Some observations sparked by a comment Jim Holstun made on Louis's blog, that I think are worth repeating here:
Jim Holstun wrote:
“there is more than one Marx–his work isn’t completely coherent.”
To which I respond:
Bingo. This is a totally controversial assertion to make among “Marxists”, however.
Most other social thinkers go through a series of ruptures, shifts in emphasis, and outright changes in the course of their intellectual life. Nobody would ever assert some seamless continuity in the work of, say, Foucault between The Order of Things and the later volumes of the History of Sexuality. On the contrary, Foucault scholars emphasize the rupture and discontinuity of his work.
Marx scholars, especially those working with the raw manuscripts being taken into the MEGA project, are finally getting around to dealing with the discontinuities and incompleteness in Marx’s work.
But the difference between Marx and Foucault is that while Foucault was basically “just” a scholar, Marx was a figure in the European labor movement, and regarded as the father of an entire worldview called “Marxism” that was adopted by an entire wing of that labor movement.
So “Marxists” have a quasi-religious interest in defending some mythical notion of a seamless continuity of a Marxist worldview. This basically leads to a lot of squaring the circle between different periods in Marx’s intellectual development in order to misrepresent him as a singular genius who was always pursuing the same line of inquiry. So you have the ridiculous attempts to reconcile the Feuerbachian anthropology of the 1844 Manuscripts with their “species being” with later works like the German Ideology in which Marx speaks of “human nature” only in terms of the “ensemble of social relationships”; or Marxists take a couple of tossed off lines from the 1859 Preface and turn it into a grandiose “theory” about developments in productive forces leading to changes in relations of production. And this despite the fact that much of Vol. I of Capital involves demonstrating how the causality is reversed: determinate relations of
production leading to certain changes in technology.
As one comrade mentioned to me in a private email once, this quasi-religious attitude toward Marx robs him of his humanity.