Salvaging Marx From The 'Marxists'

'If we truly wish to understand and apply Marx's insights today, we must reject the rigid dogmas that later 'Marxists' imposed in his name.'

On Karl Marx's 142nd death anniversary, Utkarsh Mishra discusses how his critical and analytical theories have been transformed into rigid doctrines and dogmas.

A day after Karl Marx's death in London on March 14, 1883, his closest companion Friedrich Engels wrote to their comrade Friedrich Adolph Sorge in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Apart from his deep anguish at the demise of his lifelong friend and 'the greatest living thinker', Engels also expressed apprehensions that Marx's ideas might now be interpreted, modified, or even distorted by others in ways that he might not have approved. Apprehensions that proved to be awfully prescient in time.

Driven by this concern and alarmed by the attempts to distort Marx's legacy by rival socialists, Engels set out to interpret and defend his friend's work.

Historians like Maximilien Rubel argue that by doing so, Engels transformed a critical, evolving method into a fixed system. That he unintentionally contributed to the rigidification of Marx's ideas by introducing deterministic elements, making it seem like socialism was inevitable.

However, it would be unfair to blame Engels for the later dogmatisation of Marx's ideas -- most of which occurred after the formation of the Second International and on a global scale after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

While it is true that in his works like Anti-Duhring, Engels frames socialism as a scientific, law-governed process, unlike those who called themselves 'Marxists', he did not insist on a single universal revolutionary path.

In fact, in his 1895 introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, Engels acknowledges that in certain advanced capitalist societies, the proletariat could potentially achieve socialism through electoral means rather than relying solely on revolutionary upheaval.

It is important to recognise that Engels was primarily attempting to make Marx's ideas more accessible and systematic rather than deliberately distorting them. Later Marxists misused this systemisation to claim inevitability.

Writing to German Marxist politician Eduard Bernstein, who was a prominent member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in November 1882, Engels quoted Marx saying: 'If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist'.

Marx made this famous remark in response to French socialist Jules Guesde's rigid, dogmatic interpretation of the 1880 French Workers' Party programme, which they had jointly drafted.

While Marx saw the demand for immediate political and economic reforms -- such as universal suffrage, the eight-hour workday, and union rights -- as practical steps emerging from the workers' movement itself, Guesde dismissed them as mere bait to expose capitalism's inability to reform, believing that their rejection would radicalise the proletariat. Marx rejected this 'revolutionary phrase-mongering,' criticising Guesde for disregarding the importance of real struggles for workers' rights.

In Aspects of International Socialism 1871-1914, French historian Georges Haupt provides a brief history of how the terms 'Marxism' and 'Marxist' entered our lexicon in the way they are understood today.

Haupt writes that these terms originated not from Marx's supporters but his opponents, who used them as polemical labels to attack him and his followers. Initially, during the 1840s and the Communist League's dissolution, critics spoke of 'Marx's party', and by the 1850s, terms like 'Marxian' emerged.

Later, Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin and his anarchist allies popularised 'Marxist' as an accusation, portraying Marx and his followers as authoritarian and sectarian.

However, after the split of the International Workingmen's Association at the Hague Congress in 1872, the term 'Marxist' began to spread with a slightly different meaning.

As per Haupt, the terms fully shed their pejorative connotation and became 'positive concepts' after the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) started using them during the years 1881 to 1884.

Haupt calls leading SPD theorist Karl Kautsky as 'the father of the terms 'Marxist' and 'Marxism' in the meaning they have assumed in our vocabulary'.

Kautsky used them as polemic against his rivals in the SPD like Ignaz Auer and Carl August Schramm, so much so that Schramm remarked 'Kautsky is preaching a religion of Marx', while Auer declared that he is 'not a Marxist in the sense in which the thing has gradually been developed by the fathers of the Marxist church'.

In the 1880s, the terms 'assumed such an international resonance that Engels, although he did not actually endorse their usage, accepted them without ever really using them himself', writes Haupt.

Nevertheless, Engels was still wary of the connotation that these terms assumed. He was quoted as saying in 1893 that 'he would prefer the Russians -- and everybody else too -- to stop fishing around for quotations from Marx and Engels and begin thinking instead in the way that Marx would have thought in their position'.

In his later years, Marx himself was critical of rigid, dogmatic interpretations of his work and rejected the idea that his theories should be turned into a fixed doctrine.

Although his remark that 'I am not a Marxist' could have come from his well-known wit, his correspondence during the final years of his life suggests his discomfort at his theories being treated as 'recipes for the cook-shops of the future'.

In his book The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography, York University Professor Marcello Musto mentions Marx's letter to English writer and politician Henry Hyndman.

In June 1881, Hyndman had published a book heavily drawing ideas from Marx's Capital, without giving any credit to its author. Marx wrote to Hyndman to register his displeasure, but also mentioned that 'to have named the Capital and its author would have been a big blunder. Party programs ought to keep free of any apparent dependence upon individual authors or books'.

