Authors are usually care¬fully revived from collective forgetfulness for ritual anniver¬saries. In that sense it is ironi¬cal to commemorate Marx, for he has never been forgotten in the first place. It is exactly a hundred years since Marx died—as good a time as any to see how his doctrine has done in the face of history. The exercise is all the more interesting because of a contradiction in the his-tory of ideas. Successful ideas very soon become common¬ place, and some of the most widely accepted ideas are those that come to be forgotten. Besides, when men are brought to take some suggestion about their historical condition seri¬ously enough, it comes to affect and alter that condition. So, although a picture of men’s condition may have been true enough at the time it was made, it is altered by the action of people. This is what is some¬times called the structure of a self-falsifying prophecy. Marx was too good a student of Hegel not to see this; but he believed he could escape this contradiction, or bring it under control, by giving his theory the form of a ‘science’. It is necessary for an under¬standing of Marx to realize that he did not intend to leave behind a completed philoso¬phic system. Rather, he gave his thought the open-ended structure of a science. Conse¬quently, his theory has never stopped interfering with his¬tory, just as history has never stopped interfering with his system. The anthology David McLellan has edited undertakes to tell this extra¬ordinarily complex story.
Jan-Feb 1984, volume 8, No 4