What Became of Marxism-and Why

...What is more, I do not think that the Inaugural Address was meant to be a charter of reformism, though some passages could and did invite such a construction...

...None can read it and fail to emerge with a greater awareness of significant issues, a larger store of vital information and a more sober respect for the incredible complexity of the Marxist tradition...

...If Lichtheim is correct, both the Social Democrat Kautsky and the Bolshevik Lenin, who clashed over Marx at the time of the Russian Revolution, could claim to be his legitimate heirs, though neither could rightfully claim the whole legacy...

...For Lichtheim, then, the Marxism which bridged the French and Russian revolutions was the 1848 revolutionary version that Marx himself, and Engels as well, outgrew in their later years...

...At the end, Lichtheim states his belief that "Marxism disintegrates, though it conserves its importance as a tool of analysis...

...As the flow of polemics on the subject subsides, the literature of critical interpretation continues to grow...

...Early in the book Lichtheim briefly takes account of the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in which Marx described history as an epic of man's "selfalienation" and communism as its transcendence—man's this-worldly redemption...

...But soon after Marx decided that the revolutionary era was over and became a "pragmatic social theorist...

...Marx's correspondence with Engels at the time suggests what kind of pressures may have been involved (e.g., in a letter written November 4, 1864, on the Statutes of the International: "My proposals were all accepted by the subcommittee...

...are carefully dissected, and the study concludes with a general commentary on Leninism and later Soviet Marxism...

...According to Lichtheim, the 1864 Inaugural Address of the International constituted the birth certificate of the essentially reformist German Social Democratic Marxism...

...In Lichtheim's view, the truly significant change in Marx's position, a shift from revolutionism to reformism, occurred after mid-century...

...As Lichtheim himself points out, the revolutionary mentality reappears in Marx in 1871, at the time of the Paris Commune...

...In 1875, the Critique of the Gotha Program reaffirmed unequivocally the idea of a temporary revolutionary dictatorship...

...Starting from the premise that Marxism formed a bridge between the French and Russian revolutions, Lichtheim surveys the Marxist tradition as a whole and the historical circumstances that shaped it...

...George Lichtheim's Marxism: An Historical and Critical-Study, is a substantial addition to this literature...

...Only I was obliged to insert two phrases about 'duty' and 'right' into the Preamble to the Statutes, ditto 'truth, morality and justice,' but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm...

...Clearly, difficult issues-of...

...This is a questionable procedure, I think, because it fails to consider the enigmatic metamorphosis that Marx's revolutionary credo underwent during this same five-year period: The concept of man's self-alienation, in any explicit form, completely disappeared from his writings...

...The flaming revolutionary of the 1848 Manifesto was still apparent in the Marx of the 1850 Address to the Communist League, with its call for permanent revolution and revolutionary dictatorship (a "brief Jacobin-Blanquist aberration...

...Despite my disagreement with Lichtheim, I believe we are indebted to him for an important contribution to the scholarly dialogue about Marx and Marxism...

...Under the general heading "original revolutionary credo of 1843-8," Lichtheim brackets the original Marxism of the 1844 Manuscripts with the distinctly different Marxism of the 1848 Communist Manifesto...

...And the most important evidence, to my mind, is the first volume of Capital (1867), which gives supreme embodiment to Marx's vision of the world-process as a movement toward violent revolutionary breakdown...

...The various currents of Marxist thought around the turn of the century (Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein and revisionism, Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist theory of imperialism, etc...

...interpretation are involved here...

...No serious student of these subjects can afford to overlook it...

...The obvious religious aspect of this idea is noted...

...But the central concern is historical: What became of Marxism and why...

...Today, an increasing number of Western scholars share a similar attitude toward Marxism...

...One central question is this: How accurate is the image of Marx as a man who outgrew the revolutionary mentality reflected in the Communist Manifesto to become a pragmatic social theorist and reformist...

...The reform movement was helped along in the late 19th century by Engels, and later was personified in Kautsky...

...Kautsky could point to the post1850 "revised version" of Marx's position when he repudiated Lenin's defense of revolutionary violence and dictatorship...

...In short, Engels was right when, in his graveside speech, he said that Karl Marx was above all else a revolutionist...

...The simple fact is,' Lichtheim declares, "that totalitarianism was as little dreamed of in Marx's philosophy as it was in Mill's...

...Much of the book is taken up with exposition and commentary on Marx's own ideas...

...author, "Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx" Speaking of Hegelianism, Friedrich Engels once remarked that so powerful and influential a system cannot be disposed of by merely being proved false...

...But since he sees Marxism as a fundamentally rationalistic, non-religious "critique of bourgeois society in terms of that society's own liberal aspirations," the author places relatively little stress on the young Marx's quasi-religious philosophy of alienation...

...My own feeling is that the historical evidence does not, on the whole, support it...

...In this light, it appears that the true custodians of Marx's heritage were the Social Democrats, and that Lenin's interpretation of Marx was "disastrously narrow and schematic...

...Lenin, on the other hand, could properly appeal to the revolutionary Marxism of 1848 when he denounced the "renegade" Kautsky for transforming Marx into a kind of garden liberal...

...This interpretation carries an additional implication, which is not fully spelled out in the book...

...Moreover, whatever limited claim Leninism had to be authentically Marxist was largely lost in mid-1930s with the rise of a dogmatic "Soviet Marxism" as the official ideology of a totalitarian power...

...His work is distinguished by a cool, matter-of-fact attitude and a rare breadth of erudition in matters Marxist...

...There is an illuminating discussion of the role of Engels in creating a Marxist orthodoxy complete with a "dialectical materialism" that was not present in Marx's system...