Ingo Elbe Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory

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Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx’s 
Theory 
Ingo Elbe 
 
The objective of the following observations is to offer a rough overview of central ways of 
reading Marx’s theory. These are to be presented – by means of a few selected topics – as 
Marxisms that can be relatively clearly delimited from one another, and the history of their 
reception and influence will be evaluated with regard to the common-sense understanding of 
“Marxist theory.” 
A distinction will be made between the hitherto predominant interpretation of Marx, primarily 
associated with political parties (traditional Marxism, Marxism in the singular, if you will), 
and the dissident, critical forms of reception of Marx (Marxisms in the plural), with their 
respective claims of a “return to Marx.” The first interpretation is understood as a product and 
process of a restricted reading of Marx, in part emerging from the “exoteric” layer of Marx’s 
work, which updates traditional paradigms in political economy, the theory of history, and 
philosophy. Systematized and elevated to a doctrine by Engels, Kautsky, et al, it succumbs to 
the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production and culminates in the apologetic sci-
ence of Marxism-Leninism. The other two interpretations, specifically Western Marxism as 
well as the German neue Marx-Lektüre (“new reading of Marx”), usually explore the “eso-
teric” content of Marx’s critique and analysis of society, often consummated outside of insti-
tutionalized, cumulative research programs, by isolated actors in the style of an “underground 
Marxism.” 
In order to characterize both ways of reading, some strongly truncated theses, limited to a few 
aspects, must suffice. In particular the ambitious proposition, first formulated by Karl Korsch, 
of an “application of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of his-
tory itself” – one that goes beyond the mere presentation of intellectual history, towards an 
immanent theoretical critique that critically considers the connection between historical forms 
of praxis and theoretical formations of Marxism – cannot be carried out here. In addition, a 
consideration of those readings which are critical of Marx or Marxism can also be disregarded 
here, insofar as their picture of Marx usually corresponds to that of traditional Marxism. 
I therefore begin with the hegemonic interpretative model of traditional Marxism, and only at 
the end of my presentation will I conclude with a few positive determinations of what I regard 
as the fundamental systematic intention of Marx’s work. I do this primarily because a differ-
entiated reading of Marx’s work can only be gained in the course of the learning processes of 
Western Marxism and the neue Marx-Lektüre. 
I. Marxism 
The term “Marxism” was probably first used in the year 1879 by the German Social Democrat 
Franz Mehring to characterize Marx’s theory, and established itself at the end of the 1880s as 
a discursive weapon used by both critics and defenders of “Marx’s teachings.” The birth of a 
“Marxist school,” however, is unanimously dated back to the publication of Anti-Dühring by 
Friedrich Engels in the year 1878, and the subsequent reception of this work by Karl Kautsky, 
Eduard Berstein, et al. Engels’ writings – even if the terms “Marxism” or “dialectical materi-
alism,” the self-applied labels of traditional readings, do not yet appear in them – supplied 
entire generations of readers, Marxists as well as anti-Marxists, with the interpretative model 
through which Marx’s work was perceived. In particular, the review of Marx’s Contribution 
to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the late work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of 
Classical German Philosophy (1886), and the supplement to Volume III of Capital (1894/95), 
achieved an influence that can hardly be underestimated. Above all, however, it was Anti-
Dühring that was to be stylized as the textbook of Marxist theory as well as a positive depic-
tion of a “Marxist worldview”: for Kautsky, “there is no other book that has contributed so 
much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx’s Capital is greater. But it was first through 
Anti-Dühring that we learned to correctly read and understand Capital.” And for Lenin, it is 
one of the “handbooks of every class-conscious worker.”1 
At the same time, a general characteristic of the history of “Marxism” is consummated: the 
initiators of the theoretical corpus regard it as “unnecessary […] to themselves make an 
appearance as eponyms […] the eponyms are not the real speakers.” In many respects, Marx-
ism is Engels’ work and for that reason actually an Engelsism. In what follows I will name 
only two points which an ideologized and restricted reception of Marx could draw upon. 
I.1 The Ontological-Determinist Tendency 
Scientific socialism was conceived of as an ontological system, a “science of the big picture.” 
The materialist dialectic functions here as a “general law of development of nature, society, 
and thought,”2 while nature serves for Engels as a “proof of dialectics.”3 Engels already 
undertakes a false analogy between historical-social processes and natural phenomena by the 
mere fact that in his elucidation of the main features of the dialectic, reference to subject and 
object is missing. “Negation of the negation” or the “transformation of quantity into quality” 
are identified in the changes in the physical state of water or in the development of a grain of 
barley. Against a static point of view, dialectic is supposed to demonstrate the “becoming,” 
the “transitory character” of all existence,4 and is bound to traditional dichotomies of the phi-
losophy of consciousness, such as the so-called “great basic question of all philosophy “as to 
which component of the relationship between “thinking and being” has primacy.5 The dialec-
tic is split into “two sets of laws,” into the dialectic of “the external world” and the dialectic of 
“human thought,” whereby the latter is understood to be merely a passive mental image of the 
former.6 Engels constricts – even distorts – the three elementary praxis-philosophical motifs 
of Marx, which he had partially still advocated in his earlier writings: 
1. The recognition that not only the object, but also the observation of the object is his-
torically and practically mediated,7 not external to the history of the mode of produc-
tion. Against this, Engels emphasizes that “the materialist outlook on nature means 
nothing more than the simple conception of nature just as it is, without alien addi-
tion.”8 The naive realism of the theory of reflection systematized by Lenin9 and others 
– which falls prey to the reified appearance of immediacy of that which is socially 
mediated, the fetishism of an in-itself of that which exists only via a historically deter-
mined framework of human activity – already obtains its foundation in Engels’ writ-
ings.10 As “things refer to consciousness and consciousness refers to things,”11 the 
concepts of praxis and the subjective mediation of the object, as well as ideology-
critical considerations, have hardly any place in this paradigm. 
2. The concept of Naturwüchsigkeit (“the state of being naturally derived”), which 
Engels had used in The German Ideology in a negative sense, is now turned into a pos-
itive concept. The sublation of specific social laws resting upon the unconsciousness 
of social actors is no longer postulated; rather, Engels postulates the conscious appli-
cation of “the general laws of motion […] of the external world.”12 
3. If Marx writes in the Theses on Feuerbach that “all mysteries which lead theory to 
mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of 
this practice,”13 Engels reduces praxis to the experimental activity of the natural sci-
ences.14 Admittedly, ambivalencesand praxis-philosophical motifs can also be found 
in the writings of the late Engels, which were largely blotted out by the epigones. 
Nonetheless, Engels, bundling together the scientism of his epoch, paves the way for a 
mechanistic and fatalistic conception of historical materialism by shifting the accent 
from a theory of social praxis to one of a contemplative, reflection-theory doctrine of 
development. 
The vulgar evolutionism of nineteenth-century European Social Democracy is a nearly ubiq-
uitous phenomenon.15 For that reason, it is not just for Kautsky, Bernstein, and Bebel that the 
deterministic concept of development and the revolutionary metaphysic of a providential mis-
sion of the proletariat16 occupy a central place in Marxist doctrine. Accordingly, humanity is 
subordinated to a “scientifically verifiable” automatism of liberation. That which presents 
itself in the modern scientific garb of a fetishism of laws is ultimately nothing other than a 
historical metaphysic with a socialist signature17: precisely the inversion of subject and object 
that Marx had criticized. A process consummated behind the back of social actors is attributed 
a morally qualified aim.18 Ultimately, in the Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic 
Party, this revolutionary passivity19 is codified at an official level as consistent Marxism: the 
task of the party is to remain braced for an event that will “necessarily” happen even without 
intervention, “not to make the revolution, but rather to take advantage of it.”20 The ontological 
orientation and the encyclopaedic character of Engels’ deliberations also feed the tendency to 
interpret scientific socialism as a comprehensive proletarian worldview. Ultimately, Lenin 
will present the “Marxist doctrine” as “omnipotent,” a “comprehensive and harmonious” doc-
trine that “provides men with an integral world outlook.”21 Correspondingly, the negative 
concept of ideology is neutralized into a category for the determinate being of consciousness 
in general. 
