Marx and Marxism: Was Marx always a Marxist?

By: Ricardo Israel - 13/07/2025

It is not a trick question, since for many years I have been interested in the subject of when an author embraces the doctrine he created, since in the social sciences it is not usual to have a discovery, but rather a process of years, so I have wondered what happens with the ideas he developed before, even more so if in the case of Marx we find some that later became State doctrine.

In my case, what had happened is that until now I had always done so in academic publications and conferences, and for the first time I propose to do so with a broader audience. Regarding a second question, in the century following the collapse of the Soviet Union, I wonder if the Marx we're talking about still has influence, and if so, does he? There are several Marxes, just as there were and are several Marxisms. Many of his books were only published in the 20th century, and some of the best-known are polemics with other socialists, since, during his lifetime, he was not granted the sainthood he received after his death. Others are also co-authored with his friend and benefactor, Engels. His work includes both rigorous and pamphleteering writings, and he wrote in more than one language. There are theoretical texts, extremely detailed analyses, and others, very general. Furthermore, many of his articles and newspaper columns, some of them regular, were written by his daughter Jenny, one of the three he had, who, like the other two, played a significant role in the dissemination of his ideas, a role not always recognized in the history of Marxism. Four others died in childhood.

Marx was essentially a critic of the society in which he lived, and contrary to popular belief, this abundant work has few references to how he understands the future socialist society will specifically be, no more than three of any relevance, and even less, except for prophetic slogans, communism, so true is the above, that when it becomes State policy, Leninism is added after a hyphen.

There is no sociologically precise definition of social class, although this is often confused with the importance attributed to the proletariat as the bearers of history. Therefore, in the face of its diminishing importance, new generations have transferred that role to other bearers. Mao found it in the peasantry, and in current progressivism, characterized by "intersectionality of identity," many find it in indigenous groups, various genders, and racial color.

I had to study it in several countries, mostly in formal programs, although my experience in an International Diploma in Planning at the University of Warsaw was notable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the years preceding the emergence of Lech Walesa and the Solidarity union, as a testament to the times we lived in, only one of the professors identified himself as such, and the others were liberals who proclaimed the advantages of capitalism. It was quite a change from what I experienced after graduating from law school when I enrolled in a Latin American Master's program in Economics, which I didn't finish, and where separate courses were offered for each volume of Capital.

After all this, it's clear to me why I'm not a "Marxist," although I consider myself a critical scholar of a relevant work, one whose importance was exaggerated, though indisputably influential. And I'm not referring to the political aspect, but rather to the fact that various disciplines lived in constant dialogue about his writings in university circles. In any case, I learned that some of the most lucid explanations are not found in his books, but in his correspondence, for example, with his editors.

In the mid-1980s, almost half the world's population lived under governments ranging from authoritarian to dictatorial, which considered themselves followers of his ideas, although it would certainly be disingenuous to blame him for what was done in his name elsewhere. He was a man of his time, with unwelcome—some would even say racist—opinions about Mexicans, or unfair assertions about Indian workers when they were compared to Scots, not for the work done but for the surplus value. He possessed the optimism and belief in indefinite progress that abounded in the London where he lived, although it is notable how little influence his had during his lifetime, since he generally associated himself with marginalized groups.

It was only after his death that the chair he occupied in the British Museum Library was named after him, coinciding with the rapid and widespread spread of his ideas. This process led to his becoming the official ideology of several countries, but it also so affected his writings that some scholars were needed to separate his original contributions from the many changes made after his death, without his participation.

Today, Marx faces the problem of many classics, cited but not read. In so-called communist or truly socialist countries, students rarely read him seriously, as if they were forced to, as if it were the Bible. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the West, where reading is less and less common, many people call themselves Marxists, and they probably have never read him, and if they have, it will have been no more than the Communist Manifesto. The same thing happens on the other side: those who disqualify him sometimes repeat his ideas, admittedly without knowing it, especially in materialist frameworks (which, incidentally, come from Hegel) or in the exaggeration of the influence of the economy on other facets of life, as well as the opposite, of those who use a term he never used, "cultural" Marxism, to concoct a kind of conspiracy theory that seems to be imposing itself on the world, in a manner that is not well explained.

