In the years from roughly 1885 to 1914, Marxism came to dominate European socialism. Karl Marx had died in 1883, but his memory was fresh, and his works were, for the most part, an alluring continent ripe for discovery. Friedrich Engels preserved the living link to the movement's founding drama and tirelessly propagated his and Marx's ideas right up to his death in 1895. A cast of energetic younger men and women seized on these ideas, repeated them, extended them, and sought to translate them into political practice. Advocates of Marx and Engels won seats in the parliaments of western Europe, commanding positions in the labor movement, and dominance over eastern Europe's revolutionary diaspora. In her fascinating and important book on these years, Christina Morina frequently calls this the golden age of Marxism. But it was a triumph plagued by ambiguity. After all, the same years are often denigrated as a period of “orthodox” or, even worse, “vulgar” Marxist thought. Marxist orthodoxy had hardly established itself – if it ever really did – when it was severely tested by revisionism around 1900, a strain that foreshadowed the bitter breakdown of the Second International in the opening weeks of World War I, the schism between social democracy and communism in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, and even the splitting of theory from practice exemplified by the emergence of “Western Marxism” in the 1920s. Regardless of how one assesses this period, it is unquestionably the pivotal time when Marx went from being a person to a Zeitgeist – to echo W. H. Auden on another great modern figure – and his thought was transformed into a powerful ideology and a worldview capable of structuring people's emotional and intellectual relations with the world.
Morina chooses to tell this story through a composite portrait of nine protagonists spread across very different social and political contexts: Jules Guesde and Jean Jaurès in France, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and Victor Adler in Germany and Austria, Rosa Luxemburg in Poland, and Peter Struve, Georgi Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin in Russia. Morina is careful not to impose too much unity on these nine individuals. They grew up in diverse circumstances and faced different intellectual and political challenges. Moreover, very different personalities were at play. Jaurès was bookish but earthy. Guesde was a gaunt militant single-mindedly devoted to the cause. Adler and Bernstein sought to know and interact with workers, while Luxemburg's empathy remained somewhat abstract. Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Kautsky regarded Marxism as a monistic, unified approach that yielded a materialist science of society. Jaurès understood the insights of Marx and Engels as historically situated, Adler took Marxism to be a “mutable structure” that illuminates but does not prescribe the pathway of political practice (196), Bernstein became an emphatic Marxist but evolved toward a more critical if still affirmative relation to Marx, and Struve fully renounced Marxism and became a leading Russian liberal.
Differences notwithstanding, Morina sees many commonalities uniting this group. All came from the middle strata of society; though their political choices meant sacrificing elements of a conventional place in society, none broke absolutely with their own past or fully renounced a bourgeois lifestyle. From an early age, the protagonists showed a higher than usual level of disaffection from the present society and a strong concern for social justice. They grew up in families that encouraged education and the reading of serious literature, and parents tended to tolerate the radical inclinations of their children, even if the discovery and appropriation of Marx was usually a step taken independently of the family's political orientation. Open-minded and empathetic mothers helped some to move in exploratory directions even as fathers often functioned as guardians of the existing order. The first Marxists were multilingual, which was an essential precondition for the cosmopolitan and often highly mobile lives they led. All of them had “unshakeable confidence in themselves and in their chance of success and a well-defined sense of their position in history” (35).
Their turn to Marx generally came during formative years of reading and study; for the first cohort of Marxists, this often began as solitary autodidacticism. Slightly younger figures like Luxemburg, Struve, and Lenin could benefit from the incursion of socialist ideas into university curricula. Morina cautions against speaking of a “conversion” to Marxism or of it as a “secular faith.” “Studying Marx was no act of submission,” she writes, “but was instead a hard-fought, radically secular, and sobering experience of illumination. Early Marxism promised enlightenment, not salvation” (282). It was not utopianism that appealed to these early readers, but rather Marx and Engels's explanatory power and their “factual gaze.” If the first spoke to this generation's sense of urgency in understanding modern conditions and the second comported well with the period's high respect for science, Marx and Engels's apparent hard-nosed realism galvanized protagonists who embraced a form of “interventionist thinking” (xvii) that sought to translate ideas into political programs and real transformation. All that said, Morina is also intent on understanding the emotional impact of discovering Marx and Engels. The discovery offered a “package of incendiary ideas” (117), a comprehensive worldview that seemed to harmonize and order experience, and a sense of mission that lent purpose to life. This “typical ‘Marx experience’,” argues Morina, became “part of the creation story of Marxism” (115).
The Invention of Marxism builds on a large literature about this foundational period of Marxism, but Morina adds to it in many ways. Her transnational approach, driven by comparative methods and theories of networks, creates a framework that unifies our knowledge of these individual figures. Her interest in family histories and the early years of her protagonists deepens and rounds out our understanding of the sources and trajectories of their radical engagements. Her use of the history of emotions allows her to move beyond the level of rational deliberation to that of lived experience and visceral need. Her care in determining when and how these men and women read Marx and Engels, extended and popularized their thinking, and sought to activate it as a principle of political action, sheds much light on the slow but epoch-making development of Marxism as an ideology and worldview.
These many strengths notwithstanding, Morina's would not be the only way to tell this story. One could imagine an exploration of transnational networks of workers and activists who also read and were mobilized by the ideas of Marx and Engels, who were not passive recipients but active participants in the invention of Marxism. One could also imagine more attention to ideas themselves, not just to the social and psychological settings in which ideas took hold and developed. The invention of Marxism involved critical appropriations of Marx and Engels's oeuvre, creative as well as tendentious extensions and extrapolations, and the creation of new categories and concepts that would shape the meaning and frame the discursive potentials of Marxist thought in the twentieth century. A broadened cast of social actors is absent from Morina's work, as is a truly nuanced philosophical engagement with the texts and ideas of the first wave of Marxist epigones. That said, Christina Morina's book will undoubtedly be indispensable to anyone wishing to understand the complexities of Marxism's foundational moment.