All of these developments, which undoubtedly constitute a theoretical regression, ultimately 
culminate in the theory of “Marxism-Leninism” conceived of by Abram Deborin and Josef 
Stalin. If for Lenin, Marxism constitutes – despite all emphasis upon the political – a “pro-
found doctrine of development”22 that calls attention to breaks and leaps in nature and society, 
in the case of Marxism-Leninism the naturalist-objectivist current is elevated to a state doc-
trine. The central argumentative figure will be: what is valid for nature must also be valid for 
history. Or: nature makes leaps, therefore so does history. Political praxis is thus understood 
as the consummation of historical laws. This impressive logic is perfected in Stalin’s work 
“Dialectical and Historical Materialism” – for decades an authoritative work in the Marxist 
theory of the Eastern Bloc. Historical materialism stands for the “application” and “extension” 
of ontological principles to society, which implies an epistemological essentialism (a theory 
of reflection, which in the form of Dialectical Materialism conceives of “being” and “think-
ing” independent of the concept of praxis) and a sociological naturalism (a developmental 
logic – to be “consciously applied” or “accelerated” by the party as the highest technocratic 
instance23 – existing independent of human agency).24 
 
I.2 The Historicist Interpretation of the Form-Genetic 
Method 
If Lenin’s statement that “none of the Marxists for the past half century have understood 
Marx” – a dictum that in this case however also applies to Lenin himself – has any validity, 
then it is certainly with regard to the interpretation of the critique of political economy. Even 
100 years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Engels’ commentary was widely 
regarded as the sole legitimate and adequate assessment of Marx’s critique of economy. No 
reading in the Marxist tradition was as uncontroversial as the one casually developed by 
Engels in texts such as the review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Econ-
omy (1859) or the supplement to Volume III of Capital (1894). Here, considerably more 
explicitly than in the objectivist conception of historical materialism, Marxism is Engelsism. 
Against the background of his conception of reflection, Engels interprets the first chapter of 
Capital as a simultaneously logical and historical presentation of “simple commodity produc-
tion” developing toward the relations of capitalist wage labor, “only stripped of the historical 
form and diverting chance occurrences.”25 The term “logical” in this context basically means 
nothing more than “simplified.” The method of presentation, the sequence of categories (com-
modity, the elementary, expanded, and general forms of value, money, capital) in the critique 
of political economy is accordingly “simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consis-
tent form, of the historical course.”26 The examination of the genesis of the money form is 
understood as the description of “an actual event which really took place at some time or 
other” and not as “an abstract mental process that takes place solely in our mind.”27 In no 
other passage of his work does Engels so drastically reduce historical materialism to a vulgar 
empiricism and historicism, as is made evident by his associative chain “materialism – empir-
ically verifiable facts – real process” vs. “idealism – abstract thought process – purely abstract 
territory.” 
With the “logical-historical” method, Engels provides a catchphrase that will be recited and 
stressed ad nauseam in the Marxist orthodoxy. Karl Kautsky, in his enormously influential 
presentations, understood Capital to be an “essentially historical work”28: “Marx was charged 
with recognizing capital to be a historical category and to prove its emergence in history, 
rather than mentally constructing it.”29 Rudolf Hilferding also claims that “in accordance with 
the dialectic method, conceptual evolution runs parallel throughout with historical evolu-
tion.”30 Both Marxism-Leninism31 and Western Marxism32 follow Hilferding in this assess-
ment. But if the critique of political economy is interpreted as historiography, then consequen-
tially the categories at the beginning must correspond directly to empirical objects, for exam-
ple a dubious pre-capitalist commodity not determined by price,33 and the analysis of the form 
of value must begin with the depiction of a coincidental, moneyless interaction of two com-
modity owners – with Engels’ so-called “simple production of commodities,”34 an economic 
epoch he dates from 6000 BC to the 15th century AD. According to this conception, Marx’s 
law of value35 operates at times in this epoch in a pure form “unadulterated” by the category 
of price, which Engels illustrates with the feigned example of a moneyless “exchange” 
between medieval peasants and artisans. 
Here we are dealing with a transparent social interrelationship between immediate producers 
who are at the same time the owners of their means of production, in which one producer 
labors under the watchful eye of the other, and therefore “the peasant of the Middle Ages 
knew fairly accurately the labor-time required for the manufacture of the articles obtained by 
him in barter.”36 Under the conditions of this “natural exchange”, it is not some normative cri-
terion that is for him “the only suitable measure for the quantitative determination of the val-
ues to be exchanged,”37 but rather the abstraction of a labor-time consciously and directly 
measured by the actors. Neither the peasant nor the artisan is so stupid as to exchange unequal 
quantities of labor38: “No other exchange is possible in the whole period of peasant natural 
economy than that in which the exchanged quantities of commodities tend to be measuredmore and more according to the amounts of labor embodied in them.”39 According to Engels, 
the value of a commodity is determined consciously by the labor, measured in time, of indi-
vidual producers. In this theory of value, money does not play a constitutive role. On the one 
hand, it is an expedient and lubricant to trade that is external to value, but on the other it 
serves to obscure the substance of value: suddenly, instead of exchanging according to hours 
of labor, at some point exchange is conducted by means of cows and then pieces of gold. The 
question of how this notion of every commodity being its own labor-money40 can be recon-
ciled with the conditions of private production based upon the division of labor is not posed 
by Engels. Engels – as will be elaborated by the neue Marx-Lektüre – practices exactly what 
Marx criticizes in the case of the classical economists, above all Adam Smith: a projection 
onto the past of the illusory notion of appropriation through one’s own labor, which in fact 
only exists in capitalism; neglect of the necessary connection between value and form of 
value41; a transformation of the “objective equalization” of unequal acts of labor consum-
mated by the objective social relationship itself into a merely subjective consideration of 
social actors.42 
Up until the 1960s, Engels’ theorems continued to be passed on undisputed. Along with his 
formula (once again taken from Hegel) of freedom being the insight into necessity, and the 
drawing of parallels between natural laws and social processes, they gave sustenance to a 
social-technological “concept of emancipation,” according to the following premise: social 
necessity (above all the law of value), which operates anarchically and uncontrolled in capi-
talism, will be, by means of Marxism as a science of the objective laws of nature and society, 
managed and applied according to a plan. Not the disappearance of capitalist form-
determinations, but rather their alternative use characterizes this “socialism of adjectives” 
(this term comes from Robert Kurz) and “socialist political economy.”43 There is a significant 
disproportion between, on the one hand, the emphasis upon the “historical,” and on the other, 
the absence of a historically specific and socio-theoretically reflected concept of economic 
objectivity. This is made evident by the irrelevance of the concept of social form in the dis-
cussions of traditional Marxism, in which it is at most is considered to be s a category for 
ideal or marginal circumstances, but not a constitutive characteristic of Marx’s scientific revo-
lution.44 
I.3 The Critique of the Content of the State 
Engels’ theoretical statements concerning the state in The Origin of the Family, Ludwig 
Feuerbach, Anti-Dühring, and his critique of the Erfurt draft program of the SPD from 1891, 
constitute the source of the traditional Marxist conception of the state. In Ludwig Feuerbach, 
Engels states that the fact that all needs in class societies are articulated through the will of the 
state is “the formal aspect of the matter – the one which is self-evident.”45 The main question 
of a materialist theory of the state, however, is “what is the content of this merely formal will 
– of the individual as well as of the state – and whence is this content derived? Why is just 
this willed and not something else?”46 The result of this purely content-based question con-
cerning the will of the state is for Engels the recognition “that in modern history the will of 
the state is, on the whole, determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy 
of this or that class, in the last resort, by the development of the productive forces and rela-
tions of exchange.”47 Furthermore, in his deliberations in The Origin of the Family Engels 
works with universal-historical categories onto which modern designations like “public 
authority” are projected, and constantly assumes “direct relations of domination, immediate 
forms of class rule”48 in order to explain “the” state, which is consequentially understood as a 
mere instrument of the ruling class. From this content-fixated and universal-historical way of 
considering the state, it can be deduced that Engels loses sight of the actually interesting ques-
tion, namely as to why the class content in capitalism takes on the specific form of public 
authority.49 The personal definition of class rule extracted from pre-capitalist social forma-
tions ultimately leads to reducing the anonymous form of class rule institutionalized in the 
state to a mere ideological illusion, which, in the manner of the theory of priestly deception, is 
interpreted as a product of state tactics of deception. Engels in any case attempts to make the 
class character of the state plausible by referring to “plain corruption of officials” and “an 
alliance between the government and the stock exchange.”50 Nonetheless, in Engels’ work 
there still exists, despite the predominance of the instrumentalist/content-fixated perspective, 
an unmediated coexistence between the determination of the state as the “state of the capital-
ists” and of the state as “ideal total capitalist.”51 The last definition conceives of the state “not 
as a tool of the bourgeoisie […] but rather as an entity of bourgeois society,”52 and an “organ-
isation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of 
the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of indi-
vidual capitalists.”53 But the specific formal aspect of modern statehood is not yet explained 
by this reference to functional mechanisms. Engels also paved the way for the theory of state-
monopoly capitalism.54 In the Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 he 
writes: “I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capi-
talist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in 
that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which 
is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no 
longer private production but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we 
pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches 
of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”55 Finally, 
in Anti-Dühring Engels writes of the state as real total capitalist: “The more productive forces 
it takes over into its possession, the more it actually becomes a real aggregate capitalist, the 
more citizens it exploits.” Here Engels reveals a limited understanding of private production, 
and a tendency to equate state planning and monopoly power with direct socialization,56 rein-
forced by his construction of the fundamental contradiction and his tendency to identify the 
division of labor within a factory and the division of labor in society. Engels does note that 
“the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do 
away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces,”57 but nonetheless sees an immedi-
ate transition to socialism setting in as a result, whereas the concepts of monopoly and state 
intervention remain “economically completely undetermined.”58 Engels thus suggests that the 
workers’ movement merely has to take over the forms of corporate bookkeeping in joint-stock 
companies and the comprehensive planning by monopolies developed in capitalism. For 
Engels, the bourgeoisie has already become obsolete through the separation of ownership and 
management functions.59 The “transformation of the great establishments for production and 
distribution into joint-stock companies and state property” demonstrates, according to Engels, 
“how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for thatpurpose”, i.e. for managing “modern productive 
forces”: “All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. 
The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off 
coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one 
another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now 
it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of 
the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.”60 
Reviewing this history of reception (only roughly outlined here), one could claim that Marx-
ism in the form presented here was a rumor about Marx’s theory, a rumor that was gratefully 
taken up by most critics of “Marx” and merely supplemented with a minus sign. In fact such 
an assertion – as accurate as it may be overall – makes things too easy, in that it disregards 
certain deviations from the dominant doctrine that also understood themselves to be 
Marxisms, while also regarding the above misinterpretations as completely external to Marx’s 
own theory, thus excluding the possibility of any inconsistencies or theoretical-ideological 
ambiguities in Marx’s work. To clarify this question, a glance at the differentiated reading of 
Marx’s texts worked out in the so-called “reconstruction debates” will be useful. 
In this respect, traditional Marxism should be understood here as an elaboration, systematiza-
tion, and assumption of dominance of the ideological content of Marx’s work – within the 
framework of a reception by Engels and his epigones. Practical influence was almost exclu-
sively allotted to these restricted and ideologized interpretations of Marx’s theory, as histori-
cal determinism or proletarian political economy. 
II. Western Marxism 
The formation of a Western Marxism61 arises from the crisis of the socialist workers’ move-
ment in the wake of the First World War (the collapse of the Second International as a result 
of the policy of defense of the fatherland, the defeat of revolutions in Central and Southern 
Europe, the emergence of fascist forces, etc.). Here it is Georg Lukács’ and Karl Korsch’s 
texts published in 1923 which assume a paradigmatic character. Above all Lukács is consid-
ered the first Marxist theorist who at the level of social theory and methodology called into 
question the hitherto self-evident assumption of the complete identity of Marx’s and Engels’ 
theories. At the center of his critique stood Engels’ neglect of the subject-object dialectic as 
well as his concept of a dialectic of nature, to which the fatalism of Second International 
Marxism was oriented. Against this ontologization of historical materialism into a contempla-
tive worldview, Lukács, like Western Marxism as a whole, understands Marx’s approach to 
be a critical revolutionary theory of social praxis. Against the scientistic talk of “objective 
laws of development” of social progress, Lukács posits the critique of ideology of reified con-
sciousness, deciphering the capitalist mode of production as a historically specific form of 
social praxis ossified into a “second nature,” and emphasizing revolution as a critical act of 
practical subjectivity. Self-descriptions such as “philosophy of praxis” (Gramsci) or “critical 
theory of society” (Horkheimer) therefore do not constitute code words or conceptual equiva-
lents for official party doctrine, but rather emphasize a learning process from which “arises a 
critical, action-oriented current of thought of Marxist heritage.”62 Although Western Marxism 
at first positively adopted the activist impulses of the October Revolution, its leading repre-
sentatives would quickly come to reject the doctrine of Leninism, above all its continuation of 
a naturalistic social theory and its false universalization of the experience of the Russian Rev-
olution. Georg Lukács’ critique of Bukharin’s “Theory of Historical Materialism” serves as an 
example of the former. In his critique, Lukács charges that Bukharin’s theory, with its con-
cepts of the primacy of the development of the forces of production and the seamless applica-
tion of the methods of natural science to the study of society, is fetishistic and obliterates the 
“qualitative difference” between the two subject areas of natural and social sciences, thus 
acquiring “the accent of a false ‘objectivity’ and mistaking the core idea of Marx’s method, 
namely the ascription of “all economic phenomena to the social relationships of human 
beings to one another.”63 
In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci provided the exemplary critique of the fixation of revolu-
tionary strategy upon the model of the October Revolution. Initially, he had greeted the Octo-
ber Revolution as a “revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital,”64 that is to say as a refutation of 
the allegedly proven impossibility of socialist revolution in industrially backwards countries. 
In an almost revolutionary manner, he cited the voluntaristic “socialist annunciation” as a 
source of a collective socialist “popular will” against a class consciousness mechanically 
derived from the economy and the level of its forces of production. Later, Gramsci would 
confront the Marxism of the Third International with his theory of hegemony, which rejects 
the “war of maneuver” of a frontal attack upon the repressive state apparatus as being a use-
less revolutionary strategy for modern Western capitalist societies. According to Gramsci, 
within these social formations “civil society” is composed of a labyrinthine structure of appa-
ratuses in which patterns of thought and behavior are generated which exhibit an inertia that 
cannot be shaken by grandiose political deeds. The Russian revolutionary model is also con-
demned to failure in the West because the belief in the universal nature of experience of the 
Bolsheviks with a centralist-despotic Tsarism leads to a disregard for the relevance of ideo-
logical socialization by means of the apparatuses of civil society, and their effect: subjection 
in the form of autonomous agency. However, both Lukács and Gramsci remain loyal to the 
“exclusively proletarian” conception of revolution to the extent that the former, despite his 
reflections upon reified consciousness, still attributes an epistemological privilege to the pro-
letariat guaranteed by its economic position, while Gramsci’s strategically motivated theory 
of civil society is fixated upon the room for maneuver of the working class. 
With the attempt at a social-psychological exploration of the drive/structural foundations of 
the reproduction of an “irrational society,” above all in the form of authoritarian and antise-
mitic attitudes, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, after Max Horkheimer’s assump-
tion of its directorship in 1931, achieved a level of reflection that other representatives and 
currents of Western Marxism could not match,65 and which gives up on the reassuring support 
of an imagined class consciousness of the proletariat. Finally, the empirical class conscious-
ness of the proletariat as the only existing class consciousness is subjected to analysis, while 
the “irrational,” emotional dimensions of social praxis ignored by other theorists, such as the 
social dimensions of the libidinal, are considered. This theoretical insight into the uncompro-
mising nature of critical theory is at the same time an admission of the historical process of an 
increasing rift between emancipatory theory and the perspective of revolutionary praxis. With 
the propagation of socialism in one country, the Bolshevization of the Western Communist 
Parties, and the establishment of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Third 
International after the mid-1920s, there begins the characteristic isolation of the representa-tives of Western Marxism: this current is left with neither political influence nor (with the 
possible exception of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) the institutional foundations 
for a normal scholarly praxis. The general characteristics of this Marxist formation – its sense 
for the Hegelian legacy and the critical-humanist potential of Marx’s theory, the incorporation 
of contemporary “bourgeois” approaches to elucidate the great crisis of the workers move-
ment, the orientation towards methodology, the sensitization to social-psychological and cul-
tural phenomena in connection with the question concerning the reasons for the failure of rev-
olution in “the West”66 –provides the framework for a new type of restricted exegesis of 
Marx. This is essentially characterized by the neglect of problems of politics and state theory, 
a selective reception of Marx’s theory of value, and the predominance of a “silent orthodoxy” 
concerning the critique of political economy. Although the first to understand the character of 
capitalist rule the way Marx did – anonymous, objectively mediated, and having a life of its 
own – the “founding document” of Western Marxism, Lukacs’ History and Class Conscious-
ness, avoids a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of capitalism. Instead of an analysis of Marx’s 
dialectic of the form of value up to the form of capital, which in the theory of real subsump-
tion offers an explanation of the connection – so decisive for Lukács – between commodifica-
tion and the alienated structure of the labor process, one finds merely an analogizing combina-
tion of a value theory reduced to the “quantifying” value-form (due to an orientation towards 
Simmel’s cultural critique of money) and a diagnosis, oriented towards Max Weber, of the 
formal-rational tendency of the objectification of the labor process and modern law. Until the 
mid-1960s it seems that no Western Marxists extended their debate with traditional interpreta-
tions of Marx into the realm of value theory. Some positions go even further than this silent 
orthodoxy, and – without having seriously engaged with the critique of political economy – 
contrast the “humanist cultural critic Marx” with the “economist Marx” or even regard a 
“Marxism” without a critique of political economy as being possible.67 
III. The “Neue Marx-Lektüre” 
It was first within the framework of the “neue Marx-Lektüre” (“New Reading of Marx”), 
which emerged in the mid-1960s, that problems of state theory and economic theory once 
again played a role outside of Marxism-Leninism. This new wave of reception of Marx’s the-
ory was also more or less situated outside of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Alongside the 
new reading in West European countries, there were isolated rudiments of a “new reading of 
Marx” occurring in Eastern Europe.68 Its genesis in West Germany coincided with phenomena 
such as the student movement, the first jolts to belief in a perpetual and politically manage-
able post-war prosperity, the breaking up of the anti-communist consensus in the course of the 
Vietnam War, etc., yet remained, despite its radical emancipatory claims, confined largely to 
academia. Here, we distinguish between this “new reading of Marx” in a broader sense69, and 
one more narrowly defined.70 Whereas the former was an international phenomenon, the latter 
was confined primarily to West Germany. If the former still remained predominantly trapped 
within Engelsian dogma with regard to the critique of political economy, the latter fore-
grounded the revision of previous historicist or empiricist interpretations of Marx’s form 
analysis. In terms of content, a threefold abandonment of central topoi of traditional Marxism 
was consummated in the main threads of the debate, themselves contradictory and in no way 
shared by all participants: a move away from a substantialist theory of value71; abandonment 
of manipulative-instrumental conceptions of the state72; and a move away from labor 
movement-centric interpretations of the critique of political economy, or interpretations based 
on a “labor-ontological” revolutionary theory (or even upon revolutionary theory as such).73 
This new reading articulates its theoretical efforts in the form of a reconstruction of Marx’s 
theory. 
With regard to the critique of economy, a crystallization of central questions and research 
tasks occurred within the framework of the 1967 colloquium “100 Jahre ‘Kapital.’”74 A rein-
terpretation of Marx’s critique was envisioned from the methodological perspective of social 
theory: the question as to the original object of Capital (economic form-determination), the 
particularity of scientific presentation (the dialectic of the forms of value), as well as the con-
nection between the three volumes (“capital in general – many capitals”) are posed anew, as 
distinct from quantitative approaches, and with a particular emphasis upon the significance of 
the Grundrisse. Within the field of the conflict between “critical” and “structural” Marxisms, 
transitional moments of flight from existing methodological traditions arise, oblique to the 
classical points of conflict75: both structuralist anti-historicism as well as Hegelian figures of 
thought (“progressive-regressive method,” “return to the foundation”) play an important role 
in this. 
Initially with a lot of “ifs and buts”76, and on some points remaining within the channels of 
traditional Marxism, the New Reading of Marx acquired more clearly defined contours over 
the course of the 1970s. 
Traditional readings of Marx’s theory 
Classical Assumption of the Marxism of the 
2nd and 3rd Internationals 
Marx = Engels (unified paradigm, coherent argu-
mentation, closed “worldview”) 
Levels of the critical-reconstructive 
reading 
 
Level 1: e.g. Backhaus (Materialien parts 1 
and 2) 
Engels → exoteric vs. 
Marx → esoteric 
Level 2: e.g. Althusser (Reading Capital); 
A. Schmidt; Backhaus (Materialien) 
Marx → exoteric meta-discourse vs. 
Marx → esoteric real analysis 
Level 3: e.g. Backhaus (Materialien parts 3 
and 4); Heinrich (Science of Value) 
Marx → exoteric/esoteric meta-discourse 
Marx → exoteric/esoteric real analysis 
Against the classical myth of the complete equality between the paradigms of Marx and 
Engels, with regard to both historical materialism and the critique of political economy, 
Engels’ commentaries were criticized as largely inadequate to Marx’s work and remaining at 
a purely “exoteric” level that perpetuated traditional paradigms. Thus, in 1974 Hans-Georg 
Backhaus emphasized with regard to value theory that the critique was aimed “at an interpre-
tative premise which until recently was considered one of the few uncontested elements of the 
Marxist literature, and which structured the reception of Marx’s value theory without being 
challenged: the misinterpretation, touched off by Engels, of the first three chapters of Capital 
as a value and money theory of what Engels called ‘simple commodity production.’”77 Back-
haus assumes that “proceeding from this fundamental error, Marxist value theory necessarily 
inhibited the reception of Marx’s value theory.”78 If therefore at this level an initial distinction 
is made between a Marxist theory and Marx’s theory, a problematization of Marx’s meta-
theoretical self-understanding also occurs early on. Louis Althusser had already affirmed, 
with the aid of a “symptomatic” reading directed against a subject-centric intentionalist 
hermeneutic, that Marx’s work represents a scientific revolution in the theoretical praxis of 
the analysis of capitalism, which at the meta-theoretical level is superimposed upon by a dis-
course inadequate to this problematic. Althusser defines the tasks of a reconstruction as the 
removal of the inadequate meta-discourse and the transformation of its dominant metaphors, 
which he readsas symptoms for the absence of an adequate self-reflection of the real proce-
dure of the analysis of capital, into concepts.79 As distinct from Althusser and his dualist con-
ception of the relationship between the real object and the object of knowledge80, this issue is 
usually formulated in the reconstruction debate within the theoretical framework of a Marxian 
critique of ideology: Marx distinguishes between “esoteric” and “exoteric” levels in the works 
of classical political economy. If the former contains insights into the social context of media-
tion of the bourgeois mode of production, the latter is content with an unmediated description 
and systematization of the objective forms of thought of the everyday consciousness of social 
actors, remaining trapped in the reified illusion of the immediacy of phenomena which are in 
fact socially mediated. So the “exoteric” argumentation cannot be traced back psychologically 
to subjective deficiencies or even conscious attempts at deception on the part of theorists. It 
results from a determinate form of thought which is the systematic and initially involuntary 
product of the forms of social intercourse of the capitalist mode of production. The recon-
struction debate would now apply the esoteric/exoteric distinction to Marx’s work itself. 
Ultimately, even in the critique of political economy and in historical materialism – that is to 
say in the theoretical praxis regarded at the previous stage of reconstruction as an intact “eso-
teric” layer – “exoteric” content and conceptual ambivalence “between scientific revolution 
and classical tradition”81 are manifest. The doctrine of the inviolability of the presentation of 
the critique of political economy in Capital is finally discarded. In place of the legend of a lin-
ear progression of knowledge on Marx’s part, there appeared the recognition of a complex 
coexistence and interpenetration of progress and regression in the method of presentation and 
the state of research of Marx’s critique of economy. Ultimately, the increased popularization 
of the presentation of the analysis of the forms of value from the Grundrisse to the second 
edition of Capital was pointed out. This popularization, to the extent that it increasingly con-
cealed the form-genetic method, offered points of reference to historicist and substantialist 
readings.82 
IV. Learning Processes within Marxism 
Since there is not enough space within the framework of this text to elucidate even approxi-
mately the aspects of a scientific revolution – internal learning processes, but also regressions 
to traditional economic and historical-philosophical positions in Marx’s work – I will attempt 
to briefly mention some of the points arrived at in the above-mentioned learning processes 
within Marxism. 
Marx’s theory does not affirm some kind of automatic liberation; rather, it should be under-
stood as the theoretical instance of a body of work, mediated by analysis and critique, con-
tributing to the liberation from the automatism of an irrational mode of socialization. Marx’s 
assertion that he grasps the development of the capitalist mode of production as “a process of 
natural history,”83 often cited by both Marxists and anti-Marxists as proof either of the highest 
scientific status of Marx’s work or of unscientific prophecy, should be understood as a critical 
statement. “Nature” or “naturalness” are negatively determined categories for a social system 
that, on the basis of its constitution by the private division of labor, asserts itself with regard 
to social actors as a relentless machine using up abstract labor, as a “destiny of value” beyond 
all collective and individual control and yet reproducing itself by means of their activity. 
Marx’s theory is “a unified critical judgment on previous history, to the effect that men have 
allowed themselves to be degraded into objects of the blind and mechanical process of its eco-
nomic development.”84 While Marx does succumb to a historical optimism that often tips over 
into a philosophy of history in the declamatory sections of his works, this is fundamentally 
contradicted by his scientific critique of philosophies of history and political economy.85 But 
it is precisely from these cliches that the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, as 
well as the more educated among those who disdain Marx, paste together an abstruse system 
of iron historical necessities, up to and including a “law of the sequence of social formations” 
which establishes the “general historically necessary tendency of the progress of the human 
species.”86 
The critique of political economy, which in the form of Marx’s late works “does not with-
stand comparison with the immanent claim of the programmatic declaration in The German 
Ideology,”87 namely of presenting the capitalist mode of production in its totality, can be pre-
sented as a process of four critiques: 1) the critique of bourgeois society and its destructive 
“natural” forms of development, against the background of the real, objective possibility it 
generates of its own emancipatory transcendence, 2) the critique of the fetishized and back-
ward everyday consciousness of social actors systematically generated by these social rela-
tions, 3) the critique of the entire theoretical field of political economy88, which uncritically 
systematizes these common perceptions, and 4) the critique of utopian social criticism, which 
either confronts the system of the capitalist mode of production with a model of social libera-
tion, or presumes to bring isolated economic forms to bear against the system as a whole by 
means of reforms.89 The critique is therefore not immanent in the sense that it would affirm 
the determinations of exchange, bourgeois ideals, proletarian demands for rights, or industrial 
production (which is subsumed to capital) against capitalism as a whole. 
The method of the critique of economy can be described as the “development” or “analysis of 
forms.” It aims to grasp the specific sociality of historically distinct modes of production. 
Whereas “bourgeois” approaches conduct at best a science of the reproduction of society 
within specific economic and political forms, a critique of political economy must be con-
ceived of as a science of these forms.90 Political economy operates at the level of already con-
stituted economic objects, takes them empirically as a given, or can only justify their exis-
tence in a circular manner, without conceptually penetrating the systematic process of their 
constitution. It succumbs to the self-mystification of the capitalist world of objects as a world 
of natural forms91, thus depriving humans of the ability to configure and alter their fundamen-
tal structures. 
In contrast, form-analysis develops these forms (such as value, money, capital, but also law 
and the state) from the contradictory conditions of the social constitution of labor, “clarifies 
them, grasps their essence and necessity.”92 Form development is not to be understood as the 
retracing of the historical development of the object, but rather the conceptual deciphering of 
the immanent structural relationships of the capitalist mode of production. It unscrambles the 
apparently independent, apparently objectively grounded forms of social wealth and the polit-
ical compulsion of the capitalist mode of production as historically specific and therefore – 
albeit in no way arbitrarily or in a piecemeal manner – as changeable forms of praxis. 
Traditional as well as Western Marxism had completely ignored the revolutionary scientific 
potential of Marx’s approach, his theory of the monetary constitution of value. Above all, the 
neue Marx-Lektüre criticized the empiricist-historicist misinterpretation of the method of pre-
sentation that started with Engels, and the “premonetary” interpretation of the theoryof value 
in Capital, but also ambivalences in Marx’s work itself and the popularization of his method, 
which meant “forgoing a systematic elaboration of fundamental ideas of value theory and 
methodology.”93 Engels and Traditional Marxism interpreted different levels of abstraction of 
the presentation of the laws of the capitalist mode of production in Capital as empirically 
coequal levels of a model of historically distinct modes of production. Thus categories such as 
abstract labor, value, and the elementary form of value were reinterpreted in an empiricist 
way, and the connection between commodity, money, and capital – considered essential by 
Marx – was transformed into a coincidence. Marxism thus operated on a methodological and 
value-theoretical terrain that Marx had criticized with regard to classical economics. How-
ever, Marx’s critique of political economy is distinct from an alternative political economy in 
primarily two respects: in the first instance it is not the theory of surplus-value, but rather the 
form theory of labor that distinguishes Marx from classical political economy. Marx criticizes 
the way political economy unreflectively presupposes the form of “value,” never questioning 
its genesis, unable to grasp labor that takes the form of value as a historically specific social 
form (the question is not raised as to “why labour is represented by the value of its prod-
uct”94). Political economy therefore operates fundamentally within the field of fetishistic 
forms. Moreover, Marx criticizes the premonetary character of its value theory, since it 
“treat[s] the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the 
inherent nature of commodities,”95 meaning it does not distinguish between intrinsic and 
external measure of value as categories existing at two different levels of theoretical abstrac-
tion, and does not grasp the necessity of the money-form for the exchange of commodities. 
