Richard Schmitt - Introduction to Marx and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction

Richard Schmitt

BROWN UNIVERSE

This new edition differs in several ways from the first edition of the Introduction to Marx and Engels. Rereading this book over the years, I marked passages that seemed to me to demand clarification or to require a better argument. I have now made those changes. I have also taken account of the steady stream of new books and articles on Marx and Engels and have tried to incorporate some of these new and interesting interpretations.

Other revisions were needed because my own interpretation of Marx and Engels has changed as I have continued to read and rethink Marx and as historical conditions have developed. In 1987, when the first edition appeared, the looming presence of the Soviet Union provided the background for any reading of Marx and Engels. In the official version of Marxism current in the communist countries at that time, Marxism was a science delineating social processes that shaped all our lives. The understanding and activities of people played a small role in that science. Events in the world were the outcome of impersonal social processes. The social order inspired by that view of Marxist science was bureaucratic and oppressive: A world regulated by processes unaffected and impervious to the thought of all but the experts seemed to justify government by specialists that neglected the wishes of ordinary citizens. In opposition to that version of Marxism, the previous edition of this book stressedone-sidedly, I believe nowthe role played by human understanding and self-understanding in the unfolding of history. In this present edition, although I still hold that human self-understanding is of signal importance in Marxs theories, I emphasize that this self-understanding often bears the imprint of complex social processes that are not always transparent to the observer. As a consequence, this book is very different from the first edition, even though some passages remain unchanged.

Since 1987 the Soviet Union and other communist countries have massively repudiated their previous economic and political systems and have eagerly embraced some form of capitalism. In the process they have also repudiated Marxism. In a new introduction, I reconsider Marxism in the light of these historical changes and thus set out what one can reasonably expect to learn from Marx and Engels and how reading their works continues to be important.

My understanding of Marx derives from many sources. Associates in various political projects taught me a great deal, as did many friends, both inside and out of the Radical Philosophy Association and the Marxist Activist Philosophers and their successor group, Sofphia. I owe particular thanks to Bruce Brown, Lisa Feldman, and David Schweickart as well as an anonymous reader for reading portions of this manuscript. Justin Schwartz and Karsten Struhl made important suggestions for this revised edition. I learned much from the members of the faculty discussion group at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador and from Dr. Manuel Salgado, director of the Partido Socialista de Ecuador. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Alex Pienknagura of the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito. Spencer Carr, past editor for Westview Press, has been unfailingly supportive.

Lucy Candib has shared in the writing of this book, as she shares most everything elseparticularly the enduring confidence that we can remold this world of oppression and exploitation into one in which mutual respect and concern animates the relations among free human beings. I dedicate this book to my children, Addie and Eli, who rather reluctantly came with us to Ecuador, where most of this book was written. I hope that in later years they will remember what they saw in Ecuador: If capitalism may appear to do well at least for some people in the United States, its inability to provide a good life for all people is painfully evident outside of the United States. The thoughts of Marx and Engels remain essential if one wants to understand this terrible failure of the capitalist system.

Richard Schmitt

Quito, Ecuador