“Marx was not Marxist”: A Distortion of Marx and Engels

A Protest on Engels Bicentenary Year

Sandeep Banerjee

A naïve attack against “Marxism” has been going on for quite some time based on distortion of a sentence in a few letters of Engels. In Marx bicentenary, for example, Mr Sankar Ray wrote an article in Bengali version of Indian Express titled – We must save Marx from distortions by “Marxists” By: IE Bangla Web Desk Kolkata Published: May 5, 2018, 7:20:02 AM. There he wrote “During the days of First International (May 1880) Marx warned his son in law Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde that “I know it for certain that I am not a Marxist” (“ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” – these very words in this language).” [Not exact translation from Bengali by this author.] Again in 2019 we can find one article written by him (Whither Communist International?) which was published in the Autumn Number of Frontier Weekly where he wrote: “Marx opposed the term 'Marxist' (coined by his first biographer Franz Mehring in 1981) and hence Marxism. After a session of the International Working Men's Association (First International) in 1981 Marx wrote to Paul Lafargue, "Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste." (If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist). At the IWMA session, Marx's supporters were branded as 'Marxists' and Marx felt irritated silent endorsement by Lafargue and Jules Guesde, two top French socialist leaders. To have endorsed 'Marxism' was to accept an ideology which Marx and Engels would have never approved of.” In this year too he told us the same. In an article “Karl Marx versus official Marxists” published in Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 21, New Delhi, May 9, 2020 he wrote: “Marxologists hyphenate themselves ‘ideology-fetishism’ of OMs and most of them do not like to be called as Marxists. Marx blasted ‘ideology’ and ‘ideologues” in GE. “In all ideology, the human beings and their relations”. Marx too wrote to Paul Lafargue in chaste French, “Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.” (If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist). He felt irritated with the prefix ‘Marxist’.” For Mr Ray it is a point he has been hammering for a long time. It was indeed amusing to see a couple of Kolkata intellectuals made this distorted ‘comment’ of Marx a poster during Marx Bicentenary.

But Mr Ray is not at all alone in this battle. In the Marx Bicentenary year 2018, in the Summer Issue of ISR we find Anthony Arnove’s article “How Marx became a Marxist” where he also stated: “In 1882, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx’s longtime collaborator, close friend, and ally, wrote a letter to Eduard Bernstein about the problems of the European socialists of the day. Engels recalled how Marx had told his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, that he wasn’t certain about many things, but if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that he was not a Marxist.”

Maximilien Rubel was interviewed by the Swiss daily Le Matin on March 30, 1983, Marx Death Centenary year. The Interview was provokingly titled: “And, Is Marx the first Anti-Marxist?” When the interviewer Jean-Paul Kauffmann asked him: “Often you have deplored Marxism as the mythology of the twentieth century, and you persistently recall the warning issued by Marx to his first disciples and admirers: “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist.” What do you find most shocking about the Marxist myth?” Rubel answered, “When Marx knew about the first echoes of his theoretical work towards the end of his career, he told a friend that he would need to employ twenty secretaries to refute everything that had been said or written about him. Today, after a hundred years of “quarrel over Marx”, much more is needed.” [Not exact translation from French.]

These learned persons could have search works of Marx and Engels a little better. Mr Sankar Ray can contribute a lot to history if he writes about that “session of the International Working Men's Association (First International) in 1981” or “During the days of First International (May 1880) Marx …” of which Marxist Archives do not know (1981 is obviously a typographical error, Mr Ray surely meant 1881). But that is not an issue. Had Marx wrote that letter to Lafargue as Mr Ray wrote, then Mr Ray please mention what his source is! Mr Kaufmann also avoided to mention the source of the information: the warning issued by Marx to his first disciples and admirers: “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist.”! This is not fair, Mr Ray and Mr Kaufmann. However, Mr Anthony Arnove is nearer to truth when he said: Engels recalled how Marx had told his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, that he wasn’t certain about many things, but if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that he was not a Marxist.”

So, let us turn to Engels to know the fact. Engels mentioned the matter in some letters, we could find 3 (three) such letters in all, one written in 1882 and two written in 1890. We shall see them one by one. || ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN, 2-3 November 1882. “Now what is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist]” || ENGELS TO CONRAD SCHMIDT, 5 August 1890. “But as I have said, this is all at second hand and little Moritz is a friend one can well do without. Nor, today, has the materialist view of history any lack of such friends to whom it serves as a pretext for not studying history. As Marx said of the French Marxists in the late seventies – Tout ce que je sais, c'est que je ne suis pas Marxiste.” || ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE, 27 August 1890.  “These gentry all dabble in Marxism, albeit of the kind you were acquainted with in France ten years ago and of which Marx said: ‘All I know is that I’m not a Marxist’.”  

From the above we can conclude two things — (1) the said line of Marx was not at all written by Marx, but was told once by Marx, as Engels recollected, regarding some so-called “Marxists” of France, and not as an unrelated, general statement; and (2) it was not that important for Marx to write it (otherwise surely he would have mentioned it somewhere and that would have been available in Marxist archives) and for Engels to consult what he had exactly written to Bernstein in 1882 while recalling the same in 1890 (otherwise he would not have said it a little differently each time). 

Now if authors like Mr Rubel, Mr Kaufmann or Mr Anthony Arnove or Mr Sankar Ray quote this statement of Marx without the contextual reference, that Marx said it once only with reference to some so-called French Marxists and not as a general statement, then this amount to a distortion plain and simple, falsification to further their cause.

Why they Falsified Marx and Engels
What is that cause for which what Marx said (and Engels wrote about) was distorted time   and again? The causes are to destroy “Marxism” – which to Maximilien Rubel is a twentieth century myth. “The innovator of the substance ‘Marxism’ as a negation of Marx's teaching was Lenin.”: says Maximilien Rubel in his aforementioned article. To him, the so-called triumphant ‘applied Marxism’ falls under the category of mystifying/obscuring ideologies – the main target of Marxist criticism. To Mr Sankar Ray it is ideology-centric ‘Marxism’: “Marx was stubbornly opposed to all ideologies and ideologues, in direct contrast to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and all who endorsed experimenting socialism under a totalitarian state.” (see his Frontier article).

Before taking on Lenin for fabricating “Marxism”, for making an “ideology” out of Marx’s teachings, those learned persons could consult a bit more of Engels and other Marxist scholars and leaders.

Marxism, Marxist, and Ideology – Engels, Kautsky, and also Marx
In a letter to Kautsky on August 12, 1892, Engels wrote, “… After all, the S.D.F. is purely a sect. It has ossified Marxism into a dogma and, by rejecting every labour movement which is not orthodox Marxism (and that a Marxism which contains much that is erroneous), that is, by pursuing the exact opposite of the policy recommended in the Manifesto, it renders itself incapable of ever becoming anything else but a sect.” [This author put the word Marxism in italics to make it more visible.] Here we find Engels fighting distortions in the name of Marxism. But this also showed – there is a Marxism which is not full of erroneous talks, which is not ossified, which follows the policy of the manifesto etc. In those days, Marxism was more known as ‘scientific socialism’ as we find in Kautsky’s “Frederick Engels” (1887) that was updated and published by Austrian Labour Almanac in 1899. At times these words, “scientific socialism” and “Marxism” or those who follow scientific socialism as propounded by Max and Engels and ‘Marxists’ were used interchangeably too. For example, see the following passage from “The Materialist Conception of History” (1896) by Karl Kautsky.

“We followers of the methods of scientific Socialism, as laid down by Marx and Engels, are most unlucky; not only do the opponents of Marx and Engels fight us – besides that is natural – but, there are also people who every now and again go too far in their praise of Marx and Engels, and yet who find it incompatible with the dignity of a free thinker to apply their theories in a logical manner. The witty remark of Marx that he himself was no Marxist, they apply in deadly earnest, and they would very much like to make people believe that Marx considered those who shared his point of view as idiots, who were utterly incapable of thinking for themselves. Or they declare that the Marxists are in the main incapable of understanding Marx, and that they, the non-Marxists, are raped upon to defend Marx’s theory from the fanaticism of the Marxists.
…

“Bax says of the materialist conception of history, after an introductory sentence:
“Taken in its most extreme form, therefore, this (the materialist) conception (of the historical development) says nothing less than that morality, religion, and art are not merely influenced by the economic conditions, but that they spring alone from the thought-reflex of those conditions in the social consciousness. In one word, the essential foundations of all history are material wealth, its production and exchange. Religion, morals, and art are chance phenomena, whose expression can be directly, or indirectly, traced back to an economic foundation.”

“And in a footnote, Bax remarks in addition:

“No one who knows the theories of Karl Marx will need to be told that Marx himself was far from taking up such an extreme standpoint in his statement of the materialist conception of history. ‘Moi même je ne suis pas Marxiste’ – (myself, I am no Marxist) he wrote once, and he would most certainly have repeated this opinion if he had seen the latest performances of the ‘Marxists,’ Plechanoff, Mehring, or Kautsky.”

“This footnote is decidedly original. The latest performances of the Marxists have been a source of displeasure to Bax. But he is afraid it would not have sufficient weight if he simply gave expression to his personal feelings of dissatisfaction with us. With a tenacity, which would have done honour to Miss Eusapia, he invokes the spirit of Karl Marx and allows him to formally disavow us.”

In “Ethics and the Materialist Conception Of History” (1906) by Kautsky, in the Preface we find, “Like so many other Marxist publications the present one owes its origin to a special occasion, it arose out of a controversy. The polemic in which I was involved last Autumn with the editors of Vorwärts brought me to touch on the question of their “ethical tendencies”. What I said, however, on this point was so often misunderstood by one side, and on the other brought me so many requests to give a more thorough and systematic exposition of my ideas on Ethics, that I felt constrained to attempt at least to give a short sketch of the development of Ethics on the basis of the materialist conception of history. I take as my starting point, consequently, that materialist philosophy which was founded on one side by Marx and Engels, on the other, though in the same spirit, by Joseph Dietzgen. For the results at which I have arrived I alone am responsible.” [Italics mine.]

And in this book, there is a whole chapter named: “The Ethics of Marxism” [the fifth chapter, after discussing ‘Ancient and Christian Ethics’, ‘The Ethical Systems of The Period of the Enlightenment’, ‘The Ethic of Kant’ and ‘The Ethic of Darwinism’.] There he writes,

“Even the Social Democracy as an organization of the Proletariat in its class struggle cannot do without the moral ideal, the moral indignation against exploitation and class rule. But this ideal has nothing to find in scientific socialism, which is the scientific examination of the laws of the development and movement of the social organism, for the purpose of knowing the necessary tendencies and aims of the proletariat class struggle.

“Certainly in Socialism the student is always a fighter as well, and no man can artificially cut himself in two parts, of which the one has nothing to do with the other. Thus even with Marx occasionally in his scientific research there breaks through the influence of a moral ideal. But he always endeavours and rightly to banish it where he can. Because the moral ideal becomes a source of error in science, when it takes it on itself to point out to it its aims. Science has only to do with the recognition of the necessary. It can certainly arrive at prescribing a shall, but this dare only come up as a consequence of the insight into the necessary. It must decline to discover a “shall” which is not to be recognized as a necessity founded in the world of phenomena. The Ethic must always be only an object of science; this has to study the moral instincts as well as the moral ideals and explain them; it cannot take advice from them as to the results at which it is to arrive. Science stands above Ethics, its results are just as little moral or immoral as necessity is moral or immoral.

All the same even in the winning and making known scientific knowledge morality is not got rid of. “New scientific knowledge implies often the upsetting of traditional and deeply rooted conceptions which had grown to a fixed habit. In societies which include class antagonisms, new scientific knowledge, especially that of social conditions, implies in addition, however, damage to the interests of particular classes. To discover and propagate scientific knowledge which is incompatible with the interests of the ruling classes, is to declare war on them. It assumes not simply a high degree of intelligence, but also ability and willingness to fight as well as independence from the ruling classes, and before all a strong moral feeling: strong social instincts, a ruthless striving for knowledge and to spread the truth with a warm desire to help the oppressed uprising classes.”

Thus, we find that Kautsky takes the revolutionary criticism of ruling classes in the domain of Morality and Ethics, and in his Marxism, Ethics, Morality, Religious views, etc. are subsets. But had he overstepped?

Let us see what Engels wrote in 1886 in “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” [and note the words italicized by the present author]—

"In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in Berlin, 1859, Karl Marx relates how the two of us in Brussels in the year 1845 set about: “to work out in common the opposition of our view” — the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx — to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-clarification!

"Since then more than 40 years have elapsed and Marx died without either of us having had an opportunity of returning to the subject. We have expressed ourselves in various places regarding our relation to Hegel, but nowhere in a comprehensive, connected account. To Feuerbach, who after all in many respects forms an intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception, we never returned.

"In the meantime, the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world."

Here Engels speaks not only of Marxism indirectly through the word Marxist, but also speaks of a world outlook, an encompassing term that takes into account Marxist criticism, critical views regarding many things like politics, ethics, morality and etc.

If one infers us the Engles took some view(s) ‘different’ from that of Marx in 1886, i.e., after death of Marx, that inference will be incorrect. Because, we find such a view in a very famous work of Engels published long before Marx’s death, the book: Anti Dühring. Engels writes, “The philosophy of antiquity was primitive, spontaneously evolved materialism. As such, it was incapable of clearing up the relation between mind and matter. But the need to get clarity on this question led to the doctrine of a soul separable from the body, then to the assertion of the immortality of this soul, and finally to monotheism. The old materialism was therefore negated by idealism. But in the course of the further development of philosophy, idealism, too, became untenable and was negated by modern materialism. This modern materialism, the negation of the negation, is not the mere re-establishment of the old, but adds to the permanent foundations of this old materialism the whole thought-content of two thousand years of development of philosophy and natural science, as well as of the history of these two thousand years. It is no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook which has to establish its validity and be applied not in a science of sciences standing apart, but in the real sciences. Philosophy is therefore “sublated” here, that is, “both overcome and preserved” {D. K. G. 503}; overcome as regards its form, and preserved as regards its real content." (Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels (1877) Part I: Philosophy, Chapter XIII. Dialectics. Negation of the Negation). Here we find the word “world outlook” whose meaning can be had from this text: This modern materialism, the negation of the negation, is not the mere re-establishment of the old, but adds to the permanent foundations of this old materialism the whole thought-content of two thousand years of development of philosophy and natural science, as well as of the history of these two thousand years. It is no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook …. Philosophy is therefore “sublated” here …. [My italics.]

When Marx and Engels refuted “ideology” or all ideologies they meant idealism which was to be countered by materialism as developed by development of philosophy and development of science at that age (when Marx and Engels were writing). Marx himself wrote in 1859,

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

“In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” (Karl Marx A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Preface.) Marx always avoided writing definitions as much as possible, but from this passage we can get what ideology also meant to him.

Twentieth Century: The words “Marxism” and “Ideology” and their meanings by eminent Marxists
Later, near the turn of that century (nineteenth) and after the advent of next (twentieth) century, this meaning or connotation of the word ideology came to the forefront and the word ideology, as a construct of idealism, was seldom or rarely used in literature of international working-class movement.  From the above passage quoted from Marx, take for example two part-sentence: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production …” and “… the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.” We saw earlier in this essay that Kautsky took the revolutionary criticism of ruling classes, the fight against the ruling classes, in the domain of Morality and Ethics too in the chapter “The Ethics of Marxism” in his book “Ethics and the Materialist Conception Of History” (1906). He tried to provide an ideological weapon against the ideology of the ruling class.

Marxism and Marxists also became common word – Plekhanov wrote “A Critique of Our Critics: Part I: Mr P Struve in the Role of Critic of the Marxist Theory of Social Development” in 1899, and in this writing, we find the word Marxism/Marxist many times.

Paul Lafargue, in his “The Socialist Ideal” (1900) writes how class struggle builds up in the ideological arena:

“The socialists who are accused of being stricken by Oriental fatalism and of relying upon the good pleasure of economic forces to bring to light the communist society instead of crossing their arms like the fakirs of official Economics, and of bending the knee before its fundamental dogma, laissez faire, laissez passer, propose on the contrary to subdue them, as the blind forces of nature have been subdued, and force them to do good to men instead of leaving them to work misery to the toilers of civilization. They do not wait for their ideal to fall from heaven as the Christians hope for the grace of God, and the capitalists for wealth, they prepare, on the contrary, to realize it, not by appealing to the intelligence of the capitalist class and to its sentiments of justice and humanity, but by fighting it, by expropriating it from its political power, which protects its economic despotism.

“Socialism, because it possesses a social ideal, has in consequence a criticism of its own. Every class which struggles for its enfranchisement seeks to realize a social ideal, in complete opposition with that of the ruling class. The struggle is waged at first in the ideological world before the physical shock of the revolutionary battle. It thus begins the criticism of the ideas of the society which must he revolted against, for ‘the ideas of the ruling class are the ideas of society,’ or these ideas are the intellectual reflection of its material interests.” [italics mine]

German Leaders like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg also were not averse to use of the terms Marxism/Marxist and Ideology.

Consider the 1907 work of Karl Liebknecht “Militarism & Anti-Militarism”, in which, criticising Hervé’s plan of combining a military strike with an insurrection, he wrote lines including this one: “As far as the national level is concerned, the chances of success are in direct proportion to the development of the proletariat and the degree of the political, social and economic pressure under which it lives. And this pressure will constitute either a hindrance or a help in accordance with its intensity and its relation to the economic and ideological-political development of the proletariat.”

Rosa Luxemburg, in her “Anti-Critique” (1915) used the words ‘Marxists’ and ‘ideological’. “Just consider: it is a fact that the controversies in political economy over the problem of accumulation and the possibility of the realization of surplus value have gone on for a century; in the twenties, in Sismondi’s disputes with Say, Ricardo and MacCulloch,[1] in the eighties and nineties between the Russian ‘Populists’ and Marxists.” Then, “According to Marx, the rebellion of the workers, the class struggle, is only the ideological reflection of the objective historical necessity of socialism, resulting from the objective impossibility of capitalism at a certain economic stage. Of course, that does not mean (it still seems necessary to point out those basics of Marxism to the ‘experts’) that the historical process has to be, or even could be, exhausted to the very limit of this economic impossibility.”

Advent of Fascism and the need of Ideological Preparation, Ideological Fight
With the advent of the epoch of fighting fascism the question of ideological fight became even more necessary to our leaders.

Clara Zetkin in 1923 wrote an article “Fascism” in which she said: “We have to overcome Fascism not only militarily, but also politically and ideologically.” Then, “I wish to emphasise the importance of our realising that we must struggle ideologically for the possession of the soul of these masses. We must realise that they are not only trying to escape from their present tribulations, but that they are longing for a new philosophy. We must come out of the narrow limits of our present activity.” Also, “We must not limit ourselves merely to carrying on a struggle for our political and economic programme. We must at the same time familiarise the masses with the ideals of Communism as a philosophy.” She wanted us to note, “The second root of Fascism lies in the retarding of the world revolution by the treacherous attitude of the reformist leaders. Large numbers of the petty bourgeoisie, including even the middle classes, had discarded their war-time psychology for a certain sympathy with reformist socialism, hoping that the latter would bring about a reformation of society along democratic lines. They were disappointed in their hopes. They can now see that the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie, and the worst of it is that these masses have now lost their faith not only in the reformist leaders, but in socialism as a whole. These masses of disappointed socialist sympathisers are joined by large circles of the proletariat, of workers who have given up their faith not only in socialism, but also in their own class. Fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless.”

Gramsci wrote his “For an ideological preparation of the masses” as “Introduction to the first course of the party school,” and signed “The agitation and propaganda section of the Communist Party” in April-May 1925. There he stressed, “In order for the party to live and be in contact with the masses, every member needs to be an active political element – that is to say, a leader. .... It is necessary that the party educates its members and raises their ideological level in an organised manner. ... [that means] in any situation (even if under a state of siege, even if the leading committees cannot function for a certain period or are not able to link up with the periphery) all members of the party are able to orientate themselves in their own circles. It means that each of them should be able to draw from the situation the elements required to decide a political line – so as to ensure that the working class does not lose heart, but rather feels it has direction, and is still capable of fighting. The ideological preparation of the masses is therefore an absolute necessity for the revolutionary struggle. It is one of the indispensable conditions of its victory.”

What Marx and Engels tried to tell us regarding Marxism in that quote and in those letters
In the editorial preamble by the marxists.org archive to the work “The Programme of the Parti Ouvrier” by Karl Marx and Jules Guesde (1880) we find that there was a dispute between Marx and French leader Guesde regarding the ‘Economic Section: “This document was drawn up in May 1880, when French workers' leader Jules Guesde came to visit Marx in London. The Preamble was dictated by Marx himself, while the other two parts of minimum political and economic demands were formulated by Marx and Guesde, with assistance from Engels and Paul Lafargue, who with Guesde was to become a leading figure in the Marxist wing of French socialism. … … Whereas Marx saw this as a practical means of agitation around demands that were achievable within the framework of capitalism, Guesde took a very different view: “Discounting the possibility of obtaining these reforms from the bourgeoisie, Guesde regarded them not as a practical programme of struggle, but simply ... as bait with which to lure the workers from Radicalism.” The rejection of these reforms would, Guesde believed, “free the proletariat of its last reformist illusions and convince it of the impossibility of avoiding a workers ’89.” Accusing Guesde and Lafargue of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of reformist struggles, Marx made his famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism, “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”).” And Engels mentioned this remark in his letter to Bernstein (Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 2-3 November 1882).  

But why Engels mentioned this remark of Marx in his letter to Bernstein? It is because Berstein alleged that he (Bernstein) was not getting the journal ‘Citoyen’ regularly and depended on accounts sent by some followers of Benoît Malon and was getting not bad impression about Marxists working there (“…in France ‘Marxism’ suffers from a lack of self esteem”) from those fellows. Incidentally, Benoît Malon belonged to the “Possibilist” group of French Socialists and Malon was evicted from the journal ‘Le Citoyen’ in August 1881. Engels wrote: “Nor have you any other source, i.e. other than Malon at second hand, for your reiterated assertion that in France ‘Marxism’ suffers from a marked lack of esteem. Now what is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist] But if, last summer, the Citoyen was able to sell 25,000 copies … ” Engels thus admitted that he somewhat shared Bernstein’s view about ‘Marxism’ in France (Engels put the word Marxism within single quote marks), but he also mentioned that “last summer, the Citoyen was able to sell 25,000 copies” and some other facts to Bernstein and finally remarked “The facts speak so clearly for themselves that Malon will doubtless have to swallow his ‘lack of esteem’.”

Now let us come to Engels’s letter to Conrad Schmidt on 5 August 1890. There he wrote: “… … but if little Moritz is right when he quotes Barth as saying that, in all Marx's writings, he can find only one example of the dependence of philosophy, etc., upon the material conditions of existence and that Descartes declares animals to be machines, I can only say I feel sorry for a man capable of writing such things. And if that man has not yet found out that, if the material mode of existence is the primum agens, this does not preclude the ideal fields from in turn exerting a reciprocal but secondary influence upon it, then he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about. But as I have said, this is all at second hand and little Moritz is a friend one can well do without. Nor, today, has the materialist view of history any lack of such friends to whom it serves as a pretext for not studying history. As Marx said of the French Marxists in the late seventies: ‘Tout ce que je sais, c'est que je ne suis pas Marxiste.’” So here we see that the context was misunderstanding a basic of Marxist philosophy: if the material mode of existence is the primum agens, this does not preclude the ideal fields from in turn exerting a reciprocal but secondary influence upon it. This reminds us many works by Marx and Engels, for example, “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” (From: Abstract from The Introduction to Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right. Marx, 1844)

Finally comes Engels’s letter to Lafargue (27 August 1890) written about 3 weeks after the abovementioned letter to Schmidt. Here Engels mentioned that remark of Marx while criticising some newcomer ‘Marxists’ in Germany: “These gentry all dabble in Marxism, albeit of the kind you were acquainted with in France ten years ago and of which Marx said: ‘All I know is that I'm not a Marxist.’ And he would doubtless say of these gentry what Heine said of his imitators: ‘I sowed dragons and I reaped fleas.’” Engels ridiculed the behaviour of those whom he referred as ‘crowd of students, literati and other young déclassé bourgeois’ who thought themselves leaders of the party because they are more capable due to their university education: “There has been a students’ revolt in the German party. During 2 or 3 years a crowd of students, literati and other young déclassé bourgeois invaded the party, arriving just in time to take most of the editorial posts in the new papers that were then proliferating. In their usual fashion they regarded their bourgeois universities as socialist Saint-Cyrs’ entitling them to enter the party in the rank of officer, if not of general.” (École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr is the famous military academy founded by Napoleon to serve the bourgeois-colonialist state of France.) Here we get some idea of what Engels thought to be a mindset that was not expected of Marxists.

At least these are things not at all noticed by Mr Rubel, Mr Kaufmann or Mr Arnove or Mr Ray in those letters.

In Lieu of Conclusion
As this article is already too long let this author stop here. We already saw it quite clearly that words like Marxism and Ideology are not just Third Internationalist “inventions” with some ‘evil aims’ as the ‘critics’ mentioned in the first part of the article; rather these are our essential weapons in our present fight – whatever those ‘critics’ wrote to disarm us will not deviate us.  

Back to Home Page

Sep 8, 2020