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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2019
As Joan Robinson put it so well, marxism is the opium of the Marxists — and the opium often works its effect on the Marxist mind by means of convoluted conceptual loops, many of them associated with stubborn exercises in essentialist labelling: what is Marxism? Who are the true Marxists? Who are the (self-appointed) Marxists unworthy of such a tag in the eyes of the custodians of the doctrine?
1 See E. Loorte's review of my Western Marxism (Paladin, 1986) in Government and Opposition, Volume 22 no. 2, 1987, p. 247. The title of his review ‘Is This Marxism?’ reflects this preoccupation. And I must deal briefly with some factual statements in his review. For instance, Loone criticizes me for not realising that Western Marxism ‘did not grow up in an intellectual vacuum’ and suggests that while I deal with Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger were also ‘part of the intellectual terrain during the formative years of WM’, However, I do refer to Husserl in connection with Lukács (Western Marxism, p. 63) and with the Formative years (p. 115) besides, of course, relating Sartre and Merleau-Ponty to the Founder of phenomenology (pp, 139-40 and 143). As for Heidegger. I explicitly acknowledge his influence on the young Mareuse, and, it goes without saying, on Sartre. In fact, I go as far as surmising on some interesting structural affinities between his world-view and that of Walter Benjamin (p. 128).
Moreover I take pains to stress how often several other major thinkers in the early Century, from Dilthey and Simmel to Freud and Weber, also left their mark on WM — which makes Loone charge sound Uncomfortably close to careless reading. The height of the kind of superficiality is reached when Loone decidcs to pontificate on the gap between Grarmsci, as a creative renewer of Marxist analysis, and the generally sterile Kulturkritik of mainstream WM — quite overlooking my description of Gramsci as the odd man out among Western Marxists, precisely because of his lack of Kulturkritik animus, (op. cit., p. 107)! For no other reason did I make Gramisi the hero of the book.
Loone suggests that my aquaintance with Marx and Engels is not extensive and claims, without adducing evidence, that there is a Șserious misreading’ on my part of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Loone clearly did not understand that Western Marxism is not a book on the fathers of Marxism, and therefore a more extensive use of their writings was surely not in order. I shall be glad to apologise for my “misreading” of the Critique of Gotha Programme if Loone will specify his charge.
2 Published by Blackwell, 1983.
3 For a fine recent contextual reading of Kautsky's position, see the article on him by Dick Geary in Hill, John A. (ed.) Rediscoveries — Some Neglected Modern European Politial Thinkers, Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 161-78.Google Scholar
4 For a sound sifting of Marxian tenets, adding up to a good balance-sheet of what is living and what is dead in his thought, see Elster, Jon, An Introduction to Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 John L. Stanley and Einest Zimmermann, ‘On the Alliged Differences between Marx and Engels’, Political Studies, XXXII. 1984, pp. 226-48 (p.226).
6 Elster, An Introduction . . . op. cit., ch. 3, passim.
7 On this point, see L. Colleiti. Tra marxismo e no, Bari, Laterza, 1979, esp. pp. 45, 65 and 90-92.
8 John Gray, review of Western Marxism in the Times Literary Supplement, 5 September 1986.