Musto argues that the 'chief motive for Marx's anger was not that he had not been credited by name… but his concern that Capital should not be used for a political project so clearly at odds with the ideas contained in it'.

Similarly, in his correspondence with Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich, Marx challenges the assumption that all societies must follow the European path of capitalist development, and says that his theory was 'specific to Western Europe' while other nations like Russia can take different, unique paths to socialism.

In effect, he distanced himself from the rigid 'stages of history' interpretation of his theory.

Writing the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume 1 of Capital in 1873, Marx rejected Hegelian 'mystification' of the dialectic in favour of a scientific, materialist analysis of history.

Marx, therefore, was far from the rigid determinist that his later followers portrayed him as. Author-polemicist Christopher Hitchens, even when he was a young university student, disagreed with a giant like Isaiah Berlin on this question.

Hitchens writes in his memoirs Hitch-22: 'Berlin clearly didn't know very much about either Marx or Marxism. He woodenly maintained that Marx was a historical "determinist." It's true that the old boy sometimes spoke of "history" itself as an actor, but he actually stressed human agency more than almost any other thinker.'

Musto also says that 'it would be wrong to attribute to Marx any idea that advent of socialism is a historical inevitability… He spurned any rigid linking of social changes to economic transformations alone'.

In 1881, Dutch socialist politician Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis wrote to Marx, asking him what 'legislative measures of a political and economic nature would a revolutionary government have to take after it came to power in order to guarantee success of socialism?'

Marx said he was opposed to answering such questions with a general formula. '...what is to be done, and done immediately at any given, particular moment in the future, depends wholly and entirely on the actual historical circumstances in which action is to be taken,' he said.

Notwithstanding all efforts of Marx, 'a belief in automatic advance of history took roots between First and Second International'. As seen above, this belief was also subsequently described as Marxist.

Although in the late 19th century, Eduard Bernstein, German Marxist theorist and a prominent member of the SPD, posed a challenge to orthodox Marxism, which is now popularly known as the 'revisionist crisis'.

Bernstein argued that capitalism was adapting and that socialism could be achieved through gradual reforms rather than violent revolution, and questioned the rigid determinism that many Marxists had embraced -- particularly the idea that capitalism was inevitably collapsing. Ironically, his revisionism was closer to the later writings of Marx and Engels both, where they acknowledged the possibility of different socialist paths, including democratic means in some countries.

Nonetheless, Bernstein's challenge forced orthodox Marxists to harden their positions, leading to more rigid definitions of Marxism that insisted on class struggle, capitalist breakdown, and revolutionary necessity.

As Musto writes, 'the dogmatic reduction of Marx's quintessentially critical theory resulted in the unlikeliest paradoxes'.

In the run-up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks developed a more deterministic and authoritarian interpretation of Marxism. While Marx predicted the collapse of capitalism on its own, Lenin reinterpreted his ideas to argue that a vanguard party must lead the working class, dismissing spontaneous worker movements as insufficient.

Lenin's emphasis on party discipline, centralisation, and strict adherence to 'correct' Marxist doctrine laid the foundation for Marxism-Leninism, which, under Stalin, became an unquestionable State ideology.

Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Lenin in 1918, criticising him for 'abandoning democracy and imposing a rigid, top-down model of socialism'. Luxemburg wrote that she supported the revolution but Lenin and the Bolsheviks 'are destroying democracy, which is essential for socialism to thrive'.

In the letter, Luxemburg famously wrote: 'Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution... It is a mere bureaucracy with a veneer of socialism.'

Her words turned out to be prophetic when, in the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union introduced the policy of Stakhanovism. Named after coal miner Aleksei Stakhanov, who reportedly mined 102 tonnes of coal in less than six hours, the policy, promoted hyper-productivity and encouraged workers to surpass production quotas.

This was in stark opposition to Marx, who consistently advocated for workers to enjoy material benefits and shorter working hours, viewing these as essential components of their emancipation and well-being.

Similarly, in Communist Cuba, industries minister Che Guevara sought to promote socialist consciousness by encouraging workers to labour for moral incentives rather than material rewards.

And today, we read about workers 'being rescued from slavery-like conditions in Chinese factories'.

As Musto writes, 'thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become possible to read a Marx very unlike the dogmatic, economistic, and Eurocentric theorist who was paraded around for so long'.

If we truly wish to understand and apply Marx's insights today, we must reject the rigid dogmas that later 'Marxists' imposed in his name.

Rather than treating Marxism as a set of fixed doctrines, we should return to Marx's own approach -- one rooted in critical inquiry, adaptability, and historical context.

Hence, if we endeavour to conduct a 'Marxist analysis' of our times or the future, we ought to first free Marx from the clutches of 'Marxism'.