The Marx Dictionary

232 Pages·2011·0.607 MB·English

by  Fraser, Ian;Wilde, Lawrence

Bibliography FC
The Marx Dictionary
Also available from Continuum:
The Derrida Dictionary, Simon Morgan Wortham
The Sartre Dictionary, Gary Cox
The Hegel Dictionary, Glenn Magee
Forthcoming:
The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, Greg Lambert, Gary Genosko,
Janell Watson and Eugene B. Young
The Heidegger Dictionary, Daniel O Dahlstrom
The Husserl Dictionary, Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen
The Kant Dictionary, Lucas Thorpe
The Marx Dictionary
Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York NY 10038
© Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8403-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fraser, Ian, 1962-
The Marx dictionary / Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 978-1-4411-7832-9 -- ISBN 978-1-4411-0011-5 1. Marx, Karl,
1818-1883--Dictionaries. I. Wilde, Lawrence. II. Title.
B3305.M73Z83 2011
335.4092--dc22
2011008375
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Chronology: Marx’s Life and Works 13
The Marx Dictionary 19
Bibliography 221

Acknowledgements
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 Tom 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.

Introduction
Few philosophers have inspired such extremes of adulation and loathing
as Karl Marx (1818–1883), but he was, 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 it’. Similarly,
in The German Ideology (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 was, 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
1