Richard Cándida Smith on Christina Morina’s *The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Changed Everything*

The book presents a group portrait of nine European intellectuals active in four European countries at the end of the nineteenth century: Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg from Germany (Luxemburg came originally from Poland, at the time a kingdom within the Russian Empire); Karl Kautsky and Victor Adler from Austria; Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesdes from France; Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, and Peter Struve from Russia.  Morina situates them in their social and political contexts in order to explore the various factors leading each individual to embrace Marx’s work as the necessary foundation for “scientific” political engagement.  Morina argues,“The co-opting of ‘science  by Marxist social analysis may have been the most effective political idea of social critics on the left in the nineteenth century.  It turned Marx’s theses into Marxism, and an intellectual worldview into a political truth. ‘Scientific ’ status bestowed an aura of respectability, objectivity, and incontestability, allowing Marxism to profit immensely from the ‘unprecedented cultural authority  that the sciences acquired over the course of the nineteenth century” (260).

A concise, if rigidly extreme statement of this position appeared in 1902 with the publication of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Lenin argued that scientists necessarily reframe questions into forms distinct from and superior to the naive observations of lived experience.  Science, for example, had determined that the earth goes around the sun despite immediate observation suggesting the opposite.  Given that lived experience is by nature misleading, the labor movement in its “spontaneous” (i.e. self-directed) forms cannot understand either the political or economic situation within which it operates.  The working-class movement often responds with impressive rage to what employers or the government do.  Anger dissipates as action fails to change the situation or even results in worse conditions.  Political leadership guided by a rigorous, “scientific” theory of historical change and social action, Lenin argued, will attract the loyalty of the people because its seemingly abstract and “impossible” program will prove more effective.  A revolutionary party is to workers what agronomists are to farmers or industrial designers are to mechanics.

Morina argues that Marxists worked with a “murky notion of science” with the result that Marxism never developed a coherent body of theory, nor even a shared political ideology.  There were as many “Marxisms” as there were leaders.  Drawing from the work of Reinhart Kosselleck, Morina argues that Marxism is better understood as a “worldview,” i.e. an interpretative system shaping perception of experience into an image of a coherent reality.  Historians, she argues, have generally confused the Marxist worldview with the “reception” of Marx and his arguments.  The “Marxist” worldview emerged as a result of this reception, illustrated in this work with detailed analyses of how her nine subjects came to think of their work as a continuation of Marx’s project.  The process of appropriation was in each case personal and idiosyncratic.  Morina’s protagonists differed as to why historical developments at the end of the century had diverged from Marx’s mid-century predictions.  Consequently they differed as to strategies for adapting Marxist thought to their world, though they all agreed they were living in “late capitalism” (a term then as now more wishful assertion than logical proposition).  Morina’s figures continued to advocate positions they had taken long before encountering Marx.  Rhetoric, categories, and modes of argument extracted from Marx refigured their arguments, but leaders who had fought with each over strategy and tactics continued to do so after they embraced a shared identity as Marxists.

Her subjects were among the first in Europe to self-identify as “intellectuals,” which Morina argues should not be considered an empirical sociological category for a new way of working with ideas.  People at the end of the nineteenth century who referred to themselves as “intellectuals” (as opposed to “scholars” or increasingly “experts”) “did not practice criticism as a profession; instead, they followed a calling” (xvii). Their “engagement” signified the importance of “irresistible moral imperatives” for the production of knowledge.  Her protagonists as “Marxists” had to make “normative” statements about social relations.  Their analytic work had to result in confident prediction about “what is to be done.”  Morina grounds her discussion of the Marxist intellectual as an imagined “social figure” in Norbert Elias’s 1956 essay, “Problems of Involvement and Detachment.”  She follows Elias’s argument that effective involvement requires a degree of detachment.  The greatest challenge in social science, hence in social practice, has been the distinction between “what is” and “what should be.”  Abstract thinking was for her founding group of “Marxists” a way of circumventing the difficulties of negotiating engagement and detachment, but without their actually having to confront the dilemma as such.  In Elias’s model, abstraction “creates a façade of detachment masking a highly involved approach” (337).  Elias thought that “only children and the mentally ill could be radically engaged, succumbing unreservedly to their feelings in the here and now” (336).  Morina uses this negative conclusion to construct her explanation for the ultimate failure of both Second International Marxism and Third International Marxism-Lenininsm.

Morina, following the work of Irving Fetscher, identifies three distinct theories of revolution that Marxists held prior to 1914.   Kautsky, Bernstein, Adler, and Jaurès argued that the working class fights for immediate ends, higher wages and a shorter work week at work, the right to vote and to participate in electoral politics.  Gradually its elected representatives will take charge of governing institutions.  Socialists then will use the legal and political authority the people have given them to introduce the changes necessary for a new political, economic, and social order.  Plekhanov, Guesde, and Luxemburg argued that existing democratic forms were inherently biased against the working class, which will build its own institutions to advance their interests.  The battle for power will primarily take place in the streets, as it had in France since 1789.  Workers will seize power through a general strike, whose successful conclusion will start a process of creating new forms of governance and administration.  The role of socialist agitators is to propose actions and targets to an otherwise autonomous and spontaneous mass movement.  Lenin’s path was distinct with his focus on centralizing power in the hands of a small group of professional revolutionaries who guide and instruct the working class through every phase of the revolution.  Morina notes that all Marxists assumed that the coming socialist revolution would involve significant amounts of violence initiated by reactionaries determined to maintain a dying order.  Lenin imagined that his top-down, conspiratorial approach might reduce the levels of violence because socialists would be better prepared to suppress reactionaries.

Morina argues that “a source of Lenin’s dogmatism came from his firm belief that cognition involved a straightforward representation of ‘objective’ existence” (262).  If parties to a dispute differed as to the facts of the matter, ignorance and self-interest were the most important distorting factors.  The vanguard party educated the masses so they saw the world in an objectively correct form.  Anyone who continued to disagree with “scientific” conclusions in the face of incontrovertible evidence did so willfully and maliciously.  Since all could see that government was by nature “despotic,” a revolutionary government, like the tsarist regime it would replace, Lenin stated, would necessarily direct people to do things that they would not choose to do on their own.  A revolutionary government would logically have to prevent people from advocating for positions the vanguard party had determined were wrong.  Lenin had nothing but contempt for the idealists within the working class and socialist movements, the “well-meaning, ‘childish’ moralists who sought to model a just society on the goodness of human nature” (263).   Lenin’s stress on the command and control functions of what he called the “party of a new type” was a practical response to conditions in the Russian empire.  Nonetheless, Lenin’s theory of revolution presupposed an eventual alliance of revolutionary cadres with the Russian people in their millions demanding changes that the no tsarist or bourgeois government would concede, a union that in fact congealed in 1917 and 1918 and was successfully tested during four years of civil war and foreign intervention.

The Russian Revolution made Lenin’s interpretation, which the Third International called “dialectical and historical materialism,” the dominant Marxism for most of the twentieth century.  The paths of parliamentary engagement and participatory democracy nevertheless remained active elements within the global left after 1917, even as Marxist-Leninists condemned socialists they considered wayward as “revisionists” and “infantile leftists.” The continued pull of these other strands of Marxism were found in communist parties around the world, perhaps because of a better fit to the historical conditions in many nations than Lenin’s conspiratorial model.  Morina’s historicization of “Marxism” allows for a clearer vision of the phases Marx and his image have played in international socialist politics since the appearance of The Communist Manifesto in 1848.  Marxism as an international intellectual phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should not be confused with Marx’s core writings and their critical reception.   Similarly neither Marx’s writings nor Marxism are to be conflated with Lenin’s interpretation, which gained global followers with the success of the 1917 revolution in Russia.

Morina claims to integrate the history of Marxism into “general political history.”   As a study of the intellectual formation of Marxist leaders in four European countries at the end of the nineteenth century, the book offers a detailed and useful examination of how these leaders mapped their understandings of Marx onto the political and economic conflicts of their day, with detailed discussion of the differing positions European Marxists took on organizing labor unions, the relation of workers and peasants, poverty as a political and social question, and the failed 1905 revolution in Russia, which she notes “compelled all nine individuals to question their long-held ideas about the course of history” (407).  Despite the many strengths of the book, the emphasis on “intellectuals” empties Marxism of its connections to trades unions and other mass movements that in each of their countries made Marxist leaders increasingly influential figures.  Marx’s ideas had to be modified (and were modified) to fit into distinct national circumstances in a later time period with distinct political and economic situations.  Each of her protagonists modified Marx’s ideas to reconcile the highly varied movements in each of their countries with the presumed universal principles to be found in Marxist theory.  The turmoil of the working classes is a ghostly presence in this book in part, as Morina notes, the founding figures of Marxism were largely uncomfortable whenever they had to engage workers instead of other socialist intellectuals.  Yet if each became a prominent Marxist leader in their respective countries, they necessarily had gained support from important sections of the popular classes they constantly invoked as the historical force whose action would bring revolutionary change to the modern world.

The frame of the book is too provincial to serve as explanation of the fate of a movement that was a global phenomenon.  The book’s exclusion of the Anglophone nations is significant because of their centrality to global capitalism, both industrial and agricultural; to the emergence, rise, fall, and reemergence of mass labor movements, influenced by Marxist ideas at times, but fundamentally autonomous; to imperialism and the relation of race and class in the creation of trans-national hierarchies.  The exclusion of English-speaking socialist movements goes hand in hand with the exclusion of rest of the world.  The European focus blocks attention to the many variations of socialisms developing around the world in response to the particularly aggressive if successful forms of capitalism developing in the United Kingdom and the United States.  The European frame blocks as well consideration of the need for socialists to respond to the adventurism of the imperialist powers, such as opposition within the United States to colonial war in the Philippines or extensive opposition within France to their government’s predatory policies in west Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina.

The defense for the geographic limitations of the study is straightforward: “Marxism” as such emerged primarily in the four countries that produced the book’s nine protagonists.  It is important for Morina’s argument about the role of intellectuals in defining socialism that in each of the four countries the development of capitalism involved a retarded or distorted relation to the more advanced and exigent forms of capitalism found in fuller form in the English-speaking countries, on course to become  in the twentieth century the international norm for “developed” countries.  Perhaps the geographic narrowness of the study reflects the actual narrowness of European socialism at the end of the nineteenth century and the subsequent limitations of “international socialism” in a decolonizing world.  The provinciality of European socialism needs more explanation in order understand better how the European intellectuals who played an outsized role in defining “Marxism” differed from their counterparts in other parts of the world. Marxism divorced from a fuller international setting and consequence appears strangely detached from the world that industrial capitalism was already bringing into being.