and doubts our own generation came to call its own. To accept that is to correct a record concerning Marx’s thought. It is also to demolish the very possibility of saving Marx’s godly stature by making him, or some of him, into an ‘icon’. Rigid divisions into stages will not do; he often returned to an earlier piece of study to rework it and/or to incorporate it in a new way, e.g. the re-emergence of elements of the analysis of consciousness in German Ideology (1845-6) in the discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital, Volume 1 (1867), or the clear relation between the discussion of peasants and rural commune in Grundrisse (1857-8) and the drafts of the ‘Letter to Zasulich’ (1881). But it is high time to dispose of the ever recurring stupidity of discussing a synthetic ‘Marx’s view’, while disregarding a couple of decades of intensive work and thought in between two quotations, just to discover with glee or despair ‘contradictions’. He could be wrong, but for heaven’s sake, he could not be unmarxist. To admit to the specificity of late Marx is (also) to see Marx in his creativity.
Finally, such an interpretation of late Marx suggests that the development in his thought was neither eclectic nor the type of zigzag Nikoforov offered: unilinearism then something else (not quite certain what) then back to unilinearism. The movement seems much more consistent: there was (i) a sophisticated version of unilinearism with ‘materialist’ and dialectical assumptions forming a part of it; (ii) pre-capitalist multilinearity (bilinearity?) with a supposition that capitalism will iron it all out; and (iii) the acceptance of multidirectionality also within a capitalist-dominated (and socialism-impregnated?) world of mutual dependence, indeed, of heterogeneity resulting from that very interdependence.
Which brings us to the last question but one: was Marx human? To put it otherwise is to begin from the ‘multi-dimensionality of Marx’s theory which causes all but the dim-witted or prejudiced to respect and admire Marx as a thinker even when they do not agree with him’,65 and to add that we are dealing here not in pure logic only. Marx is one in his personal endeavour, ethical stand and intellectual analysis. He showed both remarkable tenacity and outstanding flexibility of mind. When, and in what way?
Since 1847, and through the trials of political defeats, factional struggles, hopes which were dashed, and extreme personal privation, Marx never deviated from the goals of serving socialist revolution the way he came to see it, as a young man. In human terms there was the winter of 1863 when underfed, with the rent unpaid, wife ill, daughters out of school for their winter shoes were with the pawnbroker, Marx carried on with his research and political action. There were more such winters yet Marx stood fast, refusing a variety of ‘soft options’ and offers, e.g. that of semi-governmental and well cushioned journalism. Such biographical details are inexplicable in terms of ‘pure logic’, yet they have a logic of their own, without which Marx’s life would not make much sense.
At a more theoretical level Marx’s early writings are not only clues to his personal dreams and insurrection against human poverty and oppression but also to his philosophical anthropology, his ideas about the essence of being human. It still offers the only available ‘objective’ base for socialist ethics, alternative to either simple political expedience, i.e. the party line as defined by a current leader, or else to theology – an issue as urgent as it is understated in socialist thought. For it is not only an issue of fine spirit and detached discourse, but of political action and of the actually existing socialisms (remember Poland).
While clearly impatient with banal sentimentality, Marx was a humanist and an heir to the culture of the Enlightenment, in which he was steeped. His scholarship was a chosen tool in the service of a grand ethical design of liberation of human essence from its alienation caused by the grip of nature as well as by the man-made worlds of class-split societies. The best evidence of that side to Marx is his unwaning appeal today, which is, after all, not like an adoration of the multiplication table. To purify ‘mature’ Marx from the philosophical ethics of early Marx, to divide aspects of his thought into separate boxes, or to be ashamed ‘on his behalf’ of the claim for the moral content of socialism, is to do him indeed ‘too much honour’ (by someone else’s code of practice) and ‘too much injury’ (by that of his own).66
Gods remain unchanged by the process of creation and, it was said, can think only of themselves. If metaphors are to be used, Marx was not a god but a master craftsman. Craftsmen change matter while changing themselves in the process of creation. Also, if a dilettante is indeed ‘a man who thinks more of himself than of his subject’, Marx was professional in his analytical skills and therefore self-critical to the utmost. He was often tart in his critical comments and polemics, but for a man greatly admired by his own circle he was remarkably free from self-deification.
That is, in all probability, the root of the long public silence during the last decade of Marx’s life. He was ailing, but then he was never a very healthy man. He was tired and at times depressed by the post-1871 revolutionary low in Europe, but fatigue and defeat were not new to him either. He was working on the further volumes of Capital but did fairly little to it. Biographers have faithfully rewritten Mehring’s note that Marx’s last decade was ‘slow death’, failing to acknowledge that even Mehring actually described this as (before 1882) ‘grossly exaggerated’.67 The subsequent discovery of 30,000 pages of notes written over ten years, as much as the quality of the work he did, militate against the solicitous remarks about Marx’s failing powers. In the period directly following the publication of Volume 1 of Capital Marx faced critical comments and an increasing influx of ‘stubborn data’ which did not fully fit, and had to be digested. He was rethinking intensively, once more, his theoretical constructs, and moving into new fields. Lack of lucidity and a ‘heavy pen’ are often the price of depths in a path-breaking effort. Must a scholar be ill or senile not to ‘rush into print’, while still thinking through new theoretical thresholds?
To conclude, there was neither ‘epistemological rupture’ in Marx’s thought nor decline or retreat but constant transformation, uneven as such processes are. His last decade was a conceptual leap, cut short by his death. Marx was a man of intellect as much as a man of passion for social justice, a revolutionary who preferred revolutionaries to doctrinaire followers. The attempts to single out as truly scientific, external and a-moral Marx from Marx the scholar, the fighter and the man, are as silly as they are false. That is why one should not ‘read Capital’ but read Marx (Capital included) and also Goethe, Heine and Aeschylus whom Marx admired and, together with the tale of Prometheus, made into a part of his life. To give his due to the greatest revolutionary scholar, we should see him as he was as against the caricatures and icons drawn by his enemies and his worshippers. To know him is to see him change and to see in what sense he did not. To be ‘on his side’ is to strive to inherit from him the best in him – his grasp of new worlds coming into being, his critical and self-critical faculty, the merciless honesty of his intellectual craftsmanship, his tenacity and his moral passion.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are given to those who by comments or help with the collection of the evidence contributed to this paper: Perry Anderson (London), Michael Barratt-Brown (Baslow), Zygmunt Bauman (Leeds), Isaiah Berlin (Oxford), Philip Corrigan (London), Arghiri Emmanuel (Paris), Leo Haimson (New York), Harry Magdoff (New York), M. Mchedalov (Moscow), Sidney Mintz (Baltimore), Derek Sayer (Glasgow), Paul Sweezy (New York), Eric Wolf (New York), and the editorial collective of History Workshop.
Notes
1. Lukács defined in this way the more general but inclusive realm of ‘historical materialism, in its classical form’. G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, p. 229. A comment by Harry Magdoff: ‘This is not wrong but I would prefer in describing what Capital Vol. 1 is about to lay emphasis on the laws of motion of capitalism, its evolution and seeds of its transformation….’
2. For those uninitiated into the British political culture, those are words of William Blake’s ‘Milton’, still sung as an anthem at the Labour Party conventions.
