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III III 1 1 Also available from Continuum: The Derrida Dictionary, Sirnon Morgan Wortharn The Sartre Dictionary, Gary Cox The Hegel Dictionary, Glenn Magee Forthcoming: The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, Greg Larnbert, Gary Genosko, Janell Watson and Eugene.B. YOl:lng The Heidegger -0 !)ahlstrom The Husserl Dictionary, The Kant Dictionary, Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York NY 10038 © lan Fraser and Lawrence Wilde, 2011 Ali rights reservedo No part of this publication may be repraduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electranic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing fram the publisherso British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available fram the British Libraryo ISBN: 978-1-4411-7832-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fraser; lan, 1962- The Marx dictionary / lan Fraser and Lawrence Wildeo po cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. )0 ISBN 978-1-4411-7832-9 --ISBN 978-1-4411-0011-5 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883--Dictionaries, 1. Wilde, Lawrence. II. Title. B3305.M73Z83 2011 335A092--dc22 2011008375 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in India Acknowledgements vii Introduction Chronology: Marx/s Life and Works 1.3 The Marx Dictionary 19 Bibliography 221 We would like to thank Marx scholars past and present for their contri butions to the debates concerning the interpretation of Marx's thought that have informed this project. Thanks to Terrell Carver and Tony Smith for their initial advice and support for the dictionary, and to Torn Crick, editor at Continuum. We are grateful for the valuable feedback provided by participants at the Marxism Panel of the 2010 Workshops in Political Theory Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University, where we first presented the dictionary entries. Few philosophers have inspired su ch extremes of adulation and loathing as Karl Marx (1818-1883), but he waSt of course, no ordinary philosopher. After starting his intellectual career by immersing himself in the philo sophical ferment generated by Hegel and his critics, he came to be virulently opposed to this purely theoretical discourse. For example, in the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) he stated that 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change if. Similarly, in The German Ide%gy (1845-1846) he declared that philosophy and the study of the natural world have the same relation to one another as mastur bation and sexual love. However, as these statements indicate, Marx was not opposed to philosophy itself, but to philosophy that did not unite theory with practice. Consequently, he abandoned plans for an academic career in his mid-twenties in order to become a full-time theorist of a practical world revolution. This revolution was intended to abolish the private ownership of the means of production, bringing to an end the economic basis on which social classes and class antagonisms had developed over thousands of years. The possibility of such a transformation was grounded in his analysis of capitalism, through which he exposed its inherently contradictory nature and identified the socio-economic tendencies that could lead to its abolition. The revolutionary goal was the formation of classless societies throughout the world, free from exploitation and oppression, in which the majority of the people would take conscious control over their social systems for the first time in history. It waSt in short, a vision of human emancipation. How is it then, that in the eyes of many Marx's ideas are seen as a threat to human freedom? Liberalism, for example, maintains that the right to own property is a prerequisite for individual freedom, and so opposes the view that freedom is possible only when private ownership has been replaced by social control of the means of production. The liberal view suggests 2 Introduction that collectivism leads to political despotism, something that Marx strenu ously denies. The problem for the defence of Marx's position is not simply theoretical, but, crucially, historicaL It centres on the practices of Marxism as a political doctrine, for it is the bleak experience of the communist dicta torships of the twentieth century that has been the decisive factor in the negative judgement on Marx. His ideas, as set down in this dictionary, leave no doubt that he would have been appalled by the tyrannies that have wielded power in his name. But if we are correct to claim that his theories were hideously distorted, how could such distortion arise? Between Marx's death and 1917, major socialist parties across Europe harnessed the power of the growing working class and adopted his ideas as their guiding theoretical force. There was a consensus among these parties that their task was to fulfil Marx's challenge in The Communist Manifesto (1848) to 'win the battle for democracy', that is, to achieve universal franchise, win an electoral majority and begin to transform their societies as part of an international socialist movement. This was designed to build on the progress that Marx had readily identified in his description of the rise of bourgeois power in the Manifesto. The goal was to extend democracy from the political sphere to the socio-economic sphere, which is why most of the parties adopted the name of 'social democracy'. Ali this changed in November 1917 when the Boishevik wing of the Russian Social Democratie Workers' Party seized power. Isolated in a country where the working class constituted a small minority, they quickly abandoned political democracy and reinterpreted Marx's political thought to justify their dictatorship. While implementing Marx's injunction to abolish private property, the dictatorship dispensed with his commitment to human freedom and radical democracy. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the official communist movement under the dictatorship of Stalin spread internationally, and when similar dictatorships were imposed in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Chinese communists seized power in 1949, one third of the world's populace lived under regimes that were a travesty of Marx's vision. In the nineteenth century Marx had reviled the dictatorships of the Czars in Russia and Napoleon III in France, yet in the twentieth century despotic regimes claimed to be enaeting his 'science'. The worldwide communist movement not only distorted Marx's views on dernocraey, but clairned that their dictatorships constituted a superior; 'proletarian' forrn of democracy. The dernocratic Marxists, who stayed outside the comrnunist camp, gradually