{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","id":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","uuid":"df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title":"The Violence of Abstraction The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism","normalized_title":"theviolenceofabstractiontheanalyticfoundationsofhistoricalmaterialism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0631153187","isbns":["0631153187"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":93,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Violence%20of%20Abstraction%20The%20Analytic%20Foundations%20of%20Historical%20Materialism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/df60fc71-5c84-4680-bd1a-40a5ea8ac5ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"ix","pdf_page":3,"physical_index":3,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"35e1bde638ffd27842b5b4343189af0384617b2908cf2691fec126ab8ee799fe"},"chapter":"The Violence of Abstraction","content":"other modern social thinker has influenced social and political movements as much as he. Some one-third of the world's population now live under governments which claim Marx's imprimatur for their policies and indeed legitimate their very existence in terms of his supposed theory of history. Marxist parties, of varying size and strength, claim to speak for the people' everywhere they are permitted. This is not the case with a Kant or a Weber, and greatly raises the stakes of intellectual debate. Questions of what Marx meant by this or that have an inescapably political as well as a scholarly context, and may sometimes have very practical implications. In many cases the claim that Marx held such and such a view is itself - absurd as this may be - considered sufficient to confer authority upon that view. Nobody, so far as I know, has yet been incarcerated or killed for their heretical interpretation of Kant or Weber (or, come to that, for their orthodox one). Marxology' is therefore rarely a merely academic pursuit. However disinterested one's scholarly motives, conclusions often become part of other people's politics. The study of Marx can be a coded form of social criticism (in East and West alike), it can be snivelling apologetics, but it can hardly be politically innocent.\n\nIt is, of course, this political context of Marx scholarship – the association of Marxist theory with what is claimed to be socialist practice - which gives the charge of mere Marxology' its rhetorical force. The accusation of ‘scholasticism', academic' Marxism, is a convenient moral bludgeon with which to beat bourgeois' intellectuals into shamefaced conformity, or marginalize the political pertinence of their researches. Meghnad Desai, in a recent deplorable review of Teodor Shanin's Late Marx and the Russian Road – a book which painstakingly demonstrates Marx's deviation from Marxist orthodoxy across a wide range of politically sensitive issues, and traces the organized 'forgetting' of this within the communist movement - avails himself of this device in order not to discuss the challenge to received views which the book poses. Peter Binns does much the same in his grotesque dismissal, in Socialist Review, of Kolakowski's magisterial (if eminently disputable) three-volume history of Marxism as ‘chit-chat from the common rooms'.¹ It is very often just those - they frequently turn out to inhabit universities - who believe themselves to possess, in their own pet version of Marx, the truth incarnate, the revealed secret of history, who are the first to denounce serious Marx scholarship as 'Marxology'. In this environment I believe the study of what Marx actually said not merely to be an academically defensible but a politically virtuous enterprise. If intellectuals are to be of any service to humanity, they must first of all serve the truth. The political context of Marxist debate, in short, makes it more, rather than less important to respect the constraints of academic scholarship when trying to expound his ideas.\n\nThat is not to say I believe a definitive', or a disinterested, interpretation of Marx's thought to be either possible or desirable, and this is not my aim in this book. Marx wrote an enormous amount, over a period of many years. His legacy is very varied. Texts like Capital I, finished for the press, and revised through several editions, form the smaller part of the corpus that has come down to us. Unpublished drafts like The German Ideology, the Grundrisse, or the remaining volumes of Capital – all now treated as major works – are part of our inheritance in ways they were often not for earlier generations. Apart from his economics', Marx penned political tracts like the Manifesto, an inordinate amount of penny-a-line journalism (sometimes on subjects he knew little about), and even poetry. He left a voluminous private correspondence. There are obvious problems as to what weight to give to these different kinds of text, dating from different periods of his life. Not all that Marx wrote was clear, unambiguous or even consistent. It would be exceedingly surprising if it were.\n\nBut beyond this, why should we in any case seek to be definitive? It seems to me perfectly reasonable (as well as being unavoidable) to read Marx in different ways at different times and for different purposes. It is a testimony to his greatness that we can do so, notwithstanding all attempts to freeze his ideas into formulaic and dogmatic moulds. Marx's thought lives in so far as it is interpreted anew by others, in the light of their changing needs. It is no more eternal than the nineteenth century that produced it. Definitiveness, then, is so far as I am concerned a chimerical grail. Indeed I believe its assertion to be profoundly authoritarian and coercive, indicative of an approach to theory which is the opposite of emancipatory.\n\nThis is not, however, to argue for an interpretive free-for-all. As Max Weber once remarked, Marx is not a taxicab one can drive where one will. It is, I think, often possible to demonstrate that Marx did not adhere to positions commonly ascribed to him. Much of the argument of this book is of this sort. There is, for me, both a scholarly and a political point in engaging in such debate, scholastic and Marxological' as it might frequently appear. Precisely because Marx's name is so often invoked to authorize and legitimate contemporary doctrines and practices, to know what he did and did not say, and what can and cannot fairly be said in his name, becomes important.\n\nviii\n\nPREFACE\n\nPREFACE\n\nix","previous_page":2,"next_page":4}