1. A return to Marx’s texts
The work of Karl Marx is no exception to the rule, all the more so as Marx wrote a lot during his lifetime, only parts of which have been published every once in a while during more than one century after his death in 1883. With regard to political economy, for example, some manuscripts were brought out rather quickly: Volumes II and III of Capital contain a selection of manuscripts made by Friedrich Engels and published, respectively in 1885 and 1894; and the three volumes of Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value) contain another selection edited and published by Karl Kautsky in 1905–10, presented as Volume IV of Capital. However, some other important works had to wait much longer: the so-called 1857–58 Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie were first published in a not widely circulated edition in 1939–41, then in a more accessible one in 1953, and were only translated two decades later into different languages; the fragment of a draft (“Urtext”) of the 1859 Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) had to wait until 1939–41 to come out, together with the Grundrisse; and some important material for Volume I of Capital was only available, for a small part, from 1933 — this is the case, for example, of the so-called “unpublished Chapter 6”.
With regard to philosophy, things are still more striking.2 For a long time, only Marx’s introduction to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung”, and his article on the “Jewish question”, “Zur Judenfrage” (both published in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher), were known. The pieces of Marx’s 1841 doctoral thesis that have come down to us — Differenz der Demokritischen und Epikureischen Naturphilosophie (The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature) — were only published in 1902; the 1843 essay Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) in 1927; and the celebrated Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte von 1844 (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) and the 1845 Die deutsche Ideologie (German Ideology), in 1932.
These facts ought to be recalled when trying to understand the history of the debates over Marx’s thought, as well as the present state of the Marx studies. Without going into detail, five main points deserve to be stressed.
(1) First of all, it is clear that the availability, or lack thereof, of manuscripts, some of them of fundamental importance, had an impact on the various interpretations of Marx. During several decades after Marx’s death, numerous writings that are now considered as essential to a correct understanding of his views were simply not available to the general public, and very often it was not even known that such writings existed. Yet, the first interpretations, sometimes very sketchy and ad hoc, adopted and frequently promoted by political organisations, dominated the debates for a long time. This is true, for example, with regard to the general understanding of the content and “method” of Capital, especially in the theory of value and price, the falling rate of profit or the approach to economic crises. This is also the case with regard to the philosophical aspects of Marxism. Engels’ writings, sometimes tinged with Darwinism, coined a vocabulary and an orthodoxy, and were highly influential — whether on Ludwig Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians, the alleged “Utopian” and “scientific” socialisms, “historical materialism” (a phrase coined by Engels) or dialectics (that is, “materialist dialectic” or “dialectics of nature” based on a simplistic interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy). It is basically Engels’ line of thought, stated mainly in the 1880s after the death of Marx, and not Marx’s, that was developed by Marxists in several countries, for example, in works popularising the “materialist conception of history”, or in a book by Kautsky on “the three sources of Marxism”3 (German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy),4 which involved a sketchy and questionable interpretation of Marx. Engels’ views were also influential in Russia, with the development of the alleged “dialectical materialism”, especially by Georgi Plekhanov and Lenin. In all this history, independent intellectuals such as Rudolf Hilferding, Isaak Illich Rubin, György Löwinger (alias Lukács), or Karl Korsch, were rare. Over the decades, the use and abuse of some words like “dialectics” by authors whose knowledge of Hegel apparently was poor or nonexistent, led the discussions astray into blind alleys. Even some very usual vocabulary like the German word “Praxis”, used by Marx (and by Kant) to mean the ordinary practice of an activity, was misunderstood and, at best, confused with the Aristotelian distinction between “praxis” and “poiesis”, thus obscuring Marx’s intellectual developments. Needless to say, all this was a serious impediment to a better understanding of Marx’s texts and thoughts.
(2) Second, this overall chaotic state of things showed the need of a comprehensive edition of Marx’s works. Three attempts were made in this direction.
In 1927, such a systematic and complete edition started to be published by the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow, under the directorship of David Borisovich Goldendakh (alias David Rjazanov). However, in 1931, Stalin ordered Rjazanov’s detention (Rjazanov was executed in 1938) and Vladimir Viktorovich Adoratsky replaced him in the project. The result was the first MEGA — that is, Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Werke. Schriften. Briefe (MEGA being the abbreviation of Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe). This project was stopped in 1935 after 12 volumes5 had been published.
After World War II, almost all work had to start again. A new publication project was launched: the Marx–Engels Werke (MEW). From 1956 to 1990, the Institutes for Marxism–Leninism in Moscow and in East Berlin published jointly 44 volumes.6 While containing some of the most important writings and correspondence — but still deprived of many significant manuscripts — the edition is far from complete and lacks the characteristic features of a critical edition.
Hence, finally, a third attempt to bring out a complete critical edition. The Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, that is, the second MEGA or MEGA2, was put on track by the same Institutes in 1970, but came to an end as a consequence of the breakdown of the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. In 1990, the Internationale Marx Engels Stiftung (IMES) decided to resume the project in an academic context. However, the number of the originally planned 164 volumes was reduced to 114. This is still work in progress, but a large part of the project has by now been accomplished: the third attempt can be expected to be successful.
(3) Third, it is also clear that Marx’s thought is much more complex and wide-ranging than the various Marxist vulgates claimed it to be as time went by and this raises significant questions: What is the link between all these writings? Is there a continuity, or a break, or a more complex relationship, between Marx’s youthful philosophical ideas developed in the 1840s and his more mature work on political economy and politics — a question that includes an assessment of his relationship with Hegel’s philosophy and the writings of the Young Hegelians? What is the meaning of his constant intention to write a “critique of political economy”? Is it possible to identify beyond reasonable doubt Marx’s intellectual evolution and the elements of his thought that became permanent and stable? All these questions were, inter alia, discussed again since the 1960s, along with the republication of the Grundrisse, the progressive issuing of the volumes of MEW and MEGA2, and the various translations of parts of them into English, French and Italian in particular.7
In this context, Marx’s most important concepts and approaches have been questioned and studied anew, as for example, the definitions and role of “alienation” and “fetishism” in Marx’s youthful writings and in Capital, the meaning of “abstract labour” in the theory of value and its links with “value-form” analysis and money, the precise description and role of some Hegelian dialectical devices used by Marx in his political economy, the meaning of his notion of “critique”, etc. For this general work of reinterpretation — which swept aside much of the conventional discourses of the past — some critical reappraisals of central themes (dialectics, abstract labour, value and money, the deduction of concepts in Capital) played an important role: see, in particular, Lucio Colletti (1969, 1975) in Italy, Hans-Georg Backhaus (1967) and Helmut Reichelt (1970) in Germany, and the rediscovery of Rubin’s work in the early 1970s. Many innovative developments were inspired by these analyses.
Another characteristic of the research during these last decades is a strong revival of the studies of the young Marx and his formative years. Warren Breckman (1999) and David Leopold (2007) cast new light on his relationships with the Young Hegelians, thus supplementing some classic studies like McLellan (1969) and Rosen (1977); see also the studies edited by Emmanuel Renault (2008), which focus on the 1844 Manuscripts and insist, in particular, on the crucial role of Moses Hess in the development of Marx’s thought. For his part, Rojahn (1983) showed how the 1844 Manuscripts, traditionally presented as a coherent book, consist, in fact, of a simple juxtaposition of various texts written at different points of Marx’s intellectual evolution and thus does not have the philosophical status attributed to them in the past. Other more or less youthful works have also been examined, for example, the Grundrisse (see, e.g., the contributions in Musto 2008), and reappraisals of Marx’s overall philosophical development and its importance for his approach have been published (see, for example, Renault 2009, 2014; and Fischbach 2015).
(4) Of course, a great man...
