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Mike Davis on Surfing Marx's Collected Works

"There comes a time when every old student must decide whether or not to renew their driver’s license" — Mike Davis

5 February 2025

Mike Davis on Surfing Marx's Collected Works

Over the years my Marxism became rusty, to say the least. But there comes a time when every old student must decide whether or not to renew their driver’s license. And reading Daniel Bensaïd’s Marx for Our Times, a spectacularly imaginative reinterpretation that breaks free of talmudic chains, whetted my appetite for a fresh look at the “non-linear Marx” that Bensaïd proposes.[1] Retirement from teaching, then a long illness finally gave me the leisure to browse through the Collected Works of Marx and Engels now in English and, in a pirated version, available for free online.[2] Amongst recent writers who have made brilliant use of the Collected Works are John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, who has carefully reconstructed Marx’s powerful ecological critique of capitalism—a new and exciting topic, particularly in light of later socialism’s fetishism of large-scale agriculture; and Erica Benner, whose invaluable recovery of Marx’s usually misrepresented views on nationalism is discussed in Chapter 2 (“Marx’s Lost Theory”). And the mother lode has hardly been mined out: for example, Marx and Engels’s hundreds of pages of acerbic commentaries on the deep games of nineteenth-century European politics, especially the geopolitical chess match between the British and Russian empires, clearly warrant a major new interpretation. Likewise, it would be illuminating to compare his theoretical writings on political economy with his concrete analyses of contemporary economic crises such as 1857 and 1866, topics usually assigned to the footnotes. More generally, I suspect, “Marx on the conjuncture” should become the new slogan of Marxologists.

The panoramic view of the oeuvre now available also makes it easier to recognize the blind spots and misdirections in the collaboration of Marx and Engels. The former, for instance, never wrote a single word about cities, and his passionate interests in ethnography, geology, and mathematics were never matched by a comparable concern with geography (later the forte of anarchists such as Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin). He was relatively untraveled, and only at the very end of his life, desperately sick and seeking the sun, did he venture outside Western Europe. His letters from Algiers, praising the culture and dignity of the Arabs, indicated his capacity to transcend Eurocentric categories and revel in the newness of other worlds. (Alas, if only he hadn’t been so wracked by illness and family tragedy.) The United States was another paradox. Its protean future was often on his mind—he was after all a correspondent for the New York Tribune—and he and Engels worked mightily to win support for Lincoln and Emancipation within the British labor movement. Yet, despite having read Tocqueville, he never focused on the unique features of its political system, especially the impact of early white-manhood suffrage on the development of its labor movement. 

There can be no question that Marx saw far beyond the horizon of his century and that Capital, as the Economist (which Marx read faithfully) pointed out a few years back, remains startlingly contemporary even in the age of Walmart and Google. But in other cases Marx’s vision was limited by the anomalous character of his chronological niche: arguably the most peaceful period of European history in a thousand years. Colonial interventions aside, liberal London-centered capitalism did not seem structurally to require large-scale inter-state warfare as a condition of its reproduction or as the inevitable result of its contradictions. He died, of course, before the new imperialism of the late 1880s and 1890s led to zero-sum conflicts amongst the major powers for shares of the world market. Nor could Marx, even after the massacre of the Communards, have possibly foreseen the horrific price that counter-revolution in the next century, including Thermidorean Stalinism, would exact from rank-and-file anarchists, socialists, and communists: at least 7–8 million dead.[3] Since the youngest and most politically conscious tended always to be in the front lines, these repeated decimations of the vanguard entailed incalculable consequences—ones that have been almost entirely ignored by historians. 

Likewise, all signs in Marx’s day pointed to the continued erosion of belief and the secularization of industrial society. After the early writings, religion was quite understandably not a topic on his agenda. By the end of the century, however, the trends reversed, and political Catholicism, along a spectrum from embryonic Christian Democracy to the Zentrum to fascism, became the main competitor with socialism/communism in much of Europe, and the major obstacle to left electoral majorities in the 1910s– 20s and 1950s–70s. This surprising Catholic resurgence, almost a second counter-reformation, owed much to the spread of Mariolatry and the church’s aggressive appeal to proletarian mothers. The patriarchal character of the workers’ movement, which Marx and Engels never challenged, made it blind to the forces at work. Despite a household full of strong, radical women, including three daughters who became prominent revolutionists in their own right, Marx never wavered as pater familias, and the movements built in his name, as Barbara Taylor and others have pointed out, actually registered a retrogression from the striking feminism of many utopian socialist sects.[4] Indeed, between Flora Tristan and Clara Zetkin, no woman was able to claim leadership in any of the major labor or socialist formations.

The point, even if initially difficult to swallow, is that socialists, if incomparably armored by Marx’s critique of capitalism, also have something to learn from the critique of Marx and his Victorian extrapolations. I say “critique of Marx” rather than “critics of Marx” since, even in the case of those who were noble revolutionary figures in their own right, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, the mischaracterizations of Marx’s ideas were quite fantastic (as were his calumnies against them). The cult of Marx, preceded in the German workers’ movement by the cult of Lassalle, justly honored a life of almost sacrificial dedication to human liberation, but otherwise did what all cults do—it petrified his living thoughts and critical method. He, of course, was aware of this danger, which is why he famously said of Jules Guesde and his “orthodox Marxist” wing of the French Workers Party: “Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas marxiste” (“What is certain is that [if they are Marxists] I myself am not a Marxist”). How many more times would he have had to say that in the twentieth century?

— An edited excerpt from Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis (now published in a new edition). See our Mike Davis Bookshelf here.

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Notes:

1. Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique (London: Verso, 2002). 

2. The collected works, of course, are not the complete works. The Marx/ Engels archives, two-thirds in Amsterdam and one-third in Moscow, contain, in addition to published works, a vast collection of drafts (there are four of Capital), articles, newspaper columns, manifestos, fragments, 200 excerpt notebooks, and correspondence with 2,000 individuals. Publication of the whole has been variously estimated to require 130 to 180 printed volumes. Since Austrian Marxists first proposed a collected edition in 1911, moreover, there has been continuous debate over what should be included and how to insulate the editorial apparatus from party ideologies. At times this has been a life-and-death matter: David Riazanov, selected by Lenin in 1921 to lead the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, undertook work on the first edition (known as MEGA 1) in 1923, but fell afoul of Stalin, partly because of his opposition to censorship of perceived anti-Russian tracts by Marx and Engels, and was shot in 1938 together with many of his researchers. His work was resumed after 1960 in two different forms: the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), which began publication in 1975 and is now finished; and the much more complete and ambitious MEGA II, which, after the collapse of the GDR and the USSR, became a broad international collaboration (the IMES) and remains years from completion. For overviews of this complicated history, see Kevin Anderson, “Uncovering Marx’s Yet Unpublished Writings,” Critique 30/31 (1998); Jurgen Rohan, “Publishing Marx and Engels after 1989: The Fate of the MEGA,” Nature, Society, and Thought 13: 4 (October 2000); and Amy Wendling, “Comparing Two Editions of Marx-Engels Collected Works,” Socialism and Democracy 19: 1 (2005). Navigating the shoals and rapids of the MECW is less challenging if one utilizes Hal Draper’s splendid chronological guide, The Marx-Engels Chronicle (New York: Schocken, 1985).

3. This guesstimate is calculated on the following basis: Russian civil war—1 million Red Army soldiers killed; repression in interwar Europe, including Italy and Spain—150,000; China to 1949—1.5 million; Soviet Union, 1937 purge—150,000 communists; Soviet Union, Second World War (party members and Komsomol only)—3 million; Nazi Europe, including partisans—500,000; Southeast Asia (Indochina, Philippines, Indonesia)—1 million; and Latin America—100,000.

4. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983).

Old Gods, New Enigmas
Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an...