Mainlining Marx by John Stanley

Author:John Stanley [Stanley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Theory, Economics, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Business & Economics, Political
ISBN: 9780765800794
Google: blRsngEACAAJ
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2002-01-15T10:57:34+00:00

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Three of the most prominent recent critical works that have attempted to re-situate the Marxian doctrine should illustrate this point. An examination of their supposed corrections of the distortions of Marx’s doctrine by Engels has only produced other deformations, in part because Marx’s own praxis, his own politics, is inadequately treated when the new critics explain these seemingly deterministic passages. Despite the intentions of these recent works, they reveal that neither the stress on practice, nor on the theory, succeed in immunizing the doctrine from Stalinism or from positivism even if, let it be stressed, it does not necessarily lead in those directions .

The three books discussed here raise the crucial problem of the degree to which political practice inevitably distorts a theory. First of all, we should ask whether it is important for interpretive purposes to distinguish texts like the German Ideology or the Economic Manuscripts of 1844, which may have been written more for theoretical discussion or self-clarification, from those like the Communist Manifesto or Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which had more immediate political purposes and were certainly intended for popular consumption. The difficulty of distinguishing exoteric works from esoteric ones becomes apparent when we keep in mind Marx’s overriding political purposes. Marx was, among other things, a publicist in the various meanings of that term. The scholastic weight of Capital did not prevent him from urging the publication of its French edition in the form of installments “more accessible to the working class.” The editing of that translation took so much of Marx’s time that it delayed his work on the second volume.10 In this instance Marx preferred to focus on an accurate popularization of his theory at the cost of refining and expanding them.

Accuracy and popularization often do not go hand-in-hand, as Marx was the first to realize, and making an elaborate and complex theory, a theory with political purposes, comprehensible to the average reader without “vulgarizing” the texts is a daunting task.11 We know that Engels confessed that he and Marx were “partly to blame” for stressing economic factors over other ones because of “our adversaries who denied it.”

On the other hand, Engels distinguished those theoretical texts that can be vulgarized out of political necessity from those with a practical political intent which must not be vulgarized:

When it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error waspermissiable.... Too often...people think they have fully understood a new theory...from the moment they have assimilated its main principles...12

Whether or not Engels distorts Marx’s purposes here, or whether he should have reversed his priorities by striving for perfection of the theoretical texts rather than the practical ones, he nonetheless raises a general problem: How do we deal with texts such as Anti-Dühring or the prefaces to Capital, which had both theoretical and political intent? Were not many of Marx’s texts in particular bound to serve in both capacities?

Even if one can make some sort

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