely their concerns, after social democracy has shown what it is - the preservation of class society - are quite pressing today. But then Marx was against the Lasallian tendency as well. Sadly, Carver does not touch upon all of this at all. Indeed, a text like a critique of the gotha programme is not analyzed in the book at all.
4. Carver goes all out to destroy the obsession with the concept of alienation. He says it's a purely 1960s thing. He says that 1844 manuscripts are, again, not a 'work' but rough drafts and notes. He says Marx spoke this language because german philosophy of the day forced him to, 'to make sense to german philosophers' (imaginary philosophers in Marx's mind?). He says Marx disavowed the whole concept and threw it out of the window - together with much of the philosophical language - a couple of years later.
-----
So what do we make of Marx in relation to Marxism? I think if you tell smarter, and more politically-minded, Marxists that Marx was not a philosopher, but a revolutionary practitioner, they will (many of them having Lenin in mind) not be as surprised as Carver's book may make you think. If you tell them "then why are studying dialectics and all that stuff?" they will tell you they study it not because Marx explicitly applied it like one "applies" salt to a meal but because it was an immanent feature of his work. That is, he would not have been able to write things that he wrote and have had the effect that he had if he had not embodied characteristically "Marxist" skills.
What, then, they could learn from Carver's book? One is to understand the tension between marxism as a somewhat foundationalist framework of interpretation and marx's ethos of analytical/political practice. Engels wanted to make Marxism a more programmatic, a more foundationalist thing, and he pursued it, as Carver argues, because he sensed that this is what was playing well as PR of their general 'outlook' and their published works. After all, this is intuitive: say that you wrote cool books on some social subjects and you are at best interesting. Say that you have invented a new way of thinking, seeing and doing literally everything and some disoriented people looking for such new ways will pay much more interest - such, argued Shanin and others in "Late Marx", was the story Russian orthodox marxists, for instance. In contrast, Marx's ethos of analytical/political practice, writes Carver:
"throws very large burdens on activist decision-makers – all the way down to the everyday – and thus circumvents any short-cuts to programmatic organization that could follow from supposed guarantees that particular actions and outcomes are already validated elsewhere and so available as knowledge."
In a word(s), concrete analysis of the concrete situation, and much more analytical and practical work with the local - in time and place. Marx's own respectful and comradely attitude to the analysis and programs of the "People's Will", who never said they are Marxists (yet clearly had access to the same intellectual resources of the time! from Hegel to French socialism to Adam Smith etc), shows just that.
Next, class. To write of politics as if there are always classes already acting in their interest is a very poor habit of socialists. Carver writes:
Marx's exploratory principle was that classes made politics, and political change arose from these struggles, not just in the past but in the present.
To say that classes make - or made - politics is not the same as to say that there are always well-consolidated classes and everything must be explained in recourse to their actions. At the same time, practically speaking, to do politics, at least of the radically democratic and socialist sort, one absolutely needs (according to Marx) to organize as a class and to act as a class. And to achieve the latter, one may do well to learn not just dialectics or history or critique of political economy but how to speak about history understood as people's real experiences and how to appeal to the hearts.
January 1, 2019
Makes the case for a view as Marx as more than a meme but rather as an activist whose insights, may on occasion, prove useful to modern political contests.
Likely more useful to readers with prior knowledge of Marx's works.
Favourite quote from the book:
Likely more useful to readers with prior knowledge of Marx's works.
Favourite quote from the book:
Marx's views were derived from his political sense of the ‘social question’ and the possibilities that democratizing revolutions would be the key to its resolution. This is not a deduction but rather a project, grounded in values that were not widely shared at the time but also not particularly unique to Marx. These values were the worth and dignity of human lives, and in particular an overt rejection of the then commonplace view that lives have a value determined by a hierarchy of economic class and hereditary status. That hierarchy was itself, in Marx's view, largely an effect of a hierarchy of wealth and of access to it via the monetary, commercial, property and kinship systems of the time, or indeed any time.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews