Prüfstein Marx. Zur Edition und Rezeption eines Klassikers ed. by Matthias Steinbach and Michael Ploenus (review)

It is difficult in a short review to do justice to the twenty mostly very good contributions in this volume, which, despite its overall excellence, operates within serious limits that need to be addressed. The aim of the book, as the title suggests, is to examine the reception of Karl Marx’s thought from his time until today. As the editors Matthias Steinbach and Michael Ploenius state, Marx appeared to be finished with the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989, but he has experienced a “renaissance” (9) twenty years later with the onset of the global financial crisis of 2008. Marxism is dead, as contributor David Mayer suggests, but Marx as a critic of capitalism is very much alive.

The volume is divided into four sections. The first deals with the standard edition of Marx’s works, as well as with biographies of Marx. Articles by Manfred Neuhaus, Ulrich Pagel, and Regina Roth discuss the transition from the publication of Marx’s and Engels’s writings for party-political purposes, to the work on a scholarly critical edition of their complete writings, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), only after World War II. The articles by Gerd Riegel and Michael Ploenus deal with biographies of Marx: Riegel with the biographical writings of Wilhelm Bracke, a contemporary of Marx from the early labor movement, Ploenus with biographies from the nineteenth century to more recent times. They both discuss the extent to which these have largely failed to deal with the personal side of Marx’s life. Ploenus pays particular attention to Franz Mehring’s biography of 1918, which became a standard work for German Communists and later for the German Democratic Republic—despite Mehring’s critical take on the dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of Marx. These are two very good articles, but they restrict themselves entirely to German publications, ignoring significant biographies published in English.

The second section deals with the reception of Marx in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic. The question arises, of course, why a book concerned with the renaissance of Marx since the recent financial crisis should end its treatment of Marx’s reception with the Weimar Republic. Be that as it may, Christina Morina deals with two different interpretations of Marx: one by Eduard Bernstein from a democratic, evolutionary perspective, the other by Karl Kautsky from a revolutionary one. For both authors the key problem was how to deal with Marx’s prediction of the increasing impoverishment of the working class, which they recognized did not occur, and with the inevitable collapse of capitalism, which Bernstein no longer accepted but which remained a key assumption of Kautsky. Stefan Gerber discusses how Wilhelm Hohoff, as a representative of Social Catholicism, accepted Marx’s critique of capitalism but not his views about how the economy was to be restructured. Mario Keßler deals with Arthur Rosenberg, who applied Marxist categories to his analysis of ancient Greek and Roman history and then to the birth of the Weimar Republic. Matthias Steinbach looks at the political involvements of Karl Korsch from his student days until his break with the Communist party under Stalin. Korsch is considered one of the three most important originators of Western Marxism, together with György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, but Steinbach pays little attention to this side of Korsch. Nor does this volume more generally: Lukács is not mentioned in the book at all, and Gramsci is only referred to in one sentence in Florian Grams’s essay on Marxist pedagogy. Steinbach also mentions in just one sentence that Korsch was one of the founders in 1923 of the Marxist Institut für Sozialforschung, but there is not a word about Max Horkheimer, who became its director in 1930, or about the Frankfurt School. Finally, Uwe Dathe discusses Walter Eucken’s search during the Weimar years to...