TERRELL CARVER
From: Reading Marx: Life and works
Why read Marx at all? Why take any notice of his biographical circumstances? Why read his works in historical context? Why should it matter reading one edition or translation rather than another?
Seeking enlightenment from the texts of the past is an apparently paradoxical exercise. After all, the events and ideas of the past are no longer, by definition, literally in the present. “Living inthe past” is generally no compliment, and taking advice from thoseunacquainted with present circumstances does not sound like a good idea. Indeed, it might seem that Marx is now particularly discredited as an inspiration, since nearly all the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe have collapsed from within, and reformist Marxism seems to take its cue from contemporary economicand political liberalism. Perhaps an examination of thoughts from the past is a bad habit, and we should keep our minds on current affairs.
A few moments’ reflection, however, will suggest that ignoring the past is not an acceptable way of examining the present, nor is ignorance of history a recipe for contemporary bliss. The present is not a succession of fresh moments into which we can insert our views and actions as we like. Rather it is merely the past as far as it has yet proceeded. Thus the question of what the present is what is the case at this particular moment-is really a historical question and is not separable from a narrative of past ideas and events. Research into the past is not a way of explaining how we got the present we are in, in case we happened to want it explained and happened to want to employ someone with academic skills to help us. Rather, there is no knowledge of the present that is not constructed from ideas that were generated in the past. Moreover, they were not generated strictly in one’s own past but were acquired or adopted through the kinds of communication that characterize our social life.
It follows from this that any examination of present problems is itself an examination of past ideas and events. Or rather,because the present is itself constantly precipitating out of those ideas and events, any examination of the present is essentially a reexamination of those ideas and events from the past that we takethe present to be. As we do this the present tends to lose whatever simplicity we thought it possessed, and it becomes more complicated, more ambiguous – and more generously endowed with possibilities. An unexamined present yields a future that is more of the same.
Future options arise from an exhumation of the past, and the more thoroughly and sympathetically contextual the research is, the more critical perspectives that we will acquire on ourselves. We accomplish this by stepping outside the familiar narrative that constitutes the presumed present and looking for alternatives within our own cultural milieu and outside it. As our focus on the past retreats to Western societies remote in time, the effect on us is somewhat the same in terms of comparison and contrast as looking carefully at non-Western societies much nearer the present.
Why, though, should we want to acquire a critical perspective on present circumstances? This is matter of commitment and choice. The lack of any such motivation is what being uncritical is, and that is not generally a compliment in intellectual circles.It may,of course, be a compliment elsewhere, but it is surely a matter of individual choice- indeed an important individual choice -whether dangers are so clear and present that critical thought and concomitant action should be waived. It cannot be the case that having a critical perspective on the present necessarily disqualifies anyone’s work on the past; indeed, suspicion should be exercised the other way around. Lack of critical perspective ina writer should make one wonder whether such work in constructing a “present” is worth following at all. The present is constructed of narratives that do not arise by accident. Arguably they reinforce the powers of some in society at the expense of others.
Complacency is surely a vice, and research on the past that merely mirrors the dominant narratives of the present leaves everything precisely as it is, no worse perhaps but certainly no better. The past is over and cannot be relived on its own terms; inevitably we approach it from our particular “presents,” themselves constructed from particular “pasts.” In the past we find (or fail to find) certain kinds of things that we know we are looking for, even if we do not know in detail what the results of our reading and other forms of research will be. An examination of the past cannot be correct (or not) according to the standards of past authors. Marx as he was is not the arbiter of current research on himself or anything else. Accounts of past ideas and events are useful (or not) to authors and readers in the present; utility increases, so I hypothesize, when contemporary commentators develop their critical perspective on present problems by exploring the past contextually. This is to some extent an imaginative, though not anachronistic, exercise. If it results in fiction, it is a failure.
Criteria for utility in the present and plausibility in the past are not given in a way that is wholly external to the situation and to the research. Good research and effective action meet standards that evolve as they do, but it is reasonable to expect writers to work on a hypothesis that texts, inter alia, follow from the motivations of the author, are answers to questions rather than mere descriptive utterances and are directed toward an audience with whom the author is engaged in debate. This puts a considerable burden on present writers but allows them, in principle, tremendous power. If they are persuasive, they help create a future; arguably this is what humans have (or at least could have) that distinguishes them from other forms of life. On these and other issues in reading the past, see the chapters by Tully and Skinner in Tully (1988); their work incorporates extensive references to current debates, both general considerations and specific topics.
As it happens, a careful reading of Marx – which is what this volume is intended to promote – reveals that he himself exemplified much of this contextual methodology, even if he did not outline or comment on it at length. What he did substantively in his career cannot be contextually interpreted – my purpose in this chapter–without some perspective on him as an individual. Biography allows us to speculate on his development as a personality, his motivations for action or inaction, his reasons for saying and doing what he did.
0521366259.Cambridge.University.Press.The.Cambridge.Companion.to.Marx.Nov.1991
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Karl Marx´s Grundrisse – Foundations of the critique of political economy 150 years later
“When asked whether or not we are Marxist, our position is the same as that of a physicist or a biologist when asked if he [or she] is a ‘Newtonian’ or if he [or she] is a ‘Pasteurian’.
There are truths so evident, so much a part of people’s knowledge, that it is now useless to discuss them. One ought to be a ‘Marxist’ with the same naturalness with which one is ‘Newtonian’ in physics or ‘Pasteurian’ in biology, considering that if facts determine new concepts, these new concepts will never divest themselves of that portion of truth possessed by the older concepts they have outdated. Such is the case, for example, of Einsteinian relativity or Planck’s ‘quantum theory’ with respect to the discoveries of Newton; they take nothing at all away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it had achieved new concepts in space. The learned Englishman provided the necessary steppingstone for them…
The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed.”
Ernesto (Che) Guevera “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution”, Studies on the Left, Vol 1, No. 3, 1960 quoted in “The Capitalist System: A Radical Analysis of American Society” by Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich and Thomas Weisskopf, Prentice-Hall, NY, 1972 p. x)