Marxism(s)
Last update: 07 Dec 2024 23:54First version: 17 September 2019 (or earlier)
Karl Marx was a great and influential thinker, one who inaugurated a tradition of thought (and action inspired by thought) which has been extremely consequential for the world. This tradition is itself a historical entity, whose content changes over time and space and social settings. Indeed, like most long-lived traditions, it is not so much one entity as a branching lineage, spreading out, mutating locally, hybridizing with all kinds of other traditions. The mere fact that in 1948, a century after the Manifesto, one could point to both Theodor Adorno and Mao Zedong as important Marxist thinkers shows something of this divergence; and I daresay things are no more unified now. Self-proclaimed "Marxists" are adherents of that tradition who find it useful, or compelling, to point back towards Marx as the founder, and to insist that whatever modifications may have been made, the essence has been preserved; but what that essence is, is a point of disagreement among them. I find the historical definition more fruitful than disputes about essences. (I hope that in his better moments Uncle Karl would agree with me, but I also know he had plenty of not-best moments too.) The question of traditions which in fact descend from Marx, but don't acknowledge it, is an interesting one, but more complicated than I feel like wrestling with right now.
This notebook is going to be reserved for notes and references on the more intellectually-interesting forms of Marxism, rather than the numerically-predominating Stalinist, Maoist, etc., party drivel. (Though the fact that those, too, are parts of the Marxist tradition is an important fact about that tradition.)
Part of my interest is in collecting extremely unorthodox Marxists. These include Otto Neurath and Joseph Schumpeter. K. A. Wittfogel would be another.
- See also:
- Analytical Marxism
- the Frankfurt School (Adorno)
- Historical Materialism
- Leszek Kolakowski
- Karl Marx
- the Left
- Socialism
- the USSR
- L. S. Vygotsky
- Recommended, big picture:
- Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism
- Recommended, close-ups (excluding those on special topics in the notebooks above):
- Perry Anderson
- Mike Beggs, "Zombie Marx", Jacobin 14 July 2011
- Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism = Evolutionary Socialism
- Norman Geras, Literature of Revolution: Essays on Marxism
- Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince
- Stuart Hall
- "For a Marxism without Guarantees", Australian Left Review Winter 1983 pp. 38--43 [Not too hard to find online, which is obviously how I read it...]
- "The Problem of Ideology --- Marxism without Guarantees", Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 28--44
- James Joll
- The Second International, 1889--1914
- Gramsci
- Alec Nove
- Stanley Pierson, Leaving Marxism: Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology
- Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
- Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station
- Recommended, criticisms from the outside (mostly from liberals):
- Raymond Aron
- Marxism and the Existentialists
- The Opium of the Intellectuals
- Ernest Gellner
- Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals
- State and Society in Soviet Thought
- Karl Popper
- The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. II
- The Poverty of Historicism
- To read (very, very, misc.):
- Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey
- Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg
- Maurice A . Finocchiaro, Beyond Right and Left: Democratic Elitism in Mosca and Gramsci
- Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy: What Marx and Marxists Haven't Understood and Why
- Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History
- David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique
- C. Wright Mills, The Marxists
- Christina Morina, The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Changed Everything
- Jeffrey Reiman, As Free and as Just as Possible: The Theory of Marxian Liberalism
- Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880--1938
- Gerson S. Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia
- Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia