Hyacinth
8th January 2011, 09:14
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2): Has another Marx been revealed? (http://links.org.au/node/2083)
Interview with Marcello Musto, author of The Rediscovery of Karl Marx.
I thought this of special interest to those interested in the dialectics/anti-dialectics debate.
In the preparatory manuscripts for the third volume of Capital, Marx wrote that he was trying to present the “organisation of the very different from the one made by Plekhanov and, even worse, later by the fathers of that inflexible monism called Dialekticeskij materialism.
Anyway, the list of Marx’s ideas that have been misunderstood or completely dostorted by some of his “followers” or by the self-professed custodians of his thought is very long. Distorted by different perspectives into being a function of contingent political necessities, he was assimilated to these and defamed in their name. From being critical, his theory was utilised as bible-like verses. Far from heeding his warning against “writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future”, these custodians transformed him, instead, into the illegitimate father of a new social system. A very rigorous critic and never complacent with his conclusions, he became instead the source of the most obstinate doctrinarianism. A firm believer in a materialist conception of history, he was removed from his historical context more than any other author. From being certain that “the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the workers themselves”, he was entrapped, on the contrary, in an ideology that saw the primacy of political vanguards and the party prevail in their role as proponents of class consciousness and leaders of the revolution. An advocate of the idea that the fundamental condition for the maturation of human capacities was the reduction of the working day, he was assimilated to the productivist creed of Stakhanovism. Convinced of the need for the abolition of the state, he found himself identified with it as its bulwark.
Interview with Marcello Musto, author of The Rediscovery of Karl Marx.
I thought this of special interest to those interested in the dialectics/anti-dialectics debate.
In the preparatory manuscripts for the third volume of Capital, Marx wrote that he was trying to present the “organisation of the very different from the one made by Plekhanov and, even worse, later by the fathers of that inflexible monism called Dialekticeskij materialism.
Anyway, the list of Marx’s ideas that have been misunderstood or completely dostorted by some of his “followers” or by the self-professed custodians of his thought is very long. Distorted by different perspectives into being a function of contingent political necessities, he was assimilated to these and defamed in their name. From being critical, his theory was utilised as bible-like verses. Far from heeding his warning against “writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future”, these custodians transformed him, instead, into the illegitimate father of a new social system. A very rigorous critic and never complacent with his conclusions, he became instead the source of the most obstinate doctrinarianism. A firm believer in a materialist conception of history, he was removed from his historical context more than any other author. From being certain that “the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the workers themselves”, he was entrapped, on the contrary, in an ideology that saw the primacy of political vanguards and the party prevail in their role as proponents of class consciousness and leaders of the revolution. An advocate of the idea that the fundamental condition for the maturation of human capacities was the reduction of the working day, he was assimilated to the productivist creed of Stakhanovism. Convinced of the need for the abolition of the state, he found himself identified with it as its bulwark.