Money is understood as a purely technical instrument which for reasons of convenience takes 
the place of exchange on the basis of calculations of labor-time magnitudes. In Marx’s work, 
on the other hand, money is developed as a necessary moment in the process of commodity 
exchange. Without a general form of value, values cannot represent value for each other, and 
would be reduced to the status of products. One must therefore proceed from the “equiprimor-
dial” constitution of abstract labor as a logically prior immanent measure of value, and money 
as the external measure of value. In this sense, Marx speaks of the substance of value as a 
result obtained in exchange which furthermore first acquires an intertemporal existence as 
capital. In contrast to the empiricism and ahistoricism of political economy, Marx’s approach 
thus reveals itself to be a perception of essence in the sense of the reconstruction of a structure 
and system of agency which is empirically not immediately perceivable – by means of the 
elaboration of a non-empirical theoretical level which first makes possible the explanation of 
empirical forms of appearance, such as money. Marx follows “a principle of the development 
of economic categories by distinguishing between different levels of abstraction.”96 Cate-
gories such as abstract labor or value therefore have no immediate empirical referents. The 
sequence of the categories of commodity and money is not to be understood as a historical 
sequence of independently existing circumstances, but rather as a conceptual analysis. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Overview of the Marxisms 
 Important Theorists Central Reference Texts 
of Marx/Engels 
Core Concept: 
Marx’s The-
ory as… 
Traditional 
Marxism 
[1878ff.] 
[F. Engels], K. Kautsky, E. 
Bernstein, Lafargue, F. 
Mehring, A. Bebel, G. 
Plekhanov, etc.(= 1st Genera-
tion); V.I. Lenin, L. 
Trotsky, R. Luxemburg, N. 
Bukharin, M. Adler, R. Hil-
ferding (= 2nd Generation) 
Claim: Doctrine of the 
materialist conception of 
history as the center of the 
collaborative works of 
Marx and EngelsEngels: 
Anti-Dühring, Ludwig 
Feuerbach, “Review of A 
Contribution to the Cri-
tique of Political Econ-
omy” (1859) 
etc.Marx: Capital Vol. 1 – 
Chapter 32, “Preface” to 
Critique (1859), Manifesto 
(M/E) 
Closed, coherent 
proletarian world-
view and doctrine 
of the evolution of 
nature and history 
(“becoming and 
passing away”) 
Western Marx-
ism [1923ff.] 
G. Lukács, K. Korsch, E. 
Bloch, H. Lefebvre, Frankfurt 
School, A. Gramsci, K. 
Kosik, Yugoslav Praxis-
Group (G. Petrovic, P. Vran-
icki, etc.), Budapest 
School (A. Heller, G. Markus, 
etc.), L. Kofler, J.-P. Sartre 
Claim: Humanist early 
work as interpretative 
framework for the 
“scientific” later 
worksMarx: “Theses on 
Feuerbach,” 1844 Manu-
scripts, The German Ideol-
ogy (M/E) 
Critical-
revolutionary the-
ory of social 
praxis (“subjec-
tive mediation of 
the object”) 
neue Marx-
Lektüre [1965ff.] 
[Predecessors: I.I. Rubin, E. 
Paschukanis] H.G. Backhaus, 
H. Reichelt, D. Wolf, H.D. 
Kittsteiner, M. Heinrich, 
SOST, Projekt 
Klassenanalyse/PEM, S. 
Breuer, State-Derivation 
Debate (B. Blanke, D. 
Läpple, MG, J. Hirsch, W. 
Müller/ Ch. Neusüß, N. Kost-
ede, etc.) 
Claim: apprehending the 
whole Marx, or later works 
as interpretative frame-
work for the early 
worksMarx: Grun-
drisse, Capital Vol. I first 
edition, Urtext, “Results of 
the Immediate Process of 
Production” 
Deciphering and 
Critique of the 
Forms of capitalist 
socialization by 
means of logical-
systematic method 
of presenta-
tions (“form-
development 
and critique”) 
– Translated by Alexander Locascio 
Image thanks to f2b1610. 
 
1. Karl Kautsky, quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, “Engels und die Geschichte des Marx-
ismus,” in Klassen, Politik, Sprache. Für eine theorieorientierte Sozialgeschichte 
(Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot,1988), 234n; V.I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and 
Three Component Parts of Marxism.” All English quotations from Marx, Engels, 
Lenin, and Kautsky taken from the versions available at www.marxists.org ↩ 
2. Frederick Engels, “Dialectics” in Dialectics of Nature. ↩ 
3. Engels, “Introduction” in Anti-Dühring. ↩ 
4. Engels, “Hegel” in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philoso-
phy. ↩ 
5. Ibid. ↩ 
6. Engels, “Marx” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩ 
7. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.” ↩ 
8. Engels, “Notes and Fragments” in Dialectics of Nature. ↩ 
9. Above all in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, stylized by Marxism-Leninism as the 
classical textbook of dialectical materialism alongside Anti-Dühring. Here, Marxism 
becomes an ideology in the strict Marxian sense: a systemization of the forms of 
thought of a reified common sense. Concerning the political-pragamatical background 
of the text, usually disregarded in ML, see Johannes Busch-Weßlau, Der Marxismus 
und die Legitimation politischer Macht (Frankfurt: Campus Verl, 1990), 30. ↩ 
10. Falko Schmieder points to the a priori role of the medium of photography as a founda-
tion of this naive realism in philosophy, as well as the fundamental commonalities 
between Engels, Lenin, and Feuerbach; Ludwig Feuerbach und der Eingang der klas-
sischen Fotografie. Zum Verhältnis von anthropologischem und Historischem Materi-
alismus (Berlin: PHILO-Verlag, 2004), 213. ↩ 
11. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform und Denkform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978),114. ↩ 
12. Engels, “Marx” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩ 
13. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach.” ↩ 
14. Engels, “Materialism” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩ 
15. For more on this, see the study of Hans-Josef Steinberg [1967], Sozialismus und 
deutsche Sozialdemokratie. Zur Ideologie der Partei vor dem 1. Weltkrieg (Berlin-
Bonn: 1979), above all 45, 63. Approaches toward a social historicalexplanation are 
offered by idem, 145-150; Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer 
Attentismus. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges 
(Frankfurt: Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg, 1974), 58-63; Oskar Negt, “Marxismus als 
Legitimationswissenschaft,” in N. Bucharin/A. Deborin – Kontroversen über dialektis-
chen und mechanistischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974); Antonio 
Gramsci, Philosophie der Praxis. Eine Auswahl (Frankfurt: S Fischer, 1967),1386. ↩ 
16. For a critique, see Alexandrine Mohl, Verelendung und Revolution. Oder: Das Elend 
des Objektivismus. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Marxrezeption in der deutschen 
Sozialdemokratie (Frankfurt 1978); Rolf Peter Sieferle, Die Revolution in der Theorie 
von Karl Marx (Berlin: Ullstein, 1979); Ingo Elbe, “‘Umwälzungsmomente der alten 
Gesellschaft’ – Aspekte der Revolutionstheorie und ihrer Kritik bei Marx,” 2002. ↩ 
17. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe point out the Darwinist-Hegelian character of this 
conception: “Darwinism alone does not offer ‘guarantees for the future,’ since natural 
selection does not operate in a direction predetermined from the beginning. Only if a 
Hegelian type of teleology is added to Darwinism – which is totally incompatible with 
it – can an evolutionary process be presented as a guarantee of future transitions”; 
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 2001), 20. ↩ 
18. For more on this, in an instructive manner, see Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, “Bewusst-
seinsbildung, Parteilichkeit, dialektischer und historischer Materialismus. Zu einigen 
Kategorien der marxistisch-leninistischen Geschichtsmethodologie,” Internationale 
Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. 
Jg. 10, 1974. ↩ 
19. See Groh, Negative Integration, 36. ↩ 
20. Kautsky, quoted in Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 61. See 
also Ethics and the Materialist Conception Of History. According to Kautsky, the 
prospects for freedom and humanity are not “mere expectations of conditions which 
only ought to come, which we simply wish and will, but outlooks at conditions which 
must come, which are necessary.” Kautsky defends himself against interpretations of 
necessity “in the fatalist sense, that a higher power will present them to us of itself,” 
but assumes an irresistible immanent historical-economic compulsion toward revolu-
tion, whereby the immanent compulsive laws of capitalism and the formation of the 
proletariat as a successful revolutionary subject play the same role: “unavoidable in 
the sense, that the […] capitalists in their desire for profit [!] revolutionize the whole 
economic life, as it is also inevitable that the workers aim for shorter hours of labor 
and higher wages, that they organize themselves, that they fight the capitalist class and 
its state, as it is inevitable that they aim for the conquest of political power and the 
overthrow of capitalist rule. Socialism is inevitable because the class struggle and the 
victory of the proletariat is inevitable.” ↩ 
21. Lenin, “Three Sources.” ↩ 
22. Lenin, Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism. ↩ 
23. On the paradoxes of this combination of voluntarism and determinism, see Charles 
Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). ↩ 
24. It is precisely Western Marxism that – against Marxism-Leninism – emphasizes the 
non-ontological character of Marx’s materialism; see Max Horkheimer, “Traditional 
and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 
1972), as well as Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (New York: Verso, 
2014). Stalin determines the components of Marx’s theory as follows: Dialektik: a uni-
versal logic of development emphasizing discontinuity, which teaches that everything 
can be conceived of as in a state of becoming and decaying; Materialism: a contempla-
tive ontology which teaches that consciousness is merely a reflection of a nature exist-
ing independent and outside of consciousness; Historical Materialism: the application 
of dialectical materialism to history; universal historical laws are class struggle, the 
dialectic between forces of production and relations of production, rooted in the pri-
macy of the development of the forces of production (casua sui concept of forces of 
production), and ultimately the law of progress of successive social formations. ↩ 
25. Engels, “Karl Marx: Critique of Political Economy. Review by Frederick Engels.” ↩ 
26. Ibid. ↩ 
27. Ibid. ↩ 
28. Kautsky [1886], Karl Marx’ ökonomische Lehren. Gemeinverständlich dargestellt und 
erläutert von Karl Kautsky, 21. (Berlin: 1922), viii. ↩ 
29. Kautsky, quoted in Rolf Hecker, “Einfache Warenproduktion,” 1997. ↩ 
30. Rudolf Hilferding, Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx. ↩ 
31. M.M. Rosental [1955], Die dialektische Methode der politischen Ökonomie von Karl 
Marx (Berlin: Dietz, 1973). ↩ 
32. See Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press: 
1970). ↩ 
33. “This makes clear, of course, why in the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds 
from the simple production of commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to 
arrive from this basis to capital – why he proceeds from the simple commodity instead 
of a logically and historically secondary form – from an already capitalistically modi-
fied commodity.” Engels, “Preface” in Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3. ↩ 
34. Ibid. This interpretation of the analysis of the form of value is also adopted by Kaut-
sky, in The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. ↩ 
35. That is to say, the law of value discussed by Marx. See Engels’ “Supplement” to vol-
ume 3. ↩ 
36. Ibid ↩ 
37. Ibid. ↩ 
38. “Or is it believed that the peasant and the artisan were so stupid as to give up the prod-
uct of 10 hours’ labor of one person for that of a single hours’ labor of another?”; and 
whoever does so learns “only through mistakes.” Ibid. ↩ 
39. Ibid. ↩ 
40. In contrast, see Marx’s critique of the notion of labor-money, or the notion of a pre-
monetary commodity exchange in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 
and in the Grundrisse. ↩ 
41. See footnote 33 in chapter one of Capital, Volume 1. ↩ 
42. For Marx’s view, see for example: “Adam Smith constantly confuses the determina-
tion of the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them with the deter-
mination of their value by the value of labour; he is often inconsistent in the details of 
his exposition and he mistakes the objective equalisation of unequal quantities of 
labour forcibly brought about by the social process for the subjective equality of the 
labours of individuals”; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩ 
43. According to Marxism-Leninism, “value functions as an instrument of the planned 
administration of the socialist processes of production and reproduction, according to 
the principles of bookkeeping and control of the mass of labor and of consumption. 
Correspondingly, the relation of value is consciously implemented”; Wolfgang Peter 
Eichhorn, “Wert” in G. Klaus and M. Buhr, ed. Philosophisches Wörterbuch, Bd. 2 
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 1291. Within this framework, socialism consists 
“merely in the revolutionized way of calculating the same social determination of the 
products of human labor as exists in the capitalist commodity economy,” as Stefan 
Grigat critically notes; “Kritik und Utopie,” Weg und Ziel, 4 (1997): 20. Thus, 
allegedly Marxian communism degenerates into a sort of Proudhonian system of labor 
notes, as Diethard Behrens and Kornelia Hafner also observe: “all hitherto existing 
conceptions of the transition to socialism resort to models of immediate calculation of 
labor-value and utility”; “Auf der Suche nach dem wahren Sozialismus. Von der Kri-
tik des Proudhonismus überdie russische Modernisierungsdiktatur zum realsozialistis-
chen Etikettenschwindel” in Anton Pannekoek, Marxistischer Antileninismus 
(Freiburg, 1991), 226. See here also Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. 
Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolu-
tion und klassischer Tradition (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), 385-392; 
and Kittsteiner, “Bewusstseinsbildung.” ↩ 
44. For example, Engels, “Marx” in Ludwig Feuerbach. ↩ 
45. Ibid. ↩ 
46. Ibid. ↩ 
47. Ibid, translation modified. ↩ 
48. Gert Schäfer, “Einige Probleme des Verhältnisses von ‘ökonomischer’ und ‘politis-
cher’ Herrschaft,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Staatstheorie. Materialien zur 
Rekonstruktion der marxistischen Staatstheorie (Berlin: Ullstein, 1974). ↩ 
49. Compare Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism: “why is the apparatus 
of state coercion created not as a private apparatus of the ruling class, but distinct from 
the latter in the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power distinct from soci-
ety?” ↩ 
50. Engels, “Barbarism and Civilization” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, 
and the State. No wonder, then, that Lenin refers affirmatively to this “explanation,” 
with its theory of agents and influence. ↩ 
51. Engels, Anti-Dühring. [Translator’s Note: The official translation of “ideeller 
Gesamtkapitalist” in the Marx-Engels Collected Works renders this unsatisfactorily as 
“the ideal personification of the total national capital,” when in fact “ideal total capi-
talist” is more accurate.] ↩ 
52. Johannes Busch-Weßlau, Der Marxismus und die Legitimation politischer Macht, 
Frankfurt, Campus-Verlag, 1990). ↩ 
53. Engels, Anti-Dühring. ↩ 
54. Hans Holger Paul, Marx, Engels und die Imperialismustheorie der 2. Internationale 
(Hamburg, 1978). ↩ 
55. Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891.” ↩ 
56. Schäfer, “Einige Probleme,” cxxxi. ↩ 
57. Engels, Anti-Dühring. ↩ 
58. Schäfer, “Einige Probleme,” cxxxiv. ↩ 
59. This old chestnut will later be presented by Wolfgang Pohrt and others as a deep 
insight about “late capitalism.” ↩ 
60. Engels, Anti-Dühring. ↩ 
61. The term was probably first used in a Leninist polemic against Lukács’ History and 
Class Consciousness (see Rudolf Walther, “Marxismus” in O. Brunner, ed., 
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in 
Deutschland, Bd. 3, [Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1982], 968), but did not achieve greater signif-
icance, neither as a polemical formulation nor as a self-description by the theorists 
