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Marx and Political Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
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A signal danger in thinking about politics in terms of some larger philosophical conception—whether of history, anthropology, ontology, and so on—is that one may fail to attain practical concreteness. Marx thought he had overcome this problem when he conceived his own project as a dialectical unity of theory and practice. Yet, as is widely recognized, Marx's own elucidations of his project's core focus, the transition from capitalism to socialism, are difficult to grasp unambiguously as a concrete political program. The twentieth century has borne witness to this both as the collective tragedy of Stalinist totalitarianism and as the inability to theorize a coherent and politically viable Marxist humanism.
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References
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3 The locus classicus in this respect is the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. The contemporary bellwether for this sort of analysis is Louis Althusser; see his For Marx (New York, 1970)Google Scholar and, with Balibar, Etienne, Reading Capital (London, 1970)Google Scholar. From a nonpositivist perspective, Antonio Gramsci sought to reformulate Marx's conception of base and superstructure to suit his own view of political education. I have analyzed this effort in my doctoral dissertation, “The Political Thought of Antonio Gramsci: A Study in the Marxist Conception of Political Education” (Brandeis University, 1976), chap. 7Google Scholar. Williams, Raymond has extended Gramsci's analysis in his “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review, 82 (1973), 3–16Google Scholar.
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6 I am fully aware that this organization skirts the issue of whether or not there is a coupure épistémologique in Marx's philosophical self-understanding, but I consider this issue to be too peripheral to the present inquiry to justify extended comment. Let me simply acknowledge that my sympathy with the anti-Althusserian position has led me to treat all Marx's writings as of equal potential validity for illuminating the question under discussion.
7 I have attempted to deal with both these matters in my doctoral dissertation cited in note 3.
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16 Cf. Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (London, 1968), chap. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Oilman, Bertell, Alienation (London, 1971), chap. 7Google Scholar. Oilman's analysis of Marx's view of human nature is among the best in English. Much of my thinking on Marx has been inspired by it, though as I argue below, his conclusions contain an important mistake.
17 Y.M., pp. 293–294.
18 Ibid., p. 414.
19 Ibid., pp. 466–468.
20 Ibid.
21 Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Livingstone, R. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar, and especially the early essays in it, remains the locus classicus in this respect.
22 Y.M., p. 368.
23 Ibid., p. 291.
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26 Y.M., p. 292. Such descriptions could be multiplied at great length for they abound especially in the Marx-Engels correspondence. Consider for instance the following excerpt from January 14, 1848, Engels to Marx, which portrays the workers then leading the Communist League: “With the League things go miserably here. Such sleepy-headedness and petty rivalry of these fellows with each other is something I could never have imagined. The Weitlingerei and Proudhonisterei are really the supreme expression of the living conditions of these asses, and so there is nothing that can be done about it. Some are genuine Straubinger [tramps], aging Knoten [louts], and the rest are on the way to becoming petty bourgeois” (quoted in Wolff, Bertram, Marxism: One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine [New York, 1965], p. 198Google Scholar).
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30 Piccone, for instance, sets out from the Third Thesis on Feuerbach as I have, but then slides too easily into the view that because capitalism denies the worker his “self-development” he will have the need and the power to undertake revolution.
31 The main works I have in mind are those included in Tucker, Marx-Engels, pts. 3 and 4; the journalism collected by Avineri, Shlomo in Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; a few of the articles collected in Adoratsky, V., ed., Selected Works, 2 vols. (New York, 1935)Google Scholar; and relevant letters in the Correspondence 1846-1895: A Selection (London, 1934)Google Scholar and the Utters to Americans, 1848–1895 (New York, 1953)Google Scholar.
32 Y.M., p. 214.
33 Here lie the roots in Marx of Jürgen Habermas' project to create a new critical theory with a cognitive interest in emancipatory communication. Habermas explicitly links his project to the model of communicative interaction in psychoanalysis. Cf. Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971), chaps. 10–11Google Scholar.
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35 Correspondence 1846–1895, p. 60. The letter is dated September 24, 1852; the emphasis is Engels'.
36 Selected Works, 2: 442.
37 Quoted in Wolff, B., Marxism, p. 200Google Scholar. This letter was dated February 29, 1860.
38 Cf. Lafargue's, Paul “Reminiscences,” in Selected Works, I: 81–102Google Scholar.
39 Y.M., p. 257.
40 Quoted in Avineri, , Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, p. 213Google Scholar. See also Avineri's discussion in his Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, chap. 2.
41 Correspondence 1846–1895, p. 82.
42 Cf. the discussion in Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, chap. 7. Avineri is quite right in stressing that Marx's opposition to putschism was always fervent and unconditional. But Avineri goes too far when he denies (p. 196) that Marx was a Blanquist from 1848-April, 1850. He thinks that such a position “fails to explain why Marx totally altered his views between March and September, 1850, when he caused the split in the League precisely because he opposed the Blanquist elements.” On the contrary, it is precisely the abruptness of his departure from Blanquism which makes it plausible to believe that he did embrace it. These were, after all, the wistful post-1848 years when revolutionary energies still ran high while its prospects quickly faded. Marx was in fact one of the first of his fellow revolutionaries to see through the dream and into reality. In any case, the March, 1850, address cannot be passed off as mere lip service to Blanquism when its central point— the need for permanent revolution—is offered with precisely the same language Marx used to praise Blanquism in The Class Struggles in France. For fuller documentation on this point, see Wolff, B., Marxism, p. 154Google Scholar.
43 Selected Works, 2: 15. Marx also often referred to the League as a “propaganda association.” See his Herr Vogt, Werke, vols. 1–39 (Berlin, 1956), 14:438Google Scholar.
44 Quoted in Wolff, , Marxism, p. 157Google Scholar, emphasis added.
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46 Ibid., p. 400.
47 Ibid., p. 404; see p. 343 for the Manifesto reference.
48 Ibid.
49 Selected Works, 2: 616.
50 Tucker, , Marx-Engels, p. 416Google Scholar.
51 Selected Works, 2: 618.
52 Ibid.
53 Tucker, , Marx-Engels, p. 416Google Scholar.
54 Y.M., p. 261. Original emphasis.
55 Y.M., p. 438.
56 Tucker, , Marx-Engels, p. 416Google Scholar.
57 Ibid., p. 370.
58 Ibid.
59 By an educational program I have in mind, for instance, the series of lectures on economics which Marx gave in 1850–1851 to the Communist Worker's Educational Union. Cf. the reminiscences of Liebknecht, Wilhelm in Selected Works, 1: 106Google Scholar.
60 The first (Y.M., p. 214) occurs in a discussion of the editorial policy of the soon to be established Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The second (Tucker, , Marx-Engels, p. 404Google Scholar) singles out the ineptitude of two Social Democratic newspapers as the antithesis of “real educative elements”.
61 Cf. Tucker, , Marx-Engels, p. 360Google Scholar. Later in life Marx took a more skeptical view when he wrote to Sorge (October 19, 1877) that “for tens of years we have been clearing out of the German workers heads [Utopian Socialist ideas] with so much toil and labor” (Selected Works, 2: 625).
62 Cf. the quoted passage in Beer, Max, A History of British Socialism, 2 vols. (London, 1919), 2: 219Google Scholar.
63 Cf. Engels, to Bebel, , 03 18–28, 1875, in Correspondence, 1846–1895, p. 336Google Scholar.
64 Quoted in Wolff, B., Marxism, p. 242Google Scholar.
65 Letters to Americans, p. 94. Original emphasis.
66 Avineri, , Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p. 144Google Scholar.