INTRODUCTION

One hundred years after his death, Marx is an enormous presence among us. On purely quantitative criteria, judged by the number of his self-avowed followers, he exerts a greater influence than any of the religious founders or any other political figures. His doctrine being secular rather than timeless, we would not expect it to have the staying power of Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism, but up to now it has shown few signs of waning. It is not difficult to justify a continued interest in his writings.

The interest may be extrinsic or intrinsic. One may go to Marx to understand the regimes that have been influenced by him, or to understand and assess his writings as if he had had no posterity whatever. Of these, the former requires the latter, but not the other way around. When a doctrine – be it religious or political – becomes an institutional force, it always becomes the object of intense scrutiny in its own right, because the proper interpretation may be a matter of momentous importance. This is not to say that all dogmatic controversies are decided on purely internal criteria of validity or consistency. Many of them owe their resolution to mundane struggles of power, in which, however, purely textual arguments serve as one form of ammunition. Although textual considerations and rational assessment by themselves probably do not set constraints on the outcome, they may in some cases tip the balance one way or the other.