Carver - Marx

Classic Thinkers

1. Richard T. W. Arthur, Leibniz
2. Terrell Carver, Marx
3. Daniel E. Flage, Berkeley
4. J. M. Fritzman, Hegel
5. Bernard Gert, Hobbes
6. Dale E. Miller, J. S. Mill
7. Joanne Paul, Thomas More
8. A. J. Pyle, Locke
9. Andrew Ward, Kant

Copyright Terrell Carver 2018

The right of Terrell Carver to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1817-3 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1818-0 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carver, Terrell, author.

Title: Marx / Terrell Carver.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Series: Classic thinkers | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017024089 (print) | LCCN 2017028216 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509518203 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509518210 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509518173 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509518180 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.

Classification: LCC B3305.M74 (ebook) | LCC B3305.M74 C37 2017 (print) | DDC 335.4092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024089

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For my six (so far)

grandchildren

I am very grateful to numerous students and colleagues over the years who have contributed in incremental, but hugely important ways to this book, and have made it tremendous fun to write. Also heartfelt thanks to two assiduous reviewers who contributed greatly to the final draft. And I owe particular thanks to George Owers, editor at Polity Press, who thought that I might have something to say.

is an edited version of a previously published article: Terrell Carver, Making Marx Marx, Journal of Classical Sociology 17:1 (2017): 1027; used with permission.

Another Marx

Karl Marx's works have had a multi-faceted and multi-functional appeal to all sorts of audiences, political and otherwise, since the early 1840s, though during his lifetime (181883) he had relatively few readers and little if any fame. His first mass audience was in the partisan context of the international socialist movement of the later nineteenth century, and after that he occupied an iconic position in its rival communist successors and state-structures from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 up to the fall of the Wall in Berlin in 1989. In a much more limited way this kind of twentieth-century Marx-worship persists into the present, though now mostly marginalized and increasingly tenuous. All through these posthumous developments the relationships between the historical real-life Marx, the Marxisms attributed to him, the iconic Marx of parade-banners, and the actual politics of Marxist movements, leaders and states has been a maelstrom of complex political, ideological and academic negotiations and conflicts. These processes have included the Cold War and Iron Curtain great-power confrontations, as well as formidable amounts of national liberation, revolution, subversion, intervention and regime change, together with considerable violence all across the globe.