commonly subsumed under the name (such as Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, the Frankfurt 
School, Gramsci, Lefebvre, etc.). Here, I follow Perry Anderson’s usage of the term in 
Considerations on Western Marxism (New York: Verso, 1987). As fruitful as the con-
cept of Western Marxism might be as a heuristic model, its limits must be clearly 
shown; see the critique of Anderson by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Westlicher Marxis-
mus?” in Pluraler Marxismus, Bd. 2 (Hamburg: Argument, 1987) and Michael Krätke, 
“Marxismus als Sozialwissenschaft” in Haug, Materialien zum Historisch-kritischen 
Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Hamburg: Argument, 1996), 77. ↩ 
62. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Philosophieren mit Brecht und Gramsci (Hamburg: Argument, 
1996), 8. For a critique of the “code word thesis” with regard to Gramsci’s work, see 
Haug, “Einleitung,” in Antonio Gramsci, Gefängnishefte 6. Philosophie der Praxis 
(Hamburg: Argument, 1995), 1195-1209. ↩ 
63. Georg Lukács, “N. Bucharin: Theorie des historischen Materialismus (Rezension)” in 
N. Bucharin/ A. Deborin: Kontroversen über dialektischen und mechanistischen Mat-
eralismus, 289, 284. ↩ 
64. Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution Against Capital.” ↩ 
65. A scientific psychology cannot be found in the thought of most representatives of 
Marxism, apart from positive references to Pavlov’s behaviorism. Psychoanalysis was 
mostly rejected, if not demonized as “bourgeois-decadent”. Helmut Dahmer offers a 
critical overview of such reactions in Libido und Gesellschaft. Studien über Freud und 
die Freudsche Linke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 241-277; within the framework of 
Western Marxism, it was primarily Lukács who distinguished himself in the condem-
nation of Freud. Gramsci by his own admission “was not able to study Freud’s theo-
ries” ↩ 
66. As further characteristics of Western Marxism, Anderson names the recourse to pre-
Marxian philosophy in order to clarify the method of a critical social theory; the incor-
poration of contemporary “bourgeois” theories: an esoteric writing style; a rather pes-
simistic appraisal of historical development markedly divergent from the triumphalist 
diction of classical Marxism and Marxism-Leninism; a preference for problems of aes-
thetics. ↩ 
67. For example, Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man or Jürgen Habermas’ “Recon-
struction of Historical Materialism.” ↩ 
68. The first attempts at a new reading of Marx already occurred in the 1920s, on the part 
of the Soviet authors Isaak Illich Rubin and Evgeny Pashukanis. See I.I. Rubin, Essays 
on Marx’s Theory of Value, and Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and 
Marxism. Their awareness of problems of aspects of Marx’s theory with regard to 
value and legal theory was not even matched in a rudimentary way for a long time, in 
the East or the West. Only with the debates since the end of the 1960s did this change 
somewhat. ↩ 
69. As described by Heinrich “Kommentierte Literaturliste zur Kritik der politischen 
Ökonomie,” in Elmar Altvater, Rolf Hecker, Michael Heinrich, Petra Schaper-Rinkel, 
ed., Kapital. doc. Das Kapital (Bd. 1) von Karl Marx in Schaubildern und Kom-
mentaren (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), 207; and Urs Jaeggi, “Einige 
Bemerkungen zur Orthodoxie und zum Dogmatismus im Historischen Materialismus,” 
in Axel Honneth, ed., Theorien des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 
1977), 146. It is also referred to under the label of “Neo-Marxism.” ↩ 
70. As defined by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur 
Marxschen Ökonomiekritik (Freiburg; ça ira, 1997). See also Heinrich, “Kommentierte 
Literaturliste,” 211. ↩ 
71. See Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, and Helmut Brentel, Soziale Form und 
ökonomisches Objekt. Studien zum Gegenstands- und Methodenverständnis der Kritik 
der politischen Ökonomie (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1989). ↩ 
72. Concerning the so-called “state derivation debate,” see Norbert Kostede, “Die neuere 
marxistische Diskussion über den bürgerlichen Staat. Einführung – Kritik – Resul-
tate,” Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie (1976): 150-196; and Gerd Rudel, 
Die Entwicklung der marxistischen Staatstheorie in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: 
Campus-Verlag, 1981). ↩ 
73. Stefan Breuer, Die Krise der Revolutionstheorie. Negative Vergesellschaftung und 
Arbeitsmetaphysik bei Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1977); Mohl, “Verelen-
dung und Revolution”; Helmut König, Geist und Revolution. Studien zu Kant, Hegel 
und Marx (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); or the writings of the Krisis group. ↩ 
74. Alfred Schmidt and Walter Euchner, ed., Kritik der politischen Ökonomie heute. 100 
Jahre “Kapital” (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). ↩ 
75. The “critical Marxism” of the Sixties, of which Alfred Schmidt was the primary advo-
cate, emphasizes the negative and historically limited character and claim to validity 
of a “materialism of second nature,” but tends to regard methodological individualism 
as an adequate description of coming communist relations. The “scientific” Marxism 
of the Althusser school emphasizes, against individualistic theories of a “constituting 
subject,” that actors are merely bearers of the relations of productions, but on the basis 
of the tendency of its categoriesto assume universal-historical character (Balibar’s 
combinatorics of levels, Althusser’s concepts of praxis and ideology), elevates the 
independence of relations of production to a scientific norm). ↩ 
76. Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform, 11. ↩ 
77. Ibid., 69. ↩ 
78. Ibid. ↩ 
79. See Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” in Louis Althusser and Eti-
enne Balibar, Reading Capital. ↩ 
80. See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital. The difference between the structuralist 
and the critical-reconstructive reading is not limited to this point. Whereas the former 
attempts to unmask Hegelianism as an inedaquate meta-discourse, for the latter, refer-
ence to Hegel on questions of methodology is often regarded as the royal road to 
understanding Marx’s work. ↩ 
81. This is the subtitle of Heinrich’s book, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: see Backhaus’ cri-
tique of his own theoretical premises in the first two parts of his Materialien (Back-
haus, Dialektik der Wertform, 132n). ↩ 
82. For a critical perspective on some aspects of these theses, see Dieter Wolf, Ware und 
Geld. Der dialektische Widerspruch im Kapital (Hamburg: VSA, 1958) (republished 
in 2002 under the title Der dialektische Widerspruch im Kapital). Wolf also criticizes 
tendencies within the neue Marx-Lektüre that identify Marx’s dialectical method with 
logical contradictions, thus lending Marx and his method a patina of irrationalism; see 
his critique of Colletti and Göhler. Irrationalist positions are also found today by rep-
resentatives of the Krisis and Exit groups and the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum 
Freiburg. ↩ 
83. Marx, “Preface to the First German Edition.” ↩ 
84. Schmidt, Concept of Nature, 41. ↩ 
85. On Marx’s critique of philosophies of history, see: Helmut Fleischer, Marxismus und 
Geschichte, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975); Kittsteiner, “Bewusstseinsbildung”; 
Andreas Arndt, Karl Marx. Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Theorie 
(Bochum: Germinal, 1985), 50-76; Rolf Hecker, Carl-Erich Vollgraf, Richard Sperl, 
ed., Geschichte und materialistische Geschichtstheorie bei Marx (Hamburg: Argu-
ment, 1996). ↩ 
86. G. Stiehler, quoted by Jaeggi, “Einige Bemerkungen,” 153. For a “critique” of Marx 
that tries to sell this as the authentic position of Marx, see the usual works by Karl 
Popper. ↩ 
87. Helmut Reichelt [1970], Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx 
(Freiburg: ça ira, 2001), 73. ↩ 
88. See Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. ↩ 
89. On this see Brentel 1989, chapter 5. ↩ 
90. On this see Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, 380-384. ↩ 
91. In the complete form in the so-called “Trinity Formula” of the theory of the compo-
nents of value. For a critique of neoclassical economics, see Heinrich, Die Wis-
senschaft vom Wert, 62-85. ↩ 
92. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” ↩ 
93. Jan Hoff, Kritik der klassischen politischen Ökonomie. Zur Rezeption der werttheo-
retischen Ansätze ökonomischer Klassiker durch Karl Marx (Köln: PappyRossa, 
2004). ↩ 
94. Marx, Capital, Volume 1. ↩ 
95. Ibid. ↩ 
96. Hoff, Kritik der klassischen politischen Ökonomie, 78. ↩