When, in the late 1870s, Karl Marx got wind of what Jules Guesde was doing in his name, he is purported to have declared “of one thing I am sure, I am not a Marxist.” Marx was upset that Guesde had downplayed the role of reform within socialist politics, reducing Marx’s ideas to a few revolutionary slogans that might win over the masses. Over the next decade or so, Engels would wield this rejection in numerous letters to challenge those who claimed to know what Marx really meant.Footnote 1 Ventriloquizing Marx, Engels was trying to discipline a movement that had become unruly, disobedient to its purported father. But from another perspective, the panoply of Marxisms emerging at the time was a sign of Marx’s enormous influence, the clearest indication that his ideas were becoming a powerful political force. Writing a hundred years later, the French activist and thinker Régis Debray argued that this was one of the most significant developments in modern history. Without the -ism, Marx would have remained an obscure political economist.Footnote 2
Over the last few years, a range of historians have turned their attention to Marxism, not simply as an intellectual tradition, but as the ideology of a mass political movement, and the question of how it emerged unites the books under review here. All foreground the quarter century before World War I, for whatever we may think about what exactly Marxism was and how it arose, most agree that that was the crucial moment. This historiographical trend marks a tonal shift from previous works on prewar Marxism, which cast it as the rather staid precursor to the more sophisticated theory of the interwar and beyond, the “vulgar” forerunners of the “Western Marxists.” Concomitantly, scholars are moving beyond the failure narrative that was canonized by Carl Schorske in his 1951 book on prewar German social democracy.Footnote 3 While Schorske was interested in laying out the prehistory of splits that would divide the left over the next hundred years, especially that between Social Democrats and Communists, today scholars place more emphasis on the growth of a movement and set of political parties that in their social and geographical reach were the envy of the world.
Examining the birth of Marxism as an ideology, or, using the term preferred by the historians surveyed here, as a “worldview,” these scholars have collided with an old and persistent problem in intellectual history. Confronting the charge that the field is interested only in the ideas produced by atypical academics with rarified educations, intellectual historians have struggled to work out how to study ideas with broader appeal. This criticism came to the fore in the 1970s with the rise of social history, and again in the 1980s and 1990s by a less antagonistic but still critical version of cultural history. Across these debates many intellectual historians worried that they lacked the sources to do the necessary work.Footnote 4 And even when such sources were available, they were concerned that, when dealing with the ideas of hundreds of thousands or millions rather than at most a few dozen, they would be unable to maintain the same level of close reading and attention to argument that had distinguished the field. One might believe in principle that ideas are not the preserve of a tiny few, but that does not make it easier to study them on a mass scale. The books reviewed here do not solve this problem. But they offer us a sense of the possible ways we can address it. Moreover, in taking on Marxism, they engage with a form of thought that, in both helpful and unhelpful ways, has furnished some of the most influential resources for understanding popular ideologies, not least itself.
Reading Marxism as the history of intellectuals
In her rich and illuminating book The Invention of Marxism, which first appeared in German in 2017, and is here reviewed in its 2022 English translation, Cristina Morina sets herself the task of understanding the emergence of Marxism as what she calls a “worldview.” To do so she examines the interconnected lives of nine Marxist thinkers and activists from the late nineteenth century: Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Jean Jaurès, Jules Guesde, Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, and Peter Struve. This is intellectual history as prosopography. Morina follows her protagonists from their early upbringing through their first political engagements, to their reading of Marx and confrontation with the 1905 Russian Revolution. Across these studies, a composite portrait slowly comes into focus: these future Marxist thinkers and leaders had been clever schoolchildren, cultivating a strand of rebelliousness based on the certainty that they were always right (401). There is a Koselleckian flavor to the analyses here. Morina draws attention to a shared sense that the future would be radically different, as well as a common belief that the development of history was subject to laws that the human mind could understand (77).
The book comes into its own when Morina analyzes how these figures came to read Marx’s work, what it meant for them, and how they responded to it. Here, Morina pushes back against the common trope that they had a “conversion” experience, with Marx encouraging them to turn their backs on the bourgeois precepts of their upbringing (9–10). Instead, she focuses on the continuities, including an emphasis on education and the way their parents, most often their mothers, helped foster “their children’s empathetic and critical interest in the world” (23). In addition, Morina shows that, for her subjects, activism came first (161). This speaks to Morina’s central intervention; she wants to uncover the emotional preconditions of their turn to Marxism and relate it to “lived experience” (xx). Marx’s work cemented them on a path they had already chosen and clarified work they were already doing. As Morina writes about Plekhanov, but in terms that are valid more generally, he was “persuaded by Marx’s theory, because it ‘harmonized’ his experiences” (221).
Nonetheless, Marxism turned out to be determinative of their formation, in large part because of its status as a “science” (15). As Morina argues, the “co-opting of ‘science’ by Marxist social analysis may have been the most effective political idea of social critics on the left in the nineteenth century” (260). She shows how Marx’s work made sense to them as a “radical study of reality,” confronting the harsh facts of the existing world without flinching (xviii). It thus gave theoretical form to their pre-existing repudiation of capitalism, helped explain the failings of rival political strands in the workers’ movement, and gave them the confidence that they were working in concert with the forces driving history, not against them.
One might imagine that the focus on emotion and worldviews contrasts with the Marxist emphasis on material processes in historical development. Morina’s subtitle after all is “how an idea changed everything.” But in narrating her actors’ development in this way, Morina comes strangely close to their own analyses. At the time, many Marxists identified a “class feeling” (Klassengefühl), generated through the experience of capitalism and participation in class struggle, as the basis for the reception of Marx’s key theoretical insights.Footnote 5 Marxism, for them, was a theory that clarified pre-existing experiences and understandings, as well as a “science” that helped raise political activity to a higher level.Footnote 6 Moreover, Morina’s term of art, “worldview” (Weltanschauung), had some traction at the time, not due to the work of Dilthey (as in her case), but as a way of describing how Marxism could inform proletarian class consciousness (xx).Footnote 7 What sets Morina’s account apart is, then, not that she privileges ideas, but rather that she privileges the ideas of a small number of individuals—intellectuals and party leaders.
Morina’s individual and elite focus has many advantages. There are sources aplenty, which allow her to follow her actors as they travel, often crossing paths and engaging with each other. Tracking their mobile lives, Morina tells an interconnected transnational story, with nodes in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, Poland, Austria, and Switzerland, amongst others. Most importantly, it allows Morina to grapple with the ideological differences within Marxism. While noting strong similarities in background and attitude, she also wants to explain how her actors came to take opposing positions on the key controversies of their day, whether it is the clash between Jaurès and Guesde, between Bernstein and Kautsky, or between Struve and Lenin. In the closing pages of the book she sums up these differences by offering a typology based upon her actors’ connections to the working class. Kautsky and Struve were “bookworms” who examined the lives of the workers from a distance, through written reports, statistics, and so on. In contrast, Luxemburg, Lenin, the young Plekhanov, and Guesde were “adventurers.” They were there “on-site” amidst the workers, but because they revered Marxism as the “ultimate, all-encompassing model for explaining the world,” they failed to cultivate any real bonds. Morina’s sympathies lie with the “field workers”—Adler, Bernstein, and Jaurès—whose “firsthand experience” of working-class life was decisive in their developing politics (408–10).
Nonetheless, in restricting her study to a small set of thinkers, Morina risks distorting their project. Throughout the book, Morina emphasizes the self-confidence of her actors. They were certain of their judgments and thus convinced “that they personally could solve the world’s problems” (xxii, original emphasis). But this isn’t quite right. They assigned themselves, no doubt, important roles. But for them the real historical actor was the proletariat as a class, acting in unison. Their importance (and their self-confidence) as thinkers and activists derived from the part they could play in rousing this collective subject. Here Morina’s enthusiasm for the close bond of “field workers” with ordinary people is ironic, because she tends to skip over what was for them their most important contact with the workers. Throughout the book Morina notes her actors’ self-understanding as “mediators of consciousness” (xvii) whose audience was the “revolutionary subject” (334). They didn’t simply want to read and understand Marx’s work themselves; they wanted to popularize it, for that was for them the most expeditious way of calling into existence the proletariat as a self-conscious class.Footnote 8 But she spends little time on these efforts; we don’t hear how they thought through this educational project, what they did, and how they measured its success. It is as if, once these nine had come to embrace Marxism themselves, the broader uptake of Marxism was assured (xx). They did not see it that way. The invention of Marxism might have begun with these intellectuals, but if it had remained exclusively with them, it would never have changed the world.
Marxism as a proletarian science
The mass reception that Morina passes over is a prime concern of Andrew Bonnell’s Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs. The difficulty of tracking this reception discourages him from skipping across Europe as Morina does. Instead he concentrates his attention on perhaps the most important institution of late nineteenth-century Marxism, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and sets himself the task of explaining how it became “the first truly mass-based political party in the world” (1). Because Marxism was central to the SPD’s identity, Bonnell is particularly interested in the role played by Marxism in this process, and thus how it became the ideology of a mass movement (6, 198).
Bonnell challenges an older scholarship that suggests that Marx was rarely read and understood by workers at the time, an argument made most famously by Hans-Josef Steinberg in his Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie (1967). Steinberg described the party’s lending libraries, where Marx’s texts were consistently passed over by workers interested in natural science or a Zola novel.Footnote 9 To resist Steinberg’s conclusions, Bonnell highlights the other channels through which Marxist ideas flowed to the broader population (130–31). Aside from explicit courses on Marxist theory offered around Germany, Bonnell cites presentations of Marxist ideas in pamphlets that sold for only a few pfennigs; cheap books on theoretical issues, like the commentary on the SPD’s 1891 Erfurt program written by Karl Kautsky and Bruno Schoenlank that was printed in the hundreds of thousands over the course of the Second Empire; and perennial bestsellers, like August Bebel’s Woman under Socialism (131–7). One can also see sustained interest in Marxism in the widely read party press, not just the main party newspaper Vorwärts, which had 165,000 subscribers, and the Social Democratic women’s paper Die Gleichheit, but also Der wahre Jakob, a satirical magazine that had a circulation of over a third of a million, alongside oral agitation, such as lectures and speeches (137–42). Bonnell is right to marvel at this popular demand for Marxist theory. “In these days of dwindling attention spans and continual electronic distraction, there is something impressive about the crowds of workers gathered in beer halls or other meeting places on weekday evenings, usually after 9–10 hours at work in a six-day week, listening for two hours or so to addresses or lectures on often weighty topics” (143).
To explain the diffusion of Marx’s ideas, Bonnell foregrounds the technological changes which made newspapers and other texts much cheaper, fueling what he, riffing on Benedict Anderson, calls “print capitalism 3.0” (142). But he also wants to understand why workers found these ideas appealing. And for this, he sticks closely to a Marxist reading. Marxism gained traction, he argues, insofar as it made sense of the world in which the workers lived: its “influence was facilitated by the fact that for German workers before 1914 there seemed to be a striking consistency between a Marxian analysis of society and the reality of [the] Imperial German state” (149). Emphasizing the experiences that prepared the ground for the reception of Marxist theory, Bonnell’s analysis runs parallel to Morina’s, despite their differences in scope and political positioning.
Bonnell cleaves closer to Marxist orthodoxy than does Morina, and not only in foregrounding the mass reception of Marxism. At the time, the SPD understood its success as the combination of two elements, expressed in its 1891 Erfurt program, which joined the Marxist account of a revolutionary transformation of society, expressed in the “maximum program,” with the “minimum program” laying out the immediate demands of the party, including labor reforms, voting rights, and freedom of the press, of association, and of expression. In Bonnell’s reformulation, the party’s appeal can be attributed to its pairing of a “radical transformative perspective, that promised a qualitatively different kind of social order,” with a practical program addressing “real concerns” in the present (6). The chapter on the reading of Marx thus finds its complement in other sections, where Bonnell shows how the party appealed to kitchen table issues in its electoral agitation, in particular the price of bread, meat, and beer, and he argues that these allowed the party to build support for its larger political goals (99).
Most importantly, Bonnell aligns with Marxism in foregrounding class (5–7). Not only does a Marxian understanding of class help him identify the main audience for Marxist ideas; it also guides him when linking those ideas to the social conditions of the time. Following a Marxian analysis, Bonnell discounts what one might call forms of “false consciousness.” He analyzes the Lassalle cult that grew up around the socialist leader after his death in 1864. The religious overtones and deference to authority that this cult suggests—Lassalle was often compared to Jesus—should be explained, Bonnell thinks, by the proletariat’s “relative lack of maturity”; that is, by the fact that in the 1860s and 1870s there were not sufficient numbers of literate workers, and so the party had to rely on bourgeois leadership (28). These religious resonances then persisted in the “mature” working-class movement of the 1880s and 1890s, in large part as a symbol of resistance to the German Reich, buoyed by police attempts to suppress celebrations of Lassalle. Bonnell argues that the religious garb of mid-century socialism did not pass over into the later SPD but was either thrown off or worn lightly (33).
So, too, he is critical of those who emphasize the hold of nationalism or militarism on the working class. In a fascinating set of analyses of socialist responses to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Bonnell shows that even the socialists most supportive of the kaiser only endorsed a defensive war against Napoleonic aggression, and they shifted against the Prussian state after the defeat of the French at Sedan, rejecting Prussia’s claims over Alsace and Lorraine (45–6). Here Bonnell wants to argue that the workers were relatively immune to bombastic jingoism, and were drawn to socialist internationalism (50; Chapter 5).
Having cleared the ground of competing forces, Bonnell focuses on what he sees as fundamental to the working-class worldview: labor. As he notes, workers at the time understood labor to be debilitating and dehumanizing, but also a source of solidarity and honor (67). Again Bonnell’s analysis resembles that of contemporaneous Marxists, who wanted to highlight the ambivalent effects of industrial work.Footnote 10 Finally, Bonnell follows at least some Marxists of the late nineteenth century in arguing for the value and importance of the party’s organizational life (154). In a set of classic books from the 1970s and 1980s, scholars came to disparage that associational life as a vehicle for bourgeois culture, building on Robert Michel’s contemporaneous quip that “Skat Club Freedom” was Social Democratic in name only.Footnote 11 Bonnell dryly notes that the Berlin political police would have disagreed; they made sure to keep tabs on SPD card games (171–2).
Bonnell’s reliance on a Marxian class analytic allows him to make claims about millions rather than just a small number of intellectuals, and it justifies him when generalizing from his sources—worker autobiographies and police reports from social-democratic pubs—that he admits might be unrepresentative. Using this analysis he rightly pushes back against easy criticisms of German social democracy, especially regarding the popular reception of Marxist theory, where historians have been led astray by “unrealistically high standards” (150).
But in defaulting too much to Marxist theory, Bonnell undercuts his own approach. First, for all his interest in the voices of everyday workers, we get a story that is remarkably close to one that would have been offered by Marxist intellectuals at the time. But with the difference that, second, for them the story was largely forward-looking. These intellectuals used class analysis not to account for what workers believed in the present, but rather to predict what one could expect them to believe and think in the future. Even someone as invested in proletarian “spontaneity” as Rosa Luxemburg had to admit in 1898 that the workers hadn’t achieved a social-democratic consciousness yet.Footnote 12 And in her account of the mass strike from 1906, she bemoaned the intellectual “poverty” of the German worker.Footnote 13 That is, pessimism about the actual ideological level of the German worker was not simply projected back onto the prewar period by historians; it was very much present at the time. This is less visible in Bonnell’s account because, third, his appeal to class makes him pass rather quickly over ideological divisions within the working-class movement. When accounting for the reception he skips between examples from the revisionist and the radical wings, suggesting that those differences did not reach down to the rank and file (199). But while most historians agree that ordinary members of the party were frustrated by intellectual splits in the leadership, that does not mean that there were not real ideological divisions at the popular level too.
The limitations of Bonnell’s reading are most visible in his treatment of World War I. Rather than the crisis that tore a weakened, fractured social democracy apart, he presents it as an unprecedented blow that shattered a robust and unified social-democratic movement (143, 199). In his account of the infamous vote for war credits in 1914, when many Social Democratic politicians supported the government, he emphasizes the peculiarity of the situation, and the state’s control of information, rather than long-lasting support for the German Empire (55). Bonnell’s point is well taken, yet his confidence in the unity of the movement would have seemed overly sanguine to many at the time. Before the outbreak of war in 1914, prominent Social Democrats expressed skepticism that proletarian class consciousness was sufficiently developed to immunize the workers against “the poison of chauvinistic frenzy” even when their country was the aggressor.Footnote 14
Narrating Marxism as the space between
Todd Weir’s Red Secularism might appear an unlikely contribution to the conversation, because at first sight his work seems oriented by a different question. Weir wants to challenge historians like Joan Wallach Scott, who see in secularism a commitment to the public/private divide and thus an ideological support for the liberal status quo. Building on his first book, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2014), which shows how secularism came to be seen as an alternative to Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism—that is, as a “Fourth Confession”—here he maps out the relationship of secularism to radical thought, especially socialism (2–5).
To make his argument, Weir turns first and foremost to intellectuals, albeit ones who were less prominent than those that populate Morina’s account, and he is particularly interested in the interaction between relatively elite secularist societies and Social Democratic intellectuals in Germany.Footnote 15 Like Morina, Weir turns to family history in order to understand why these intellectuals found secularist ideas so attractive. His actors’ conflictual relationship with authority was encouraged by absent fathers and overly present guardians who tried to impose religious sensibilities on their young charges (91). Secularism thus became, for many, emblematic of a resistance to the existing order, both of the German Empire and of the SPD orthodoxy.
The latter is important, and Weir homes in on the way secularism introduced divisions into the workers’ movement. It was, he later declares, “a sectarian reservoir for revisionist and radical critiques of the party” (324). Secularists were often thorns in the side of the SPD leadership, prioritizing secularist ideals over socialist political goals, especially during church-leaving campaigns of the early twentieth century (72). Correlatively many of the more orthodox party leaders worried that secularists were too “idealist” in their focus on cultural change, neglecting social and economic forces. Weir tracks this broader tension as it worked itself out in some of the most important theoretical debates of the Second International, not least the challenge of the so-called Jungen around 1890–91, the revisionism controversy after 1897, and ultimately the splits in the left over the outbreak of war and the German Revolution of 1918–19 (68–76, 196–210, 221–38).
But Weir’s analyses refuses to stay confined to intellectual circles, and here his work speaks to the question of what it means for Marxism to be a worldview. In part, this is because many thought that, if Marxism were to become a popular ideology, it would necessarily be secularist. After all, it was competing for hearts and minds with other worldviews informed by Christianity. Secularism offered plausible alternatives to the religious practices and rituals that had been central to German life, not least the “Jugendweihe,” a sort of secular confirmation service marking the beginning of adulthood for those who had become “unchurched,” and cremation as an alternative to Christian burial (36–7). Weir thus details how secularism emerged as a “self-organizing subculture” that broke with the mores of traditional society just as much as socialism broke with its economy and politics (8). And it surely didn’t hurt that secularism proved to be more popular in worker circles than the dense texts written by Marx and Engels (116). As Weir argues, “for many workers, the ‘socialist worldview’ was a mixture of second-hand Marx and first-hand Haeckel” (151). The importance of secularist ideas is confirmed in many of the worker autobiographies that were published at the time. Together they show that “secularist enlightenment and anticlerical animus were central factors in the socialization of many working-class members of the SPD” (125). Weir notes that secularism was particularly attractive to women, who saw it as empowering (143–50).
Ultimately, however, it is the exchange between intellectuals and the broader population that holds Weir’s attention. It is important to register that much of the discussion of secularism was aspirational. Secularism may have been a “worldview,” but most saw it as a worldview of the future. That is why many secularist intellectuals styled themselves avatars of Prometheus, who were bringing divine knowledge to the masses, or otherwise as prophets and heretics (76, 80). Consequently, many secularists devoted themselves primarily to mass education. Weir shows how several of the most important educational establishments of Germany social democracy could trace their origins to avowed secularists (55–61, 122).
The pedagogical relationship between intellectuals and the broader population turns out to be a privileged site for analyzing the tensions that secularism introduced into the socialist movement (Chapter 5), even to the point of challenging the place of Marxism. Debates often came down to the question whether foregrounding secularism best served the party’s goal of preparing the proletariat for revolution, particularly whether it helped the diffusion of Marxist ideas. Many secularists posed their worldview as a necessary way station on the road to socialist consciousness, one that was far more accessible than the dry and difficult Marx (118). But others embraced socialism because they came to believe that only in a socialist society would the conditions finally emerge for the mass embrace of secularism. Some went further and argued that secularism was an obstacle to the emergence of class consciousness. In part this is because of secularism’s seemingly unlimited potential for attracting government repression. As secularists pushed for transformation now, especially in the various church-leaving campaigns that dot the period, they focused the ire of the state onto the party. But it is also because, even though secularism proved popular for some workers, it elicited considerable resistance from others. Weir draws out the logic of what he calls the “Gretchen Question.” Secularism was often disavowed because it might alienate potential voters. That is why the official stance of the SPD throughout the Second Empire was that religion was a “private affair” (Privatsache) (14–20).
Bonnell sees an essential unity to the popular embrace of Marxism and uses this to narrate the social-democratic cultural politics from the mid-nineteenth century. That is why, for him, the splits of 1914 largely come out of the blue. In contrast, Weir identifies preexisting tensions within the socialist movement and looks forward. In his telling, the great divisions that shattered the unity of socialism after the outbreak of World War I merely exacerbated a range of oppositions that had already been working their way through a “red secularist” worldview, not least about the proper relationship of Marxism and secularism. On the one hand, the Weimar Republic saw the fullest flowering of a socialist secularist culture. Many secularist intellectuals attributed the failure of revolution around 1919 to the party’s reliance on a dogmatic Marxism. Secularism was better able to cultivate the workers’ revolutionary will (251). That is why they put great efforts into developing this worldview, encouraging children to withdrew from religious instruction, and receive their own classes, while experimenting with nudism (Freikörperkultur) and gymnastics as means of self-emancipation (267–75). On the other hand, other secularists came to subordinate their worldview to the politics of the Communist Party, especially after the Soviet leadership embraced anticlericalism, both at home and abroad (296–8). Secularism thus proved to be one of the forces splitting the working class. In addition, despite their differences, both directions lent fuel to a new Kulturkampf against secularism, first by the Catholic Church, then by Protestants, and later by the Nazis (300–14). The Nazis used their opposition to secularism, Weir argues, in order to mobilize otherwise skeptical and divided religious voters around an authoritarian vision (321–2).
Conclusion
Weir’s account suggests new paths for thinking about intellectual history on a mass scale. It encourages us to focus not on popular belief or on intellectuals in isolation, but on their interactions. This has at least two benefits. First, when firsthand sources are in short supply, we gain a privileged perspective on the diversity of a worldview by critically examining how intellectuals responded to popular ideas, especially in moments of thwarted expectation. This allows a more fine-grained account than a simple reliance on class, which can homogenize popular belief, and in the case of Marxism can lead us ironically back to the views held by intellectuals. Second, attending to these interactions helps us avoid the errors of what Antonio Gramsci labeled “folklorism”; that is, a purely descriptive study.Footnote 16 Both for intellectuals at the time, and for many people with whom those intellectuals interacted, “worldviews” were not simply fixed and unchanging, but also projects. They were something that needed to be cultivated, that could transform, and that had a future. In the words of Raymond Geuss, worldviews are “inherently open to variation, evolution, and change,” and we should recognize that when we study them.Footnote 17 This dynamic quality finds one manifestation in the differences between the hopes and expectations of intellectuals and the actual beliefs and ideas of the broader population. Studying these differences helps us understand the hopes invested in particular worldviews as well as their political and social potentialities.
In undertaking such a study, we need not accept the hierarchies within which many intellectuals at the time framed those differences. The distance between intellectuals and the masses (as well as that between intellectuals, and within the masses) is not the distance between ideal and reality, or between pristine original and imperfect copy. Nor does it rely upon a teleology bringing the latter increasingly in line with the former. For as Weir’s book shows, the broader public were by no means passive recipients of ideas developed elsewhere, and the way in which they picked up and transformed a worldview directly informed debates between intellectuals about what that worldview should be. Engels recognized it early on. Marxism was never the exclusive property of any intellectual, not even of one named Karl Marx.
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