nostalgebraist:

One of the things that confuses me about contemporary Marxism is the tendency – or anyway it looks to me like there is such a tendency – to define “Marxist analysis of capitalism” as “analysis that sees capitalism as Marx saw 19th century industrial capitalism,” rather than “analysis following Marx’s strategies and characteristic lines of thought.”

In other words: Marx (to a first approximation; this is very contentious) said the means of production determine economic relations, and thus that the capitalism he saw around him was inherently the result of the industrial revolution.  He forecasted that the next step after this phase would be communism, but that doesn’t mean that if he were around today, he would see our current economy with its very different technologies as just more industrial capitalism, waiting around for the leap to communism.  His thoughts were up-to-the-minute then and, presumably, would be up-to-the-minute now.

I’ve been idly reading Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel, a set of expository essays on modern Marxist thinkers, and maybe this is just a problem with Kunkel specifically, but his treatment of “Marx” as a set of morally edifying texts, in need only of careful exegesis to reveal more eternal answers, rather than “Marx” as a thinking being, is jarring:

Marx’s brilliant and somewhat contradictory comments on [crisis theory] bring to mind Cioran’s remark “Works die; fragments, not having lived, can no longer die.” Such seeds sowed one of the most fertile fields in Marxist economics.

[…]

In a sense, the emphasis [on geography] confirms Harvey’s classicism. Marx himself somewhat curiously concluded the first volume of Capital—a book otherwise essentially concerned with local transactions between capital and labor, illustrated mostly from the English experience—with a chapter discussing the “primitive accumulation” of land and mineral wealth attendant on the European sacking of the Americas. […] The book starts as a patient philological reconstruction, from Marx’s stray comments, of a Marxian theory of crisis.

[…]

Harvey is not adding to Marx here: his achievement is to piece a heap of fragments into a coherent mosaic. And for his reconstructed Marx, the end of capitalism – or at least its latest stage, of globally integrated finance – lies in its beginning.

[…]

This line of thought takes inspiration from Marx’s remark that wages are never higher than on the eve of a crash … 

[…]

On the other hand, the Marxist tradition received in Jameson’s work about as profound a vindication of its interpretative mission as could be imagined.

And sprinkled throughout are phrases like “Marx himself had of course observed in Capital,” “as Marx once put it,” “as readers of Marx know,” “might lead us to recall Marx’s proposition that,” and so on.

Of course Kunkel sees Marx as a great thinker and so those phrases come with the territory, but it all feels to me like he’s more interested in “can we trace this back to something Marx wrote back when he was alive?” than “is this the sort of analysis Marx would have done?”  He wants to understand (for instance) “globally integrated finance” not as Marx might have understood it, but as if Marx was really writing about it all along when he wrote of different things.

ETA: I should add that this isn’t a beef I have with Marxism specifically.  It seems to me like this is a general problem with how intellectual culture treats “great works” (of nonfiction) – fixing the texts in place and then asking them to speak about everything, rather than thinking about the humans who wrote them and acknowledging that their style of thought was more fundamental than their conclusions, and that they might have drawn different conclusions had they seen other things.