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Revolution, Reform and Dialectic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Roy Edgley
Roy Edgley
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Extract

Marxism is the tradition of thought and practice founded by Marx. To be identifiable as Marxism any phase of this tradition must have important resemblances to Marx's own work, and those resemblances must be conscious and acknowledged. Anti-Marxists tend to interpret this relation according to a derogatory religious model. Marxists, they suppose, treat Marx as an authority and follow their leader wherever he leads, instead of following the argument wherever it leads. On this view Marxism has an essentially scholarly relation to Marx and a polemical relation to everything else: it seeks to identify exactly what Marx said and thought, to preserve the master's teaching in all its original purity, and to appeal to it for correct answers to the substantive questions that we face. In other words, Marxism is that tradition which treats the works of Marx as a bible and imagines that it can clinch substantive arguments with the words ‘Marx has said it’.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 14: Marx and Marxisms , September 1982 , pp. 21 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1982

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References

1 See Krige, John's ‘Revolution and Discontinuity’, Radical Philosophy, No. 22 (Summer 1979).Google Scholar

2 A point made forcefully by Russell Keat in his reply (Radical Philosophy, No. 23) to an early draft of some of these ideas in Radical Philosophy, No. 21.

3 Its many and varied resources in this respect are described and analysed in papers by Collier, A., Norman, R. and Skillen, A. in Radical Philosophy, Nos. 5, 6, 8 and 9.Google Scholar

4 Another matter also stressed by Russell Keat in his reply (Radical Philosophy, No. 23) to my remarks on this subject in Radical Philosophy, No. 21.

5 For a philosophical example of this, see Rawls, J.' Theory of JusticeGoogle Scholar, and the critique of this by G. Doppelt, so far unpublished.