Understanding Marx

DeLong: Understanding Marx Lecture for April 20, 2009

In the beginning was Karl Marx, with his vision of how the Industrial
Revolution would transform everything and be followed by a Great
Communist Social Revolution—greater than the political French
Revolution—that would wash us up on the shores of Utopia.
The mature Marx saw the economy as the key to history: every forecast
and historical interpretation must be based on the economy's logic of
development. This project as carried forward by others ran dry.

Sometimes--as in, say, Eric Hobsbawm's books on the history of the
nineteenth century--this works relatively well. But sometimes it led
nowhere. The writing of western European history as the rise, fall, and
succession of ancient, feudal, and bourgeois modes of production is a
fascinating project. But the only person to try it seriously soon throws the
Marxist apparatus over the side, where it splashes and sinks to the bottom
of the sea. Perry Anderson's

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and
Lineages of the Absolutist State are great and fascinating books, but they
are not Marxist. They are Weberian. The key processes in Anderson's
books concern not “modes of production” but rather “modes of
domination.” And when Marx and Engels's writings became sacred texts
for the world religion called Communism, things passed beyond the
absurd into tragedy and beyond tragedy into horror: the belief that the
logic of development of the economy was the most important thing about
society became entangled in the belief that Joe Stalin or Mao Zedong or
Pol Pot or Kim Il Sung or Fidel Castro was our benevolent master and
ever-wise guide.

But let us go back to a time before Marxism lost its innocence. Let us go
back and look at the thinker, Karl Marx, and what he actually wrote and
thought.Karl Marx had a three part intellectual trajectory. He started out as a
German philosopher; became a French-style political activist, political
analyst, and political historian; and ended up trying to become a Britishstyle
economist and economic historian. At the start of his career he
believed that all we had to due to attain true human emancipation was to

think correctly about freedom and necessity. Later on he recognized that
thought was not enough: that we had to organize, politically. And then in
the final stage he thought that the political organization had to be with and
not against the grain of the truly decisive factor, the extraordinary
economic changes that the coming of the industrial revolution was
bringing to the world.

At each stage Marx had the enthusiasm of the true-believing convert: it
was never the case that philosophy alone could bring utopia, it was never
the case that after the revolution all problems will be resolved, and it was
never the case that the underlying economic mode of production was the
base and that its evolution drove the shape of the superstructure.
Karl Marx never completed the intellectual trajectory he set himself on.
He tried as hard as he could to become a British-style classical economist-
-a "minor post-Ricardian theorist" as Paul Samuelson once joked--but he
did not make it: the late, mature Marx is mostly an economist and
economic historian, but he is also part political activist--and also part
prophet.

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