Why Are There "Academic Marxists" Who Do Not Follow in Marx's Footsteps at All?
It is quite a puzzling thing: Everyone seems to say that there are large numbers of “academic Marxists”. But it is very, very difficult to ever find any academic actually making a Marxist argument—that is, one that springs from one or more of the six intellectual threads woven together in the 1859 Preface to Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Columbia’s Adam Tooze says this AM that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
He does not say why. So let me tell you why. The passage (reproduced at the very bottom of this post) can be usefully divided into six threads:
Here we have, working backward:
Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,
Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.
Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.
Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.
Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.
Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that
And I argued <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/six-analytical-threads-in-search> that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful, other than grabbing that term as a positive or negative marker of tribal allegiance. If someone shows up calling themself a “Marxist”, and cannot demonstrate which of the threads from at least one of these six claims they are pursuing in their thinking—well, they should find something else to call themself.
Conversely, looking at the development of social science since 1870 or so, it is a fact that nearly everybody else doing historical social science worth reading who is not picking up and developing one of these six claims is spending a lot of their time trying to disprove and dispel one or more of them.
But I had yet more to say. So here it is: