You Can Make a Career Out of Saying Stupid Things About Karl Marx

by Cliopatria

Well, perhaps not as easily as you once could. But there's no penalty for making perfectly groundless statements on Marx with an air of great certainty. In some quarters, doing so is obligatory.

For a fine round-up of the standard nonsense and its precise, well-documented refutation, there is now Marx Myths & Legends.

Frankly, I doubt it will do one bit of good. This is a matter in which total ignorance tends to be quite proud of itself.

It's a magnificent resource, even so. (Thanks to the new site Continental Philosophy for pointing it out.) I am particularly glad to see that the site includes Christopher J. Arthur's classic paper "Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology".

The notion that Marx drew on Hegel's analysis of"lord and bondsman" relationship (as it's also called, in the Baille translation of the Phenomenology) is one of those things you hear so often that it's kind of shocking to learn that there is no real evidence for it.

As myths go, of course, that one is not so pernicious as the efforts to present Marx as an architect of despotism.

But the fact that the site includes Arthur's paper is evidence of its high standard of seriousness.

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Stephan Xavier Reich - 11/25/2006

The academic seriousness of that Marx Myth website is certainly in question! In (attempting) to refute two key claims made by Marx's critics (his proto anti-semitism and his authoritarian weakness when it came to proletarian dictatorship), the site uses articles by Hal Draper--a Marx "scholar" (read, apologist) of no credibility, and one who, moreover, had no access to archives that have enlightened scholarship over the past four decades.

Michael McIntyre - 8/18/2006

Better yet, if Reich wishes to critique or respond to Hal Draper's articles, he can post his work directly to Marx Myths & Legends. Ad hominem probably isn't the best strategy, though.

Scott McLemee - 8/18/2006

If there is any serious challenge to Draper's scholarship, I would be glad to read it. And if there is some particular finding in the archives that would challenge his arguments on either score, then even better -- let's hear it.

Otherwise, the claim that Draper has "no credibility" means absolutely nothing. I doubt anyone who has ever read any of the four volumes of his "Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution" would share that rather peculiar judgment.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/18/2006

Mr. Reich, Would you ban all scholarship done by a Marxist? The credibility of Draper's scholarship doesn't depend on whether he was a Marxist but on its internal coherence, logic, use of evidence, etc. The site also has an article by my colleague on Conservativenet, Peter G. Stillman. That suggests that its ideological latitude is much wider than you would allow. Beyond that, would you ban all scholarship done prior to the opening of the Soviet archives? That would be a very foolish and intolerant move. I'll be interested in learning for what cause you get labeled as being an "apologist" one of these days.