So where does that leave us in relation to Marx, and him in relation to us? There are any number of ways that this relationship can be constructed, as this book has demonstrated, and – given the secure international reputation, and the vast amount of material available – there is no reason to think that this process is over, or even declining, rather the reverse. But then this situation poses the question, why?
This book has taken a political angle on the subject, namely an argued coincidence of concepts and issues between our time and Marx's. The link is the ‘social question’, conceived not merely as inequality between individuals (and as generated by individual actions) but rather more intractably as ‘social class’ (a persisting structure through which individuals are very often constrained by ‘their place’). Individuals may like this (or not), accept it (or not), but if ‘not’ in these instances, then they may resist and may alter their individual circumstances, or – as Marx fervently hoped – rebel collectively against the structures of power through which circumstances and life-chances for individuals arise.
Marx's politics resisted the idea that the future must necessarily be the same as the presumed certainties of the present, and his conception of class was performative – it was something that had to be made, not just identified. And it was analytical – it arose in and through specific properties of commodified production for exchange, including the reproduction of human labour ‘inputs’. This seems to me to track any number of political movements, positions and arguments of the present, and to give us a ‘take’ on any number of debating points, confrontations, even revolutionary acts and armed uprisings as they break out. But certainly this political orientation towards class does not describe all conflicts everywhere, since the point in Marx's activisms was to make conflicts that ‘looked like that’. Nor is this political orientation a simple prescription for any and every conflict. Looked at that way, maybe Marx's legacy can be an inspiration, rather than an exegetical burden. And looked at that way, class struggle, class analysis and class theory set a stage for seeing what Marx has to say about history, progress, democracy, socialism/communism, capitalism, revolution, exploitation and alienation – which is how this book was structured.
Alternatively there is no law against reading Marx as a philosopher, a sociologist, a political scientist or an economist, where an only slightly varied canon of ‘basic’ writings sits easily in ‘readers’ for instructors and students. As with the political ‘take’ outlined above, but in a rather contrasting manner, this academic approach produces a number of ‘Marxes’ more or less fit for purpose, generating appropriately knotty puzzles and more or less inspiring scholarly enquiries. Explication in that way began in earnest just after Marx died, with formulations of his relationship to, and of course critique of, philosophical materialisms, idealisms, Hegelian dialectics, particular histories and the like, generally extrapolating from what he said politically about materialists, idealists, Hegelians, dialecticians and historical changes. Much the same applies to somewhat later constructions of his ‘theories’ of class, class politics, the state, revolution and communism, as well as to the intricacies of his work on value, surplus-value, labour-power, money, capital and markets, and by extension to more familiar economic concepts of price, rent, productivity and crisis. There is no doubt that he is good fun, as any number of authors can be when they're sufficiently revivified as teachers and colleagues (even if some hundreds of years old). And there is no doubt that his argumentative analyses and ad hominem critiques are intricately and eruditely argued in a memorable rhetorical manner.
This book has been quite selective in ‘bringing in’ some of the various ‘Marxes’ along the way, so as to give the reader a contemporary view of his legacy (his actual will and testament was quite a simple affair, though his literary executor, Engels, exploited the surviving materials in ways described above). Thus Leninists, Stalinists and Maoists do not figure in this introductory study, but the construction of a ‘materialist theory of history’ certainly does, since that has persisted as an intellectual and political artefact since the days of Engels and on into the present. Similarly other canonical concepts such as bourgeoisie and proletariat, revolutionary transformation, dictatorship of the proletariat, value and surplus-value, and communism (if sketchily) figure here as ‘basics’. The now ubiquitous ‘base and superstructure’ metaphor only occurs once as such in Marx's writings, and then rather tentatively and in passing; it comes up here in discussions of historical change, where he situated this rather tempting image. And similarly in his political interventions Marx did not resort to ‘dialectic’ as a formula, and rather tetchily remarked that he had no ‘master key’ for historical development and political change, foreswearing any ‘all-purpose formula of a general historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical’.1 Once again, this proved a tempting idea, developed at length by Engels, and it has been pursued by some distinguished (and some very undistinguished) philosophers.
However, it is certainly not the case that Marx's activisms tracked all our current ones, and it follows that he might not have much to say to us in certain respects. But given his status as intellectual and political reference point, attempts are always underway to make him speak to these concerns, though the results are often ‘a stretch’ (or indeed that he is not obviously on the right side of currently ‘progressive’ issues, causes and movements). Marx was not actively engaged with ‘the woman question’, which generated overt struggle and controversy in socialist circles in the later 1870s, so rather predictably ‘a Marx’ has been constructed since then to speak to that question, and to gender-hierarchy in relation to class-hierarchy, as he conceived it. As described above, this sort of construction involves ‘mining’ the archive for snippets and quotations, as indeed women (though not men-as-men in a gendered account) figure from time to time in various contexts, though as an adjunct to matters at hand.2
The politics of nationalism, race/ethnicity and the post-colonial perspective have similarly undertaken to locate Marx's ‘thought’ in relation to on-going political concerns and projects, both practical and intellectual. The Manifesto is famously dismissive of nationalisms as potent and persisting political movements (‘Workers have no nation of their own’), though section IV of the text deals with socialist parties in national settings, necessarily involved in coalitional politics.3 Marx's journalism is in no way dismissive of nations and nationalist projects, since he engages explicitly with imperial conquest, nation-building and nationalist revolt in economic and political terms. He generally promoted an international perspective on class struggle and working-class liberation, as one would expect – even if he (and indeed often we ourselves) are somewhat stuck for easy analysis and easy answers.4 Though prone in correspondence to casual expressions that are today flagged as racist, his activisms were most definitely on-side with anti-slavery movements (even if he was rather unforthcoming on other aspects of racial hierarchy within class-structured societies). Constructing ‘a Marx’ to speak to these issues, particularly the centrality (rather than marginality) of colonialism to capitalism and its ‘inner logic’, is not particularly easy – but then scholars today seldom find these issues very straightforward even in conceptual terms.5
But in many ways Marx was different, which is why this book has focused on him as an engagé activist. While not all ‘great men’ of Western, white academia were disengaged from their political environment or indeed from self-conscious interventions from time-to-time, Marx was unusually consistent as a political animal, even if not a politician, exactly. None of his contemporaries had quite his persistence, most faded into obscurity or even recanted their youthful radicalism, and some indeed rose within the ranks of respectable socialist party politics. However, events unfolded during the twentieth century that made Marx iconic, but formulaic: Lenin, Stalin and Mao produced primers, short courses, paraphrases and reductions to suit their political purposes. But unlike Marx, these men were politicians and became world leaders, but then from today's perspectives none of these former heroes (of various self-styled and contending Marxisms) figures very large in the ‘social theory’ world of academic study. In a sense, they succeeded at what Marx apparently did not try. By contrast Platonists or Aristotelians or Kantians or Hegelians or Ricardians or Weberians have not figured that way on the world stage, and their respective gurus did not acquire such highly politicized avatars as was Marx's fate.
In this book, then, a political ‘take’ on Marx – as an activist in the ‘everyday’ – does not produce a new version of any of the ‘Marxes’ to date, or a one-life-suits-all ‘Marxes’ to date, but then I am arguing that that is a strength, though not of your author – but rather of the subject.