Preface
Notes
1 M. Desai, review of Shanin (1984), in Fournal of Peasant Studies 13 (3), 1986; P. Binns, review of Kolakowski (1981), in Socialist Review (11), 1979.
Chapter 1 Prologue: Marx's guiding thread'
1 Though it should be remembered that Engels's Anti-Dühring had Marx's imprimatur; indeed Marx wrote a chapter for it. On the Marx/Engeis relationship see Carver (1986).
2 Marx wrote to Engels on 30 September 1882, the “Marxists" and the "anti-Marxists" at their respective conferences . . . have done everything possible to spoil my stay in France'. His letter to Jenny Longuet of 11 April 1881 relates his first, distinctly unfavourable impressions of Kautsky. His letter to Sorge of 5 November 1880, dismisses the soí-disant Marxist' Black Repartition group in Geneva (whose founder was Plekhanov) as doctrinaires', contrasting them unfavourably with the ‘populist' People's Will group. See Shanin (1984). The well-known attribution to Marx of the statement all I know is, I am not a "Marxist"' is Engels's.
3 See the works of Althusser, and Hindess and Hirst, listed in my bibliography; Cutler et al. (1978); Godelier (1973; 1984); Hilton (1985).
4 Similar problems arise in trying to use traditional Marxist categories to make sense of present-day ‘socialist' societies. Mao Zedong, that most unorthodox of twentieth-century Marxist thinkers and doers, often stretched such concepts to breaking-point (see Corrigan,. Ramsay and Sayer, 1979). Among western commentators on the historical experience of socialist construction, Charies Bettelheim (see Bibliography) has been more aware than most of the need to rethink Marxist analytic categories.
5 See my 1983: ch. 1, and below, ch. 3, section II, and chapter 4, section II, for elaboration and exemplification.
6 As will become clear I do not believe Marx was an empiricist in the standard philosophical sense. He is better characterized as a realist. But basic to Marx is the notion that empirical phenomena are the startingpoint of analysis, in the course of which scientific concepts and theories are developed a posteriori, and the capacity of theories actually to explain such phenomena remains the uitimate criterion of their validity. "Theory' is thus always empirically grounded and validated. I argue this, against Althusser, in my 1979, and in more formal terms in my 1983: ch. 5. See also Thompson (1978a).
7 I detail this in my 1983. See also Wada in Shanin (1984); Marx (1879a, b; 1882a), Krader (1975), and Dunayevskaya (1982).
Chapter 2 Productive forces
1 See for instance Balibar in Althusser (1970), and subsequent discussions in the writings of Hindess and Hirst. Construing mode of production in such abstraction has often led to the need to differentiate ‘social formation' - conceived as a concrete society - independently. One implication of my argument is that such a distinction is misplaced, or at least needs very careful handling. Modes of production exist only in and as concrete social formations. Whilst it may be legitimate to abstract the concepts of mode of production for some analytic purposes, there is a persistent danger of reification in so doing.
2 Marx makes this clear in the 1859 Preface. Marx's rude awakenings as to the import of ‘material interests’ in social life can be traced through his Rheinische Zeitung articles (in Collected Works, vol. 1), especially those on thefts of wood (1842) and the plight of wine-growers in the Mosel (1843a). Too often the evolution of Marx's ideas towards materialism and communism is traced as a purely philosophical journey; in his superb study, Draper (1977). breaks away from this, stressing the formative import of Marx's own political experience. What is most striking in the Mosel piece is the way Marx simply counterposes the phenomenal reality of the Prussian state – the one which was to close down his newspaper - against its philosophical concept, and this discrepancy is what led him to undertake his critique of Hegel. The impact on Marx's ideas shortly after this of Engels – who was at that stage of their lives very much better acquainted with industrial conditions, both in Germany and Britain (see Collected Works 2, especially the early Reports from Bremen', and the articles on England) – is also not to be underestimated.
3 Cohen himself admits this with regard to the relations of correspondence Marx posits in the Preface, but he does not extend the argument to the entities related.
NOTES TO PAGES 11-17
151