In this sense, if there is someone who experienced the same thing as Marx, it is the Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who is also attributed an unusual importance in concepts such as cultural hegemony. The problem is that many who do so in the 21st century probably have not read it, the same problem with Marx, since it is very difficult for them to have extracted it from his well-known "Prison Notebooks", which as a work written in a fascist prison where he spent years under Mussolini, are rather notes, sometimes disordered, extracted with difficulty to be published, a collection of notes, which if they acquired the relevance that is credited to them, in a very opposite vein to Lenin, suffered the same process of appropriation as Marx, since it was Palmiro Togliatti (1893-1964), who transformed some of those ideas into the doctrine of the most important communist party in the West, the Italian, and later it was Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984), his successor as general secretary, who would turn those notes into the basis of Eurocommunism in the 70s.

Marx, whose life spanned the period from 1818 (Germany) to 1883 (London), was variously described as a philosopher, historian, economist, and/or revolutionary. He was raised in a well-to-do middle-class home. His family was of Jewish origin, but his father converted to Protestantism for reasons of social standing, breaking with a family tradition of several rabbis. Marx made an intellectual break with his heritage in a book known as The Jewish Question, published in 1844 as a review of two works by Bruno Bauer.

At 17, he entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn, and during his studies, he became engaged to the daughter of a prominent baron, whom he married. Jenny von Westphalen surely could not have imagined that her marriage to this follower of German Romanticism would drag her into a life of deprivation and poverty. Marx subsequently moved to the University of Berlin, where he became active in the "Young Hegelians," a group of followers of the important philosopher Hegel, who died in 1831. However, the group was not limited to theoretical debate; it also fought against the Prussian government, a crucial development, since his oppositional nature prevented him from teaching at the university, his vocation. In exchange, he later left Germany, only to be expelled from France, and later from Brussels, traveling to London, where he would live for the rest of his life.

It was in France that he met the person with whom he would collaborate and identify most throughout his life, his friend and comrade Friedrich Engels, who not only published his books but also allowed him to devote himself to studying and writing, thanks to a textile company in Manchester owned by his father. Furthermore, it was Engels who recognized Freddy, the son Marx had with Elena Demuth, his wife's maid, a little-known incident permanently forgotten by some of his biographers.

It was in Paris and Brussels that the apprentice philosopher moved to the study of history and began to conceive ideas that others would later call Historical Materialism. It was during these years that Marx wrote a manuscript, which would only be published the following century under the title "The German Ideology," in which he asserted that individuals depended on material conditions, described the modes of production that had existed throughout history, and predicted the replacement of capitalism with something new, communism, without adding anything substantive, if anything new to his intellectual output.

The earlier texts, of some length, captured his early revolutionary positions, in which a humanist and idealist conception is evident. The influence of another philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, is now noticeable, to whom Marx dedicated eleven brief notes, which were published as Theses. However, this is only a partial account of a period that would be known as that of the "young Marx" to differentiate him from the "mature Marx," that is, an author whose best-known and most popular ideas had not yet been developed. Although it may seem odd to state this, Marx was still a "non-Marxist" Marx, in the sense that he had not yet found the theoretical and doctrinal framework with which he passed into history. He was a critic of the society of his time, but he did not yet offer a replacement, since socialism not only seemed distant, but he had not yet developed anything that brought him closer in time, either intellectually or politically.

However, this is what has aged best about Marx, since if there is any influence today it does not come from the doctrines of the communist parties or from dialectical materialism, nor from the one in permanent debate with other socialists. Perhaps the meaning of these pages is that if there is any relationship between Marx and what is happening politically today it is with the "young Marx", not the Marxist Marx, but the one who was not, at least not yet, only with the doubt as to whether those active in the streets have read this lesser-known Marx.

He is an individualist and at the same time a communitarian thinker, more concerned with the local than with a universal revolution, closer to some progressive strains and even to Wokism, far removed from economic or dogmatic explanations, more libertarian and less dogmatic. Perhaps there is an abundance of idealism, and if there is ideology, it is more about identity than social class. He speaks of social relations of solidarity, more from below than imposed by state power from above, where rather than the end of history with communism, he speaks of emancipation and dignity, words that are widely used in current political debate.

The truth is that dialectical materialism is considered the philosophy of Marxism, but Marx never, ever used the term and probably the first to do so was the Russian revolutionary and Marxist propagandist Georgi Plekhanov in 1891. For its part, historical materialism is so central a body of work that, in my opinion, it divides the early writings of the already Marxist Marx, but the point is that Marx did not use it, it was Engels who initiated its use in 1892.

Two events distanced him from following the young Marx's lead. The first took place in 1847, when the Congress of a small Communist League he had joined commissioned him and Engels to write an easy-to-read summary of the organization's ideas. Probably no one imagined that the final product would become, known as the Communist Manifesto, one of the most widely read texts in history. The second took place in 1948, a year of revolutionary outbreaks in Europe, most of them aborted, so the revolutionary hour passed quickly. It had been a passing cloud, and social protest was replaced by a new wave, this time conservative and lasting much longer.

However, it is important that the man of action sees for the first and perhaps only time what a revolutionary moment could mean, and so he dedicates the rest of his days to trying to get ahead of it, that is, to anticipate a similar moment. From that moment on, with the help of Engels and some inheritances from his wife's relatives, he begins a quest, the idea that "a new revolution will only be possible as a consequence of a new crisis," an intellectual quest that will accompany him to his grave: how to determine the starting point of crises capable of originating a revolutionary transformation of society. There we find the origins of the Marx who would dedicate himself to the study of political economy to understand the conditions, elements, and probable causes of the eventual crisis. Marx the economist, the one who in some correspondence considered himself a disciple of the former Member of the British Parliament, David Ricardo (1772-1823), with one major difference, since Marx believed that the study of economics would allow him to distinguish crises with revolutionary perspectives from ordinary ones.

On the other hand, the other part of the legacy that came down to us, with all its polarization and confrontation, was a kind of secular saint, enshrined on an altar that no one recognized in his lifetime, least of all among his many socialist opponents. A man of flesh and blood was turned into a statue, both by the Second International, founded in 1889, by socialist and social-democratic parties, and also, and much more so, by its rival, the Third International, the Communist International or Comintern, founded in 1919 by Lenin. Even more important was what had happened in the Soviet Union, where after the October Revolution, the process of degeneration of the original ideas began, culminating in Stalinism, which adopted official positions even in art and literature.

It is this process that leads to a simple conception of history being transformed into a complete scientific analogy comparable to Darwin's theory of evolution, so much so that, at his graveside, Engels said that his friend had achieved in the humanities what Darwin had done in the natural sciences.

Marx is also a typical product of the 19th century. Not only was he influenced by positivism in philosophy and methodology, but, living in England, he not only observed the fruits of the colonial system but was influenced by it in at least two ways. First, he believed he could do the same thing that had been done in the newly discovered laws of physics and chemistry, discovering the laws that govern human social behavior.

Secondly, the spirit of the times is evident in his rigid Victorian morality. He was socially advanced, but extremely conservative regarding issues such as family, as illustrated by his patriarchal attitude toward his wife and daughters, illustrated by his letters to his wife and, in the case of the latter, his correspondence with her suitors.

Marx was vain, though humble enough to claim that he had invented nothing, his work being merely a synthesis of German philosophy, English economics, and French socialism. His moral critique of the social cost of British industrialization and perhaps the theme of inequality continue to draw him closer to younger generations, helping to explain the validity of the anti-capitalist argument. Even more so is the appeal of the "young Marx" discourse on a more just society. However, it does not seem entirely appropriate that, in the century following the end of the Cold War, he is still considered one of those primarily responsible for the Soviet Union or the millions of deaths under communist tyrannies. It is useful to remember that the most apocalyptic part of his ideology was adopted by some of his followers to carry out the Russian revolution, precisely under the conditions of productive backwardness that Marx claimed was impossible. While in Germany and the United Kingdom, a parliamentary path was followed, initially also in his name.

I'm still surprised by the passion his name continues to inspire, especially among people who haven't read him. He is certainly a contradictory figure, although his portrayal of the lives of the poor and marginalized during the Industrial Revolution isn't so different from Charles Dickens's literary work. In conclusion, I think Marx was a better evangelist of a new creed than a prophet of a better society, and Jean François Revel was right when he said that "a human group becomes a manipulable crowd...when it becomes sensitive to images and not ideas, to suggestion and not reason."

@israelzipper

Master's and PhD in Political Science (Essex University), Bachelor of Law (University of Barcelona), Lawyer (University of Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

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