<http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl? sid=06/07/28/1916205&mode=nested&tid=9> "Invaders from Marx: On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading – A Critical Engagement with Karl Heinz Roth and others" Michael Heinrich
[The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in Jungle World, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth, one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: here]
In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions.
This omniscient Marxism was analytically useless, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.
This new Left was anything but unified. As regards the critique of Marxist orthodoxy, one can distinguish, to strongly simplify, between two major directions. One tendency criticized the trade unions and left political parties for viewing the workers as an object to be managed and not as a subject capable of struggle and resistance. The theoretical foundations of this controlling, dominating relationship to the working class were located in the objectivism and economism of traditional Marxism. Class struggle, as opposed to objective economic laws, was emphasized as the decisive motor of societal development.