Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx’s

Theory

Ingo Elbe

The objective of the following observations is to offer a rough overview of central ways of
reading Marx’s theory. These are to be presented – by means of a few selected topics – as
Marxisms that can be relatively clearly delimited from one another, and the history of their
reception and influence will be evaluated with regard to the common-sense understanding of
“Marxist theory.”

A distinction will be made between the hitherto predominant interpretation of Marx, primarily
associated with political parties (traditional Marxism, Marxism in the singular, if you will),
and the dissident, critical forms of reception of Marx (Marxisms in the plural), with their
respective claims of a “return to Marx.” The first interpretation is understood as a product and
process of a restricted reading of Marx, in part emerging from the “exoteric” layer of Marx’s
work, which updates traditional paradigms in political economy, the theory of history, and
philosophy. Systematized and elevated to a doctrine by Engels, Kautsky, et al, it succumbs to
the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production and culminates in the apologetic sci-
ence of Marxism-Leninism. The other two interpretations, specifically Western Marxism as
well as the German neue Marx-Lektüre (“new reading of Marx”), usually explore the “eso-
teric” content of Marx’s critique and analysis of society, often consummated outside of insti-
tutionalized, cumulative research programs, by isolated actors in the style of an “underground
Marxism.”

In order to characterize both ways of reading, some strongly truncated theses, limited to a few
aspects, must suffice. In particular the ambitious proposition, first formulated by Karl Korsch,
of an “application of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of his-
tory itself” – one that goes beyond the mere presentation of intellectual history, towards an
immanent theoretical critique that critically considers the connection between historical forms
of praxis and theoretical formations of Marxism – cannot be carried out here. In addition, a
consideration of those readings which are critical of Marx or Marxism can also be disregarded
here, insofar as their picture of Marx usually corresponds to that of traditional Marxism.

I therefore begin with the hegemonic interpretative model of traditional Marxism, and only at
the end of my presentation will I conclude with a few positive determinations of what I regard
as the fundamental systematic intention of Marx’s work. I do this primarily because a differ-
entiated reading of Marx’s work can only be gained in the course of the learning processes of
Western Marxism and the neue Marx-Lektüre.

I. Marxism
The term “Marxism” was probably first used in the year 1879 by the German Social Democrat
Franz Mehring to characterize Marx’s theory, and established itself at the end of the 1880s as
a discursive weapon used by both critics and defenders of “Marx’s teachings.” The birth of a
“Marxist school,” however, is unanimously dated back to the publication of Anti-Dühring by
Friedrich Engels in the year 1878, and the subsequent reception of this work by Karl Kautsky,
Eduard Berstein, et al. Engels’ writings – even if the terms “Marxism” or “dialectical materi-
alism,” the self-applied labels of traditional readings, do not yet appear in them – supplied
entire generations of readers, Marxists as well as anti-Marxists, with the interpretative model
through which Marx’s work was perceived. In particular, the review of Marx’s Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the late work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of
Classical German Philosophy (1886), and the supplement to Volume III of Capital (1894/95),
achieved an influence that can hardly be underestimated. Above all, however, it was Anti-
Dühring that was to be stylized as the textbook of Marxist theory as well as a positive depic-
tion of a “Marxist worldview”: for Kautsky, “there is no other book that has contributed so
much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx’s Capital is greater. But it was first through
Anti-Dühring that we learned to correctly read and understand Capital.” And for Lenin, it is
one of the “handbooks of every class-conscious worker.”1

At the same time, a general characteristic of the history of “Marxism” is consummated: the
initiators of the theoretical corpus regard it as “unnecessary […] to themselves make an
appearance as eponyms […] the eponyms are not the real speakers.” (Georges Labica) In
many respects, Marxism is Engels’ work and for that reason actually an Engelsism. In what
follows I will name only three points which an ideologized and restricted reception of Marx
could draw upon.

I.1 The Ontological-Determinist Tendency

Scientific socialism was conceived of as an ontological system, a “science of the big picture.”
The materialist dialectic functions here as a “general law of development of nature, society,
and thought,”2 while nature serves for Engels as a “proof of dialectics.”3 Engels already
undertakes a false analogy between historical-social processes and natural phenomena by the
mere fact that in his elucidation of the main features of the dialectic, reference to subject and
object is missing. “Negation of the negation” or the “transformation of quantity into quality”
are identified in the changes in the physical state of water or in the development of a grain of
barley. Against a static point of view, dialectic is supposed to demonstrate the “becoming,”
the “transitory character” of all existence,4 and is bound to traditional dichotomies of the phi-
losophy of consciousness, such as the so-called “great basic question of all philosophy “as to
which component of the relationship between “thinking and being” has primacy.5 The dialec-
tic is split into “two sets of laws,” into the dialectic of “the external world” and the dialectic of
“human thought,” whereby the latter is understood to be merely a passive mental image of the
former.6 Engels constricts – even distorts – the three elementary praxis-philosophical motifs
of Marx, which he had partially still advocated in his earlier writings:

1. The recognition that not only the object, but also the observation of the object is his-
torically and practically mediated,7 not external to the history of the mode of produc-
tion. Against this, Engels emphasizes that “the materialist outlook on nature means
nothing more than the simple conception of nature just as it is, without alien addi-
tion.”8 The naive realism of the theory of reflection systematized by Lenin9 and others
– which falls prey to the reified appearance of immediacy of that which is socially
mediated, the fetishism of an in-itself of that which exists only via a historically deter-
mined framework of human activity – already obtains its foundation in Engels’ writ-
ings.10 As “things refer to consciousness and consciousness refers to things,”11 the
concepts of praxis and the subjective mediation of the object, as well as ideology-
critical considerations, have hardly any place in this paradigm.
 2. The concept of Naturwüchsigkeit (“the state of being naturally derived”), which
Engels had used in The German Ideology in a negative sense, is now turned into a pos-
itive concept. The sublation of specific social laws resting upon the unconsciousness
of social actors is no longer postulated; rather, Engels postulates the conscious appli-
cation of “the general laws of motion […] of the external world.”12
3. If Marx writes in the Theses on Feuerbach that “all mysteries which lead theory to
mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of
this practice,”13 Engels reduces praxis to the experimental activity of the natural sci-
ences.14 Admittedly, ambivalences and praxis-philosophical motifs can also be found
in the writings of the late Engels, which were largely blotted out by the epigones.
Nonetheless, Engels, bundling together the scientism of his epoch, paves the way for a
mechanistic and fatalistic conception of historical materialism by shifting the accent
from a theory of social praxis to one of a contemplative, reflection-theory doctrine of
development.

The vulgar evolutionism of nineteenth-century European Social Democracy is a nearly ubiq-

uitous phenomenon.15 For that reason, it is not just for Kautsky, Bernstein, and Bebel that the
deterministic concept of development and the revolutionary metaphysic of a providential mis-
sion of the proletariat16 occupy a central place in Marxist doctrine. Accordingly, humanity is
subordinated to a “scientifically verifiable” automatism of liberation. That which presents
itself in the modern scientific garb of a fetishism of laws is ultimately nothing other than a
historical metaphysic with a socialist signature17: precisely the inversion of subject and object
that Marx had criticized. A process consummated behind the back of social actors is attributed
a morally qualified aim.18 Ultimately, in the Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic
Party, this revolutionary passivity19 is codified at an official level as consistent Marxism: the
task of the party is to remain braced for an event that will “necessarily” happen even without
intervention, “not to make the revolution, but rather to take advantage of it.”20 The ontological
orientation and the encyclopaedic character of Engels’ deliberations also feed the tendency to
interpret scientific socialism as a comprehensive proletarian worldview. Ultimately, Lenin
will present the “Marxist doctrine” as “omnipotent,” a “comprehensive and harmonious” doc-
trine that “provides men with an integral world outlook.”21 Correspondingly, the negative
concept of ideology is neutralized into a category for the determinate being of consciousness
in general.

All of these developments, which undoubtedly constitute a theoretical regression, ultimately

culminate in the theory of “Marxism-Leninism” conceived of by Abram Deborin and Josef
Stalin. If for Lenin, Marxism constitutes – despite all emphasis upon the political – a “pro-
found doctrine of development”22 that calls attention to breaks and leaps in nature and society,
in the case of Marxism-Leninism the naturalist-objectivist current is elevated to a state doc-
trine. The central argumentative figure will be: what is valid for nature must also be valid for
history. Or: nature makes leaps, therefore so does history. Political praxis is thus understood
as the consummation of historical laws. This impressive logic is perfected in Stalin’s work
“Dialectical and Historical Materialism” – for decades an authoritative work in the Marxist
theory of the Eastern Bloc. Historical materialism stands for the “application” and “extension”
of ontological principles to society, which implies an epistemological essentialism (a theory
of reflection, which in the form of Dialectical Materialism conceives of “being” and “think-
ing” independent of the concept of praxis) and a sociological naturalism (a developmental
logic – to be “consciously applied” or “accelerated” by the party as the highest technocratic
instance23 – existing independent of human agency).24
I.2 The Historicist Interpretation of the Form-Genetic
Method
If Lenin’s statement that “none of the Marxists for the past half century have understood
Marx” – a dictum that in this case however also applies to Lenin himself – has any validity,
then it is certainly with regard to the interpretation of the critique of political economy. Even
100 years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Engels’ commentary was widely
regarded as the sole legitimate and adequate assessment of Marx’s critique of economy. No
reading in the Marxist tradition was as uncontroversial as the one casually developed by
Engels in texts such as the review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy (1859) or the supplement to Volume III of Capital (1894). Here, considerably more
explicitly than in the objectivist conception of historical materialism, Marxism is Engelsism.

Against the background of his conception of reflection, Engels interprets the first chapter of
Capital as a simultaneously logical and historical presentation of “simple commodity produc-
tion” developing toward the relations of capitalist wage labor, “only stripped of the historical
form and diverting chance occurrences.”25 The term “logical” in this context basically means
nothing more than “simplified.” The method of presentation, the sequence of categories (com-
modity, the elementary, expanded, and general forms of value, money, capital) in the critique
of political economy is accordingly “simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consis-
tent form, of the historical course.”26 The examination of the genesis of the money form is
understood as the description of “an actual event which really took place at some time or
other” and not as “an abstract mental process that takes place solely in our mind.”27 In no
other passage of his work does Engels so drastically reduce historical materialism to a vulgar
empiricism and historicism, as is made evident by his associative chain “materialism – empir-
ically verifiable facts – real process” vs. “idealism – abstract thought process – purely abstract
territory.”

With the “logical-historical” method, Engels provides a catchphrase that will be recited and
stressed ad nauseam in the Marxist orthodoxy. Karl Kautsky, in his enormously influential
presentations, understood Capital to be an “essentially historical work”28: “Marx was charged
with recognizing capital to be a historical category and to prove its emergence in history,
rather than mentally constructing it.”29 Rudolf Hilferding also claims that “in accordance with
the dialectic method, conceptual evolution runs parallel throughout with historical evolu-
tion.”30 Both Marxism-Leninism31 and Western Marxism32 follow Hilferding in this assess-
ment. But if the critique of political economy is interpreted as historiography, then consequen-
tially the categories at the beginning must correspond directly to empirical objects, for exam-
ple a dubious pre-capitalist commodity not determined by price,33 and the analysis of the form
of value must begin with the depiction of a coincidental, moneyless interaction of two com-
modity owners – with Engels’ so-called “simple production of commodities,”34 an economic
epoch he dates from 6000 BC to the 15th century AD. According to this conception, Marx’s
law of value35 operates at times in this epoch in a pure form “unadulterated” by the category
of price, which Engels illustrates with the feigned example of a moneyless “exchange”
between medieval peasants and artisans.

Here we are dealing with a transparent social interrelationship between immediate producers
who are at the same time the owners of their means of production, in which one producer
labors under the watchful eye of the other, and therefore “the peasant of the Middle Ages
knew fairly accurately the labor-time required for the manufacture of the articles obtained by
him in barter.”36 Under the conditions of this “natural exchange”, it is not some normative cri-
terion that is for him “the only suitable measure for the quantitative determination of the val-
ues to be exchanged,”37 but rather the abstraction of a labor-time consciously and directly
measured by the actors. Neither the peasant nor the artisan is so stupid as to exchange unequal
quantities of labor38: “No other exchange is possible in the whole period of peasant natural
economy than that in which the exchanged quantities of commodities tend to be measured
more and more according to the amounts of labor embodied in them.”39 According to Engels,
the value of a commodity is determined consciously by the labor, measured in time, of indi-
vidual producers. In this theory of value, money does not play a constitutive role. On the one
hand, it is an expedient and lubricant to trade that is external to value, but on the other it
serves to obscure the substance of value: suddenly, instead of exchanging according to hours
of labor, at some point exchange is conducted by means of cows and then pieces of gold. The
question of how this notion of every commodity being its own labor-money40 can be recon-
ciled with the conditions of private production based upon the division of labor is not posed
by Engels. Engels – as will be elaborated by the neue Marx-Lektüre – practices exactly what
Marx criticizes in the case of the classical economists, above all Adam Smith: a projection
onto the past of the illusory notion of appropriation through one’s own labor, which in fact
only exists in capitalism; neglect of the necessary connection between value and form of
value41; a transformation of the “objective equalization” of unequal acts of labor consum-
mated by the objective social relationship itself into a merely subjective consideration of
social actors.42

Up until the 1960s, Engels’ theorems continued to be passed on undisputed. Along with his
formula (once again taken from Hegel) of freedom being the insight into necessity, and the
drawing of parallels between natural laws and social processes, they gave sustenance to a
social-technological “concept of emancipation,” according to the following premise: social
necessity (above all the law of value), which operates anarchically and uncontrolled in capi-
talism, will be, by means of Marxism as a science of the objective laws of nature and society,
managed and applied according to a plan. Not the disappearance of capitalist form-
determinations, but rather their alternative use characterizes this “socialism of adjectives”
(this term comes from Robert Kurz) and “socialist political economy.”43 There is a significant
disproportion between, on the one hand, the emphasis upon the “historical,” and on the other,
the absence of a historically specific and socio-theoretically reflected concept of economic
objectivity. This is made evident by the irrelevance of the concept of social form in the dis-
cussions of traditional Marxism, in which it is at most is considered to be s a category for
ideal or marginal circumstances, but not a constitutive characteristic of Marx’s scientific revo-
lution.44

I.3 The Critique of the Content of the State

Engels’ theoretical statements concerning the state in The Origin of the Family, Ludwig
Feuerbach, Anti-Dühring, and his critique of the Erfurt draft program of the SPD from 1891,
constitute the source of the traditional Marxist conception of the state. In Ludwig Feuerbach,
Engels states that the fact that all needs in class societies are articulated through the will of the
state is “the formal aspect of the matter – the one which is self-evident.”45 The main question
of a materialist theory of the state, however, is “what is the content of this merely formal will
– of the individual as well as of the state – and whence is this content derived? Why is just
this willed and not something else?”46 The result of this purely content-based question con-
cerning the will of the state is for Engels the recognition “that in modern history the will of
the state is, on the whole, determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy
of this or that class, in the last resort, by the development of the productive forces and rela-
tions of exchange.”47 Furthermore, in his deliberations in The Origin of the Family Engels
works with universal-historical categories onto which modern designations like “public
authority” are projected, and constantly assumes “direct relations of domination, immediate
forms of class rule”48 in order to explain “the” state, which is consequentially understood as a
mere instrument of the ruling class. From this content-fixated and universal-historical way of
considering the state, it can be deduced that Engels loses sight of the actually interesting ques-
tion, namely as to why the class content in capitalism takes on the specific form of public
authority.49 The personal definition of class rule extracted from pre-capitalist social forma-
tions ultimately leads to reducing the anonymous form of class rule institutionalized in the
state to a mere ideological illusion, which, in the manner of the theory of priestly deception, is
interpreted as a product of state tactics of deception. Engels in any case attempts to make the
class character of the state plausible by referring to “plain corruption of officials” and “an
alliance between the government and the stock exchange.”50 Nonetheless, in Engels’ work
there still exists, despite the predominance of the instrumentalist/content-fixated perspective,
an unmediated coexistence between the determination of the state as the “state of the capital-
ists” and of the state as “ideal total capitalist.”51 The last definition conceives of the state “not
as a tool of the bourgeoisie […] but rather as an entity of bourgeois society,”52 and an “organ-
isation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of
the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of indi-
vidual capitalists.”53 But the specific formal aspect of modern statehood is not yet explained
by this reference to functional mechanisms. Engels also paved the way for the theory of state-
monopoly capitalism.54 In the Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 he
writes: “I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capi-
talist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in
that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which
is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no
longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we
pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches
of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”55 Finally,
in Anti-Dühring Engels writes of the state as real total capitalist: “The more productive forces
it takes over into its possession, the more it actually becomes a real aggregate capitalist, the
more citizens it exploits.” Here Engels reveals a limited understanding of private production,
and a tendency to equate state planning and monopoly power with direct socialization,56 rein-
forced by his construction of the fundamental contradiction and his tendency to identify the
division of labor within a factory and the division of labor in society. Engels does note that
“the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do
away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces,”57 but nonetheless sees an immedi-
ate transition to socialism setting in as a result, whereas the concepts of monopoly and state
intervention remain “economically completely undetermined.”58 Engels thus suggests that the
workers’ movement merely has to take over the forms of corporate bookkeeping in joint-stock
companies and the comprehensive planning by monopolies developed in capitalism. For
Engels, the bourgeoisie has already become obsolete through the separation of ownership and
management functions.59 The “transformation of the great establishments for production and
distribution into joint-stock companies and state property” demonstrates, according to Engels,
“how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose”, i.e. for managing “modern productive
forces”: “All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees.
The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off
coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one
another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now
it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of
the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.”60
Reviewing this history of reception (only roughly outlined here), one could claim that Marx-
ism in the form presented here was a rumor about Marx’s theory, a rumor that was gratefully
taken up by most critics of “Marx” and merely supplemented with a minus sign. In fact such
an assertion – as accurate as it may be overall – makes things too easy, in that it disregards
certain deviations from the dominant doctrine that also understood themselves to be
Marxisms, while also regarding the above misinterpretations as completely external to Marx’s
own theory, thus excluding the possibility of any inconsistencies or theoretical-ideological
ambiguities in Marx’s work. To clarify this question, a glance at the differentiated reading of
Marx’s texts worked out in the so-called “reconstruction debates” will be useful.

In this respect, traditional Marxism should be understood here as an elaboration, systematiza-

tion, and assumption of dominance of the ideological content of Marx’s work – within the
framework of a reception by Engels and his epigones. Practical influence was almost exclu-
sively allotted to these restricted and ideologized interpretations of Marx’s theory, as histori-
cal determinism or proletarian political economy.

II. Western Marxism

The formation of a Western Marxism61 arises from the crisis of the socialist workers’ move-
ment in the wake of the First World War (the collapse of the Second International as a result
of the policy of defense of the fatherland, the defeat of revolutions in Central and Southern
Europe, the emergence of fascist forces, etc.). Here it is Georg Lukács’ and Karl Korsch’s
texts published in 1923 which assume a paradigmatic character. Above all Lukács is consid-
ered the first Marxist theorist who at the level of social theory and methodology called into
question the hitherto self-evident assumption of the complete identity of Marx’s and Engels’
theories. At the center of his critique stood Engels’ neglect of the subject-object dialectic as
well as his concept of a dialectic of nature, to which the fatalism of Second International
Marxism was oriented. Against this ontologization of historical materialism into a contempla-
tive worldview, Lukács, like Western Marxism as a whole, understands Marx’s approach to
be a critical revolutionary theory of social praxis. Against the scientistic talk of “objective
laws of development” of social progress, Lukács posits the critique of ideology of reified con-
sciousness, deciphering the capitalist mode of production as a historically specific form of
social praxis ossified into a “second nature,” and emphasizing revolution as a critical act of
practical subjectivity. Self-descriptions such as “philosophy of praxis” (Gramsci) or “critical
theory of society” (Horkheimer) therefore do not constitute code words or conceptual equiva-
lents for official party doctrine, but rather emphasize a learning process from which “arises a
critical, action-oriented current of thought of Marxist heritage.”62 Although Western Marxism
at first positively adopted the activist impulses of the October Revolution, its leading repre-
sentatives would quickly come to reject the doctrine of Leninism, above all its continuation of
a naturalistic social theory and its false universalization of the experience of the Russian Rev-
olution. Georg Lukács’ critique of Bukharin’s “Theory of Historical Materialism” serves as an
example of the former. In his critique, Lukács charges that Bukharin’s theory, with its con-
cepts of the primacy of the development of the forces of production and the seamless applica-
tion of the methods of natural science to the study of society, is fetishistic and obliterates the
“qualitative difference” between the two subject areas of natural and social sciences, thus
acquiring “the accent of a false ‘objectivity’ and mistaking the core idea of Marx’s method,
namely the ascription of “all economic phenomena to the social relationships of human
beings to one another.”63

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci provided the exemplary critique of the fixation of revolu-
tionary strategy upon the model of the October Revolution. Initially, he had greeted the Octo-
ber Revolution as a “revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital,”64 that is to say as a refutation of
the allegedly proven impossibility of socialist revolution in industrially backwards countries.
In an almost religious manner, he cited the voluntaristic “socialist annunciation” as a source
of a collective socialist “popular will” against a class consciousness mechanically derived
from the economy and the level of its forces of production. Later, Gramsci would confront the
Marxism of the Third International with his theory of hegemony, which rejects the “war of
maneuver” of a frontal attack upon the repressive state apparatus as being a useless revolu-
tionary strategy for modern Western capitalist societies. According to Gramsci, within these
social formations “civil society” is composed of a labyrinthine structure of apparatuses in
which patterns of thought and behavior are generated which exhibit an inertia that cannot be
shaken by grandiose political deeds. The Russian revolutionary model is also condemned to
failure in the West because the belief in the universal nature of experience of the Bolsheviks
with a centralist-despotic Tsarism leads to a disregard for the relevance of ideological social-
ization by means of the apparatuses of civil society, and their effect: subjection in the form of
autonomous agency. However, both Lukács and Gramsci remain loyal to the “exclusively
proletarian” conception of revolution to the extent that the former, despite his reflections upon
reified consciousness, still attributes an epistemological privilege to the proletariat guaranteed
by its economic position, while Gramsci’s strategically motivated theory of civil society is
fixated upon the room for maneuver of the working class.

With the attempt at a social-psychological exploration of the drive/structural foundations of

the reproduction of an “irrational society,” above all in the form of authoritarian and antise-
mitic attitudes, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, after Max Horkheimer’s assump-
tion of its directorship in 1931, achieved a level of reflection that other representatives and
currents of Western Marxism could not match,65 and which gives up on the reassuring support
of an imagined class consciousness of the proletariat. Finally, the empirical class conscious-
ness of the proletariat as the only existing class consciousness is subjected to analysis, while
the “irrational,” emotional dimensions of social praxis ignored by other theorists, such as the
social dimensions of the libidinal, are considered. This theoretical insight into the uncompro-
mising nature of critical theory is at the same time an admission of the historical process of an
increasing rift between emancipatory theory and the perspective of revolutionary praxis. With
the propagation of socialism in one country, the Bolshevization of the Western Communist
Parties, and the establishment of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Third
International after the mid-1920s, there begins the characteristic isolation of the representa-
tives of Western Marxism: this current is left with neither political influence nor (with the
possible exception of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) the institutional foundations
for a normal scholarly praxis. The general characteristics of this Marxist formation – its sense
for the Hegelian legacy and the critical-humanist potential of Marx’s theory, the incorporation
of contemporary “bourgeois” approaches to elucidate the great crisis of the workers move-
ment, the orientation towards methodology, the sensitization to social-psychological and cul-
tural phenomena in connection with the question concerning the reasons for the failure of rev-
olution in “the West”66 –provides the framework for a new type of restricted exegesis of
Marx. This is essentially characterized by the neglect of problems of politics and state theory,
a selective reception of Marx’s theory of value, and the predominance of a “silent orthodoxy”
concerning the critique of political economy. Although the first to understand the character of
capitalist rule the way Marx did – anonymous, objectively mediated, and having a life of its
own – the “founding document” of Western Marxism, Lukacs’ History and Class Conscious-
ness, avoids a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of capitalism. Instead of an analysis of Marx’s
dialectic of the form of value up to the form of capital, which in the theory of real subsump-
tion offers an explanation of the connection – so decisive for Lukács – between commodifica-
tion and the alienated structure of the labor process, one finds merely an analogizing combina-
tion of a value theory reduced to the “quantifying” value-form (due to an orientation towards
Simmel’s cultural critique of money) and a diagnosis, oriented towards Max Weber, of the
formal-rational tendency of the objectification of the labor process and modern law. Until the
mid-1960s it seems that no Western Marxists extended their debate with traditional interpreta-
tions of Marx into the realm of value theory. Some positions go even further than this silent
orthodoxy, and – without having seriously engaged with the critique of political economy –
contrast the “humanist cultural critic Marx” with the “economist Marx” or even regard a
“Marxism” without a critique of political economy as being possible.67

III. The “Neue Marx-Lektüre”

It was first within the framework of the “neue Marx-Lektüre” (“New Reading of Marx”),
which emerged in the mid-1960s, that problems of state theory and economic theory once
again played a role outside of Marxism-Leninism. This new wave of reception of Marx’s the-
ory was also more or less situated outside of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Alongside the
new reading in West European countries, there were isolated rudiments of a “new reading of
Marx” occurring in Eastern Europe.68 Its genesis in West Germany coincided with phenomena
such as the student movement, the first jolts to belief in a perpetual and politically manage-
able post-war prosperity, the breaking up of the anti-communist consensus in the course of the
Vietnam War, etc., yet remained, despite its radical emancipatory claims, confined largely to
academia. Here, we distinguish between this “new reading of Marx” in a broader sense69, and
one more narrowly defined.70 Whereas the former was an international phenomenon, the latter
was confined primarily to West Germany. If the former still remained predominantly trapped
within Engelsian dogma with regard to the critique of political economy, the latter fore-
grounded the revision of previous historicist or empiricist interpretations of Marx’s form
analysis. In terms of content, a threefold abandonment of central topoi of traditional Marxism
was consummated in the main threads of the debate, themselves contradictory and in no way
shared by all participants: a move away from a substantialist theory of value71; abandonment
of manipulative-instrumental conceptions of the state72; and a move away from labor
movement-centric interpretations of the critique of political economy, or interpretations based
on a “labor-ontological” revolutionary theory (or even upon revolutionary theory as such).73
This new reading articulates its theoretical efforts in the form of a reconstruction of Marx’s
theory.

With regard to the critique of economy, a crystallization of central questions and research
tasks occurred within the framework of the 1967 colloquium “100 Jahre ‘Kapital.’”74 A rein-
terpretation of Marx’s critique was envisioned from the methodological perspective of social
theory: the question as to the original object of Capital (economic form-determination), the
particularity of scientific presentation (the dialectic of the forms of value), as well as the con-
nection between the three volumes (“capital in general – many capitals”) are posed anew, as
distinct from quantitative approaches, and with a particular emphasis upon the significance of
the Grundrisse. Within the field of the conflict between “critical” and “structural” Marxisms,
transitional moments of flight from existing methodological traditions arise, oblique to the
classical points of conflict75: both structuralist anti-historicism as well as Hegelian figures of
thought (“progressive-regressive method,” “return to the foundation”) play an important role
in this.

Initially with a lot of “ifs and buts”76, and on some points remaining within the channels of
traditional Marxism, the New Reading of Marx acquired more clearly defined contours over
the course of the 1970s.
Traditional readings of Marx’s theory
Classical Assumption of the Marxism of the
2nd and 3rd Internationals
Levels of the critical-reconstructive
reading
Level 1: e.g. Backhaus (Materialien parts 1
and 2)
Level 2: e.g. Althusser (Reading Capital);
A. Schmidt; Backhaus (Materialien)
Level 3: e.g. Backhaus (Materialien parts 3
and 4); Heinrich (Science of Value)
Marx = Engels (unified paradigm, coherent argu-
mentation, closed “worldview”)
Engels → exoteric vs.
Marx → esoteric
Marx → exoteric meta-discourse vs.
Marx → esoteric real analysis
Marx → exoteric/esoteric meta-discourse
Marx → exoteric/esoteric real analysis

Against the classical myth of the complete equality between the paradigms of Marx and
Engels, with regard to both historical materialism and the critique of political economy,
Engels’ commentaries were criticized as largely inadequate to Marx’s work and remaining at
a purely “exoteric” level that perpetuated traditional paradigms. Thus, in 1974 Hans-Georg
Backhaus emphasized with regard to value theory that the critique was aimed “at an interpre-
tative premise which until recently was considered one of the few uncontested elements of the
Marxist literature, and which structured the reception of Marx’s value theory without being
challenged: the misinterpretation, touched off by Engels, of the first three chapters of Capital
as a value and money theory of what Engels called ‘simple commodity production.’”77 Back-
haus assumes that “proceeding from this fundamental error, Marxist value theory necessarily
inhibited the reception of Marx’s value theory.”78 If therefore at this level an initial distinction
is made between a Marxist theory and Marx’s theory, a problematization of Marx’s meta-
theoretical self-understanding also occurs early on. Louis Althusser had already affirmed,
with the aid of a “symptomatic” reading directed against a subject-centric intentionalist
hermeneutic, that Marx’s work represents a scientific revolution in the theoretical praxis of
the analysis of capitalism, which at the meta-theoretical level is superimposed upon by a dis-
course inadequate to this problematic. Althusser defines the tasks of a reconstruction as the
removal of the inadequate meta-discourse and the transformation of its dominant metaphors,
which he reads as symptoms for the absence of an adequate self-reflection of the real proce-
dure of the analysis of capital, into concepts.79 As distinct from Althusser and his dualist con-
ception of the relationship between the real object and the object of knowledge80, this issue is
usually formulated in the reconstruction debate within the theoretical framework of a Marxian
critique of ideology: Marx distinguishes between “esoteric” and “exoteric” levels in the works
of classical political economy. If the former contains insights into the social context of media-
tion of the bourgeois mode of production, the latter is content with an unmediated description
and systematization of the objective forms of thought of the everyday consciousness of social
actors, remaining trapped in the reified illusion of the immediacy of phenomena which are in
fact socially mediated. So the “exoteric” argumentation cannot be traced back psychologically
to subjective deficiencies or even conscious attempts at deception on the part of theorists. It
results from a determinate form of thought which is the systematic and initially involuntary
product of the forms of social intercourse of the capitalist mode of production. The recon-
struction debate would now apply the esoteric/exoteric distinction to Marx’s work itself.

Ultimately, even in the critique of political economy and in historical materialism – that is to
say in the theoretical praxis regarded at the previous stage of reconstruction as an intact “eso-
teric” layer – “exoteric” content and conceptual ambivalence “between scientific revolution
and classical tradition”81 are manifest. The doctrine of the inviolability of the presentation of
the critique of political economy in Capital is finally discarded. In place of the legend of a lin-
ear progression of knowledge on Marx’s part, there appeared the recognition of a complex
coexistence and interpenetration of progress and regression in the method of presentation and
the state of research of Marx’s critique of economy. Ultimately, the increased popularization
of the presentation of the analysis of the forms of value from the Grundrisse to the second
edition of Capital was pointed out. This popularization, to the extent that it increasingly con-
cealed the form-genetic method, offered points of reference to historicist and substantialist
readings.82

IV. Learning Processes within Marxism

Since there is not enough space within the framework of this text to elucidate even approxi-
mately the aspects of a scientific revolution – internal learning processes, but also regressions
to traditional economic and historical-philosophical positions in Marx’s work – I will attempt
to briefly mention some of the points arrived at in the above-mentioned learning processes
within Marxism.

Marx’s theory does not affirm some kind of automatic liberation; rather, it should be under-
stood as the theoretical instance of a body of work, mediated by analysis and critique, con-
tributing to the liberation from the automatism of an irrational mode of socialization. Marx’s
assertion that he grasps the development of the capitalist mode of production as “a process of
natural history,”83 often cited by both Marxists and anti-Marxists as proof either of the highest
scientific status of Marx’s work or of unscientific prophecy, should be understood as a critical
statement. “Nature” or “naturalness” are negatively determined categories for a social system
that, on the basis of its constitution by the private division of labor, asserts itself with regard
to social actors as a relentless machine using up abstract labor, as a “destiny of value” beyond
all collective and individual control and yet reproducing itself by means of their activity.

Marx’s theory is “a unified critical judgment on previous history, to the effect that men have
allowed themselves to be degraded into objects of the blind and mechanical process of its eco-
nomic development.”84 While Marx does succumb to a historical optimism that often tips over
into a philosophy of history in the declamatory sections of his works, this is fundamentally
contradicted by his scientific critique of philosophies of history and political economy.85 But
it is precisely from these cliches that the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, as
well as the more educated among those who disdain Marx, paste together an abstruse system
of iron historical necessities, up to and including a “law of the sequence of social formations”
which establishes the “general historically necessary tendency of the progress of the human
species.”86

The critique of political economy, which in the form of Marx’s late works “does not with-
stand comparison with the immanent claim of the programmatic declaration in The German
Ideology,”87 namely of presenting the capitalist mode of production in its totality, can be pre-
sented as a process of four critiques: 1) the critique of bourgeois society and its destructive
“natural” forms of development, against the background of the real, objective possibility it
generates of its own emancipatory transcendence, 2) the critique of the fetishized and back-
ward everyday consciousness of social actors systematically generated by these social rela-
tions, 3) the critique of the entire theoretical field of political economy88, which uncritically
systematizes these common perceptions, and 4) the critique of utopian social criticism, which
either confronts the system of the capitalist mode of production with a model of social libera-
tion, or presumes to bring isolated economic forms to bear against the system as a whole by
means of reforms.89 The critique is therefore not immanent in the sense that it would affirm
the determinations of exchange, bourgeois ideals, proletarian demands for rights, or industrial
production (which is subsumed to capital) against capitalism as a whole.
The method of the critique of economy can be described as the “development” or “analysis of
forms.” It aims to grasp the specific sociality of historically distinct modes of production.
Whereas “bourgeois” approaches conduct at best a science of the reproduction of society
within specific economic and political forms, a critique of political economy must be con-
ceived of as a science of these forms.90 Political economy operates at the level of already con-
stituted economic objects, takes them empirically as a given, or can only justify their exis-
tence in a circular manner, without conceptually penetrating the systematic process of their
constitution. It succumbs to the self-mystification of the capitalist world of objects as a world
of natural forms91, thus depriving humans of the ability to configure and alter their fundamen-
tal structures.

In contrast, form-analysis develops these forms (such as value, money, capital, but also law
and the state) from the contradictory conditions of the social constitution of labor, “clarifies
them, grasps their essence and necessity.”92 Form development is not to be understood as the
retracing of the historical development of the object, but rather the conceptual deciphering of
the immanent structural relationships of the capitalist mode of production. It unscrambles the
apparently independent, apparently objectively grounded forms of social wealth and the polit-
ical compulsion of the capitalist mode of production as historically specific and therefore –
albeit in no way arbitrarily or in a piecemeal manner – as changeable forms of praxis.

Traditional as well as Western Marxism had completely ignored the revolutionary scientific
potential of Marx’s approach, his theory of the monetary constitution of value. Above all, the
neue Marx-Lektüre criticized the empiricist-historicist misinterpretation of the method of pre-
sentation that started with Engels, and the “premonetary” interpretation of the theory of value
in Capital, but also ambivalences in Marx’s work itself and the popularization of his method,
which meant “forgoing a systematic elaboration of fundamental ideas of value theory and
methodology.”93 Engels and Traditional Marxism interpreted different levels of abstraction of
the presentation of the laws of the capitalist mode of production in Capital as empirically
coequal levels of a model of historically distinct modes of production. Thus categories such as
abstract labor, value, and the elementary form of value were reinterpreted in an empiricist
way, and the connection between commodity, money, and capital – considered essential by
Marx – was transformed into a coincidence. Marxism thus operated on a methodological and
value-theoretical terrain that Marx had criticized with regard to classical economics. How-
ever, Marx’s critique of political economy is distinct from an alternative political economy in
primarily two respects: in the first instance it is not the theory of surplus-value, but rather the
form theory of labor that distinguishes Marx from classical political economy. Marx criticizes
the way political economy unreflectively presupposes the form of “value,” never questioning
its genesis, unable to grasp labor that takes the form of value as a historically specific social
form (the question is not raised as to “why labour is represented by the value of its prod-
uct”94). Political economy therefore operates fundamentally within the field of fetishistic
forms. Moreover, Marx criticizes the premonetary character of its value theory, since it
“treat[s] the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the
inherent nature of commodities,”95 meaning it does not distinguish between intrinsic and
external measure of value as categories existing at two different levels of theoretical abstrac-
tion, and does not grasp the necessity of the money-form for the exchange of commodities.
Money is understood as a purely technical instrument which for reasons of convenience takes
the place of exchange on the basis of calculations of labor-time magnitudes. In Marx’s work,
on the other hand, money is developed as a necessary moment in the process of commodity
exchange. Without a general form of value, commodities cannot represent value for each
other, and would be reduced to the status of products. One must therefore proceed from the
“equiprimordial” constitution of abstract labor as a logically prior immanent measure of
value, and money as the external measure of value. In this sense, Marx speaks of the sub-
stance of value as a result obtained in exchange which furthermore first acquires an intertem-
poral existence as capital. In contrast to the empiricism and ahistoricism of political economy,
Marx’s approach thus reveals itself to be a perception of essence in the sense of the recon-
struction of a structure and system of agency which is empirically not immediately perceiv-
able – by means of the elaboration of a non-empirical theoretical level which first makes pos-
sible the explanation of empirical forms of appearance, such as money. Marx follows “a prin-
ciple of the development of economic categories by distinguishing between different levels of
abstraction.”96 Categories such as abstract labor or value therefore have no immediate empiri-
cal referents. The sequence of the categories of commodity and money is not to be understood
as a historical sequence of independently existing circumstances, but rather as a conceptual
analysis.

Overview of the Marxisms

 Important Theorists Central Reference Texts Core Concept:
of Marx/Engels Marx’s The-
ory as…
Traditional [F. Engels], K. Kautsky, E. Claim: Doctrine of the Closed, coherent
Marxism Bernstein, Lafargue, F. materialist conception of proletarian world-
[1878ff.] Mehring, A. Bebel, G. history as the center of the view and doctrine
Plekhanov, etc.(= 1st Genera- collaborative works of of the evolution of
tion); V.I. Lenin, L. Marx and EngelsEngels: nature and history
Trotsky, R. Luxemburg, N. Anti-Dühring, Ludwig (“becoming and
Bukharin, M. Adler, R. Hil- Feuerbach, “Review of A passing away”)
ferding (= 2nd Generation) Contribution to the Cri-
tique of Political Econ-
omy” (1859)
etc.Marx: Capital Vol. 1 –
Chapter 32, “Preface” to
Critique (1859), Manifesto
(M/E)
Western Marx- G. Lukács, K. Korsch, E. Claim: Humanist early Critical-
ism [1923ff.] Bloch, H. Lefebvre, Frankfurt work as interpretative revolutionary the-
School, A. Gramsci, K. framework for the ory of social
Kosik, Yugoslav Praxis- “scientific” later praxis (“subjec-
Group (G. Petrovic, P. Vran- worksMarx: “Theses on tive mediation of
icki, etc.), Budapest Feuerbach,” 1844 Manu- the object”)
School (A. Heller, G. Markus, scripts, The German Ideol-
etc.), L. Kofler, J.-P. Sartre ogy (M/E)
neue Marx- [Predecessors: I.I. Rubin, E. Claim: apprehending the Deciphering and
Lektüre [1965ff.] Paschukanis] H.G. Backhaus, whole Marx, or later works Critique of the
H. Reichelt, D. Wolf, H.D. as interpretative frame- Forms of capitalist
Kittsteiner, M. Heinrich, work for the early socialization by
SOST, Projekt worksMarx: Grun- means of logical-
Klassenanalyse/PEM, S. drisse, Capital Vol. I first systematic method
Breuer, State-Derivation edition, Urtext, “Results of of presenta-
Debate (B. Blanke, D. the Immediate Process of tions (“form-
Läpple, MG, J. Hirsch, W. Production” development
Müller/ Ch. Neusüß, N. Kost- and critique”)
ede, etc.)

– Translated by Alexander Locascio

Image thanks to f2b1610.

1. Karl Kautsky, quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, “Engels und die Geschichte des Marx-
ismus,” in Klassen, Politik, Sprache. Für eine theorieorientierte Sozialgeschichte
(Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot,1988), 234n; V.I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and
Three Component Parts of Marxism.” All English quotations from Marx, Engels,
Lenin, and Kautsky taken from the versions available at www.marxists.org ↩
2. Frederick Engels, “Dialectics” in Dialectics of Nature. ↩
3. Engels, “Introduction” in Anti-Dühring. ↩
4. Engels, “Hegel” in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philoso-
phy. ↩
5. Ibid. ↩
6. Engels, “Marx” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩
7. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.” ↩
8. Engels, “Notes and Fragments” in Dialectics of Nature. ↩
9. Above all in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, stylized by Marxism-Leninism as the
classical textbook of dialectical materialism alongside Anti-Dühring. Here, Marxism
becomes an ideology in the strict Marxian sense: a systemization of the forms of
thought of a reified common sense. Concerning the political-pragamatical background
of the text, usually disregarded in ML, see Johannes Busch-Weßlau, Der Marxismus
und die Legitimation politischer Macht (Frankfurt: Campus Verl, 1990), 30. ↩
10. Falko Schmieder points to the a priori role of the medium of photography as a founda-
tion of this naive realism in philosophy, as well as the fundamental commonalities
between Engels, Lenin, and Feuerbach; Ludwig Feuerbach und der Eingang der klas-
sischen Fotografie. Zum Verhältnis von anthropologischem und Historischem Materi-
alismus (Berlin: PHILO-Verlag, 2004), 213. ↩
11. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978),114. ↩
12. Engels, “Marx” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩
13. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.” ↩
14. Engels, “Materialism” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩
15. For more on this, see the study of Hans-Josef Steinberg [1967], Sozialismus und
deutsche Sozialdemokratie. Zur Ideologie der Partei vor dem 1. Weltkrieg (Berlin-
Bonn: 1979), above all 45, 63. Approaches toward a social historical explanation are
offered by idem, 145-150; Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer
Attentismus. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges
(Frankfurt: Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg, 1974), 58-63; Oskar Negt, “Marxismus als
Legitimationswissenschaft,” in N. Bucharin/A. Deborin – Kontroversen über dialektis-
chen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974); Antonio
Gramsci, Philosophie der Praxis. Eine Auswahl (Frankfurt: S Fischer, 1967),1386. ↩
16. For a critique, see Alexandrine Mohl, Verelendung und Revolution. Oder: Das Elend
des Objektivismus. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Marxrezeption in der deutschen
Sozialdemokratie (Frankfurt 1978); Rolf Peter Sieferle, Die Revolution in der Theorie
von Karl Marx (Berlin: Ullstein, 1979); Ingo Elbe, “‘Umwälzungsmomente der alten
Gesellschaft’ – Aspekte der Revolutionstheorie und ihrer Kritik bei Marx,” 2002. ↩
17. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe point out the Darwinist-Hegelian character of this
conception: “Darwinism alone does not offer ‘guarantees for the future,’ since natural
selection does not operate in a direction predetermined from the beginning. Only if a
Hegelian type of teleology is added to Darwinism – which is totally incompatible with
it – can an evolutionary process be presented as a guarantee of future transitions”;
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 2001), 20. ↩
18. For more on this, in an instructive manner, see Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, “Bewusst-
seinsbildung, Parteilichkeit, dialektischer und historischer Materialismus. Zu einigen
Kategorien der marxistisch-leninistischen Geschichtsmethodologie,” Internationale
Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung.
Jg. 10, 1974. ↩
19. See Groh, Negative Integration, 36. ↩
20. Kautsky, quoted in Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 61. See
also Ethics and the Materialist Conception Of History. According to Kautsky, the
prospects for freedom and humanity are not “mere expectations of conditions which
only ought to come, which we simply wish and will, but outlooks at conditions which
 must come, which are necessary.” Kautsky defends himself against interpretations of
necessity “in the fatalist sense, that a higher power will present them to us of itself,”
but assumes an irresistible immanent historical-economic compulsion toward revolu-
tion, whereby the immanent compulsive laws of capitalism and the formation of the
proletariat as a successful revolutionary subject play the same role: “unavoidable in
the sense, that the […] capitalists in their desire for profit [!] revolutionize the whole
economic life, as it is also inevitable that the workers aim for shorter hours of labor
and higher wages, that they organize themselves, that they fight the capitalist class and
its state, as it is inevitable that they aim for the conquest of political power and the
overthrow of capitalist rule. Socialism is inevitable because the class struggle and the
victory of the proletariat is inevitable.” ↩
21. Lenin, “Three Sources.” ↩
22. Lenin, Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism. ↩
23. On the paradoxes of this combination of voluntarism and determinism, see Charles
Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). ↩
24. It is precisely Western Marxism that – against Marxism-Leninism – emphasizes the
non-ontological character of Marx’s materialism; see Max Horkheimer, “Traditional
and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum,
1972), as well as Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (New York: Verso,
2014). Stalin determines the components of Marx’s theory as follows: Dialectic: a uni-
versal logic of development emphasizing discontinuity, which teaches that everything
can be conceived of as in a state of becoming and decaying; Materialism: a contempla-
tive ontology which teaches that consciousness is merely a reflection of a nature exist-
ing independent and outside of consciousness; Historical Materialism: the application
of dialectical materialism to history; universal historical laws are class struggle, the
dialectic between forces of production and relations of production, rooted in the pri-
macy of the development of the forces of production (casua sui concept of forces of
production), and ultimately the law of progress of successive social formations. ↩
25. Engels, “Karl Marx: Critique of Political Economy. Review by Frederick Engels.” ↩
26. Ibid. ↩
27. Ibid. ↩
28. Kautsky [1886], Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren. Gemeinverständlich dargestellt und
erläutert von Karl Kautsky, 21. (Berlin: 1922), viii. ↩
29. Kautsky, quoted in Rolf Hecker, “Einfache Warenproduktion,” 1997. ↩
30. Rudolf Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx. ↩
31. M.M. Rosental [1955], Die dialektische Methode der politischen Ökonomie von Karl
Marx (Berlin: Dietz, 1973). ↩
32. See Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press:
1970). ↩
33. “This makes clear, of course, why in the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds
from the simple production of commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to
arrive from this basis to capital – why he proceeds from the simple commodity instead
of a logically and historically secondary form – from an already capitalistically modi-
fied commodity.” Engels, “Preface” in Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3. ↩
34. Ibid. This interpretation of the analysis of the form of value is also adopted by Kaut-
sky, in The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. ↩
35. That is to say, the law of value discussed by Marx. See Engels’ “Supplement” to vol-
ume 3. ↩
36. Ibid ↩
37. Ibid. ↩
38. “Or is it believed that the peasant and the artisan were so stupid as to give up the prod-
uct of 10 hours’ labor of one person for that of a single hours’ labor of another?”; and
whoever does so learns “only through mistakes.” Ibid. ↩
39. Ibid. ↩
40. In contrast, see Marx’s critique of the notion of labor-money, or the notion of a pre-
monetary commodity exchange in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
and in the Grundrisse. ↩
41. See footnote 33 in chapter one of Capital, Volume 1. ↩
42. For Marx’s view, see for example: “Adam Smith constantly confuses the determina-
tion of the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them with the deter-
mination of their value by the value of labour; he is often inconsistent in the details of
his exposition and he mistakes the objective equalisation of unequal quantities of
labour forcibly brought about by the social process for the subjective equality of the
labours of individuals”; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩
43. According to Marxism-Leninism, “value functions as an instrument of the planned
administration of the socialist processes of production and reproduction, according to
the principles of bookkeeping and control of the mass of labor and of consumption.
Correspondingly, the relation of value is consciously implemented”; Wolfgang Peter
Eichhorn, “Wert” in G. Klaus and M. Buhr, ed. Philosophisches Wörterbuch, Bd. 2
(Westberlin: DEB, 1985), 1291. Within this framework, socialism consists “merely in
the revolutionized way of calculating the same social determination of the products of
human labor as exists in the capitalist commodity economy,” as Stefan Grigat criti-
cally notes; “Kritik und Utopie,” Weg und Ziel, 4 (1997): 20. Thus, allegedly Marxian
communism degenerates into a sort of Proudhonian system of labor notes, as Diethard
Behrens and Kornelia Hafner also observe: “all hitherto existing conceptions of the
transition to socialism resort to models of immediate calculation of labor-value and
utility”; “Auf der Suche nach dem wahren Sozialismus. Von der Kritik des Proudhon-
ismus über die russische Modernisierungsdiktatur zum realsozialistischen Etiketten-
schwindel” in Anton Pannekoek, Marxistischer Antileninismus (Freiburg, 1991), 226.
See here also Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. Die Marxsche Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradi-
tion (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), 385-392; and Kittsteiner, “Bewusst-
seinsbildung.” ↩
44. For example, Engels, “Marx” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩
45. Ibid. ↩
46. Ibid. ↩
47. Ibid, translation modified. ↩
48. Gert Schäfer, “Einige Probleme des Verhältnisses von ‘ökonomischer’ und ‘politis-
cher’ Herrschaft,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Staatstheorie. Materialien zur
Rekonstruktion der marxistischen Staatstheorie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1974). ↩
49. Compare Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism: “why is the apparatus
of state coercion created not as a private apparatus of the ruling class, but distinct from
the latter in the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power distinct from soci-
ety?” ↩
50. Engels, “Barbarism and Civilization” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State. No wonder, then, that Lenin refers affirmatively to this “explanation,”
with its theory of agents and influence. ↩
51. Engels, Anti-Dühring. [Translator’s Note: The official translation of “ideeller
Gesamtkapitalist” in the Marx-Engels Collected Works renders this unsatisfactorily as
“the ideal personification of the total national capital,” when in fact “ideal total capi-
talist” is more accurate.] ↩
52. Johannes Busch-Weßlau, Der Marxismus und die Legitimation politischer Macht,
Frankfurt, Campus-Verlag, 1990). ↩
53. Engels, Anti-Dühring. ↩
54. Hans Holger Paul, Marx, Engels und die Imperialismustheorie der 2. Internationale
(Hamburg, 1978). ↩
55. Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891.” ↩
56. Schäfer, “Einige Probleme,” cxxxi. ↩
57. Engels, Anti-Dühring. ↩
58. Schäfer, “Einige Probleme,” cxxxiv. ↩
59. This old chestnut will later be presented by Wolfgang Pohrt and others as a deep
insight about “late capitalism.” ↩
60. Engels, Anti-Dühring. ↩
61. The term was probably first used in a Leninist polemic against Lukács’ History and
Class Consciousness (see Rudolf Walther, “Marxismus” in O. Brunner, ed.,
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in
Deutschland, Bd. 3, [Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1982], 968), but did not achieve greater signif-
icance, neither as a polemical formulation nor as a self-description by the theorists
commonly subsumed under the name (such as Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, the Frankfurt
School, Gramsci, Lefebvre, etc.). Here, I follow Perry Anderson’s usage of the term in
Considerations on Western Marxism (New York: Verso, 1987). As fruitful as the con-
cept of Western Marxism might be as a heuristic model, its limits must be clearly
shown; see the critique of Anderson by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Westlicher Marxis-
mus?” in Pluraler Marxismus, Bd. 2 (Hamburg: Argument, 1987) and Michael Krätke,
“Marxismus als Sozialwissenschaft” in Haug, Materialien zum Historisch-kritischen
Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Hamburg: Argument, 1996), 77. ↩
62. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci (Hamburg: Argument,
1996), 8. For a critique of the “code word thesis” with regard to Gramsci’s work, see
Haug, “Einleitung,” in Antonio Gramsci, Gefängnishefte 6. Philosophie der Praxis
(Hamburg: Argument, 1995), 1195-1209. ↩
63. Georg Lukács, “N. Bucharin: Theorie des historischen Materialismus (Rezension)” in
N. Bucharin/ A. Deborin: Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Mat-
eralismus, 289, 284. ↩
64. Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution Against Capital.” ↩
65. A scientific psychology cannot be found in the thought of most representatives of
Marxism, apart from positive references to Pavlov’s behaviorism. Psychoanalysis was
mostly rejected, if not demonized as “bourgeois-decadent”. Helmut Dahmer offers a
critical overview of such reactions in Libido und Gesellschaft. Studien über Freud und
die Freudsche Linke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 241-277; within the framework of
Western Marxism, it was primarily Lukács who distinguished himself in the condem-
nation of Freud. Gramsci by his own admission “was not able to study Freud’s theo-
ries” ↩
66. As further characteristics of Western Marxism, Anderson names the recourse to pre-
Marxian philosophy in order to clarify the method of a critical social theory; the incor-
poration of contemporary “bourgeois” theories: an esoteric writing style; a rather pes-
simistic appraisal of historical development markedly divergent from the triumphalist
diction of classical Marxism and Marxism-Leninism; a preference for problems of aes-
thetics. ↩
67. For example, Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man or Jürgen Habermas’ “Recon-
struction of Historical Materialism.” ↩
68. The first attempts at a new reading of Marx already occurred in the 1920s, on the part
of the Soviet authors Isaak Illich Rubin and Evgeny Pashukanis. See I.I. Rubin, Essays
 on Marx’s Theory of Value, and Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and
Marxism. Their awareness of problems of aspects of Marx’s theory with regard to
value and legal theory was not even matched in a rudimentary way for a long time, in
the East or the West. Only with the debates since the end of the 1960s did this change
somewhat. ↩
69. As described by Heinrich “Kommentierte Literaturliste zur Kritik der politischen
Ökonomie,” in Elmar Altvater, Rolf Hecker, Michael Heinrich, Petra Schaper-Rinkel,
ed., Kapital. doc. Das Kapital (Bd. 1) von Karl Marx in Schaubildern und Kom-
mentaren (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), 207; and Urs Jaeggi, “Einige
Bemerkungen zur Orthodoxie und zum Dogmatismus im Historischen Materialismus,”
in Axel Honneth, ed., Theorien des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1977), 146. It is also referred to under the label of “Neo-Marxism.” ↩
70. As defined by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur
Marxschen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg; ça ira, 1997). See also Heinrich, “Kommentierte
Literaturliste,” 211. ↩
71. See Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, and Helmut Brentel, Soziale Form und
ökonomisches Objekt. Studien zum Gegenstands- und Methodenverständnis der Kritik
der politischen Ökonomie (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1989). ↩
72. Concerning the so-called “state derivation debate,” see Norbert Kostede, “Die neuere
marxistische Diskussion über den bürgerlichen Staat. Einführung – Kritik – Resul-
tate,” Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie (1976): 150-196; and Gerd Rudel,
Die Entwicklung der marxistischen Staatstheorie in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt:
Campus-Verlag, 1981). ↩
73. Stefan Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie. Negative Vergesellschaftung und
Arbeitsmetaphysik bei Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977); Mohl, “Verelen-
dung und Revolution”; Helmut König, Geist und Revolution. Studien zu Kant, Hegel
und Marx (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); or the writings of the Krisis group. ↩
74. Alfred Schmidt and Walter Euchner, ed., Kritik der politischen Ökonomie heute. 100
Jahre “Kapital” (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). ↩
75. The “critical Marxism” of the Sixties, of which Alfred Schmidt was the primary advo-
cate, emphasizes the negative and historically limited character and claim to validity
of a “materialism of second nature,” but tends to regard methodological individualism
as an adequate description of coming communist relations. The “scientific” Marxism
of the Althusser school emphasizes, against individualistic theories of a “constituting
subject,” that actors are merely bearers of the relations of productions, but on the basis
of the tendency of its categories to assume universal-historical character (Balibar’s
combinatorics of levels, Althusser’s concepts of praxis and ideology), elevates the
independence of relations of production to a scientific norm). ↩
76. Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform, 11. ↩
77. Ibid., 69. ↩
78. Ibid. ↩
79. See Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” in Louis Althusser and Eti-
enne Balibar, Reading Capital. ↩
80. See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital. The difference between the structuralist
and the critical-reconstructive reading is not limited to this point. Whereas the former
attempts to unmask Hegelianism as an inedaquate meta-discourse, for the latter, refer-
ence to Hegel on questions of methodology is often regarded as the royal road to
understanding Marx’s work. ↩
81. This is the subtitle of Heinrich’s book, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: see Backhaus’ cri-
tique of his own theoretical premises in the first two parts of his Materialien (Back-
haus, Dialektik der Wertform, 132n). ↩
82. For a critical perspective on some aspects of these theses, see Dieter Wolf, Ware und
Geld. Der dialektische Widerspruch im Kapital (Hamburg: VSA, 1958) (republished
in 2002 under the title Der dialektische Widerspruch im Kapital). Wolf also criticizes
tendencies within the neue Marx-Lektüre that identify Marx’s dialectical method with
logical contradictions, thus lending Marx and his method a patina of irrationalism; see
his critique of Colletti and Göhler. Irrationalist positions are also found today by rep-
resentatives of the Krisis and Exit groups and the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum
Freiburg. ↩
83. Marx, “Preface to the First German Edition.” ↩
84. Schmidt, Concept of Nature, 41. ↩
85. On Marx’s critique of philosophies of history, see: Helmut Fleischer, Marxismus und
Geschichte, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975); Kittsteiner, “Bewusstseinsbildung”;
Andreas Arndt, Karl Marx. Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Theorie
(Bochum: Germinal, 1985), 50-76; Rolf Hecker, Carl-Erich Vollgraf, Richard Sperl,
ed., Geschichte und materialistische Geschichtstheorie bei Marx (Hamburg: Argu-
ment, 1996). ↩
86. G. Stiehler, quoted by Jaeggi, “Einige Bemerkungen,” 153. For a “critique” of Marx
that tries to sell this as the authentic position of Marx, see the usual works by Karl
Popper. ↩
87. Helmut Reichelt [1970], Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx
(Freiburg: ça ira, 2001), 73. ↩
88. See Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. ↩
89. On this see Brentel 1989, chapter 5. ↩
90. On this see Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, 380-384. ↩
91. In the complete form in the so-called “Trinity Formula” of the theory of the compo-
nents of value. For a critique of neoclassical economics, see Heinrich, Die Wis-
senschaft vom Wert, 62-85. ↩
92. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” ↩
93. Jan Hoff, Kritik der klassischen politischen Ökonomie. Zur Rezeption der werttheo-
retischen Ansätze ökonomischer Klassiker durch Karl Marx (Köln: PappyRossa,
2004). ↩
94. Marx, Capital, Volume 1. ↩
95. Ibid. ↩
96. Hoff, Kritik der klassischen politischen Ökonomie, 78